Following on from Social Media 101

Yesterday morning, I conducted a roundtable for the Colorado Business Marketing Association titled Social Media 101. Now, certainly, that’s a broad topic, so to get a better handle on what to cover, I surveyed those people who were planning on attending. Here are the questions and answers:

What tools do you want to learn about (check all that apply)?

Are you interested in learning how to measure/analyze social media activity?

  • Yes: 86%
  • No:  14%

My last question was free-form, asking people what else they wanted to know about. The questions revolved around these issues:

  • What tactics work best in my industry?
  • How does this apply to B2B companies?
  • How do you use social media for a cleaning product?
  • How can you use social media to generate leads?
  • What are best practices?

I had time to scratch the surface on a small number of all the requests, and, we’re already planning for more workshops on specifics, but, we truly had an interesting discussion. The point I brought home is that the best way to think about social media (at least, from a marketing perspective) is to understand that it is a great opportunity to connect with small, niche groups of people online. The key to discovering those groups is by doing research using monitoring, search and research tools. I showed them these:

I also want to invite those of you who were at the roundtable to connect with the Denver/ Boulder Social Media Club. We had our first meeting on September 23, and are planning another meeting in late October.

Were you there? Anything I forgot to mention that you want to remember? Leave a comment.

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  • Robin:

    These are some helpful notes that reminds me just how eager business professions are to continue to learn about social media. Here's hoping that the Colorado Business Marketing Association members will not only attend your upcoming workshops, but that they'll also start to become regulars at events like the Social Media Club and start to participate at BarCamps, PodCaamps, etc.

    BryanPerson
    LiveWorld social media evangelist
  • Cari
    It is becoming increasingly important that companies have a conversation with their customers. We are starting a buzz marketing company that is similar to Radian6 and Collective Intellect, but our focus is more on smaller businesses. We monitor and measure relevant online conversations to your company and industry and join the conversations for you. Essentially, we say what you would say if you had the time and knowledge to do it. We are currently developing a consumer version of our software that allows companies that can't afford the full service to self serve.
  • Mary Lou Egan
    I thought the roundtable was great - informative enjoyable and friendly. There's a lot to social media and it was good to get an overview. I'm looking forward to learning more (reading some of the recommended material) and to social media 200.
  • The roundtable was great, thank you for being so patient with our undoubtedly naïve questions Robin! Some additional things I walked away with as being helpful were:
    * Google Alerts with your industry's keywords can give you good insight on where conversations are happening
    * Social bookmarking ... although I'm still not quite sure what this is ... :-(
    * a few reading suggestions (Groundswell book, the Twitter NY Times article, and Chris Brogan's 50 ways to use twitter article -- thank you to Greg Olson of Ubiquity for these)

    ... and so my social media ineptness is out there for the whole world to see ... yikes! Good news is, my expertise can only go up from here ;-)
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