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.

Social Media Club Dallas - Chris Brogan

Had the opportunity to attend the Social Media Club Dallas January event with guest speaker Chris Brogan at the Angelika Dallas at Mockingbird Station.

I arrived early to help setup and do what I could to make the event a total success. Meet up with several of my friends @kfcatoe and @davidswinney. And very quickly the excitement was building with folks started arriving for the event.

In talking with the organizers, it was a sold out show with 200 people in attendance. Wow, how much Social Media geekiness can you fit in one room. It was awesome to see the number of well know social media leaders from the Dallas area all in one location.

I also had the opportunity to shake hands and chat with @chrisbrogan for a few minutes.

@mikedmerrill president of @smcdallas introduced @chrisbrogan and the event was on. I was being the true geek that I am and was tweeting highlights through out the lecture. After all this was an acceptable practice at an event like this.

Here are a few notes that I took:

• We are all in customer service.
• Networking is no longer passing business cards and shaking hands.
• Experts say that we can only have a strong network of 150 people. We need to overlap our 150 people with other peoples networks and increase the strength and size of our networks.
• Marketing should be made up of 2 parts helping, 2 parts connecting and 1 part selling.
• Listening is a key part of being successful.
• We should be like farmers... The look for ways to build and give back.
• We should be spending 40% of our twitter time listening.
• We should be making an effort to comment on other peoples blogs.
• What can we do to give value prior to the sale?
• We need to ask questions. Ask opinions. This helps us to listen and hear the needs of others.
• LinkedIn is more than a job seeking tool. We need to write our profiles with a focus on the future and not the past.

@chrisbrogan suggested that we re-read Ogilvy on Advertising. He also mentioned that Guy Kawasaki's site Alltop.com was a great source for information.

After the lecture, there was a tweetup next door at @Trinityhall where everyone went and packed the place for some great networking and Guinness drinking.

There was one other thing that happened that was a highlight of the evening. Once just about everyone cleared the Angelika, a couple of dozen of us were standing around chatting about the event. When from the next theater over out walked Jerry Jones and his wife. Yes the Dallas Cowboy's Jerry Jones. He was pretty cool with it all and posed for several camera phone photos. I tried but the light was way to low for my iPhone to do much.

If you are interested in Social Media you need to check out the Social Media Club.

Until next time.
John

NosalCentral - Your Central Source for Web Solutions

Introduction

Greetings from NosalCentral - Your Central Source For Web Solutions. My name is John J Nosal and I am the President of NosalCentral, LLC. a company that I started in July of 2009.

NosalCentral offers web consulting to small and medium sized business that are needing to increase the effectiveness of their web presence through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Social Media Marketing. In addition we can help you learn to use analytic tools to monitor your traffic and to react accordingly.

My goal with this BLOG is to share information about my areas of expertise like social media, SEO and other things that I run across from time to time. This will include tips and tricks on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and hints and tricks that will help in Networking with others.

A lot of the tips that I share will be from the perspective of the job hunt since I am active with a career networking organization called CareerConnection (www.careerconnection.org) where I am a regular presenter on the topics of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and there use in the job hunt.

If you have questions or suggested topics please let me know, I would be happy to write about the things you would like to know more about.

Happy Networking,
John