Blue Knot Luncheon Presentation Notes

Today I had the opportunity to present to the Blue Knot group which is the technical group of the Jewish Federation.

While we were hoping for a bigger group, we did have just under 40 in attendance. There were a number of other events that were taking place at the same time so it did have the attendance a little low.

Social Media

I started with a video from YouTube entitled "Social Media ROI: Socialnomics"

Social Media is not a in your face sales tool. You want to talk about relevant information to your audience. Talking about going to Starbucks to get another double whatchamacallit coffee thing is not a productive topic of interest to most people.

Facebook is a massive social site that appears to be morphing into a new game platform with the craze of Farmville, Mafia Wars and Fishville. With the demographics information available from the profiles for all the users, you can do some very detailed marketing.

One option that is a growing trend is the creation of "Fan Pages" on Facebook. These pages allow you to have "fans" and be able to talk to them and make offers that they would be interested.

Twitter, is another tool that has a growing market for companies to have a presence to provide a face for a company. A lot of companies are creating a presence to do customer service and insure that a good reputation is being maintained.

I gave an example of a Professional Blogger in California that had an issue with their internet service. A phone call to customer service rendered a time frame of 2 days before the issue would be resolved. A quick tweet on their cell generated a personal call from a VP and their internet service was back up in a couple of hours.

Follow or stalk people that are saying meaningful things. Things that are of interest to you.
Post message about things to add value to your products or services.
Repost or retweet, message and links that are good info to share.

All of the social media sites can be a big consumer of your time. There are a number of tools that can help you streamline your posting activities.

SocialOomph.com - This is a free tool that allows you to schedule your messages to your social sites. Example, on Monday morning take 30 minutes and setup 20 tweets or so that will communicate to your audience at various times through out the week. When would your audience be looking?

Ping.fm - Provides a tool to tweet once and hit all the social sites.

Extra Tip: Setup several Google Alerts to monitor your name, your business and/or your products. This will allow you to keep tabs of what is being said.

pipl.com - I mentioned this as a tool to see what is publicly known about you. It is an aggregation
of public records (phone, birth, death, etc.) a little freaky to see what you can find.

If I can answer any questions about my presentation to day please feel free to post a comment.