Conference Buddies

Utilizing Social Media and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Hal Lublin, President, BuzzBuilderz

Conference Notes:

• Social Media = People driven, social, collaborative
• Estimated search engine marketing spend is $11B in 2010 = SEM (Search Engine Marketing Professional)
• 65% of people feel constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising and consider to be out of control (Forrester)
• Average person receives 70 spam emails a day (McAfee)
• Become Part of the Community
• Physical networking is being replaced by social marketing
• Create a professional profile
• Frolleagues = colleagues who send friendship requests
• Plaxo = Professional Profile
• Facebook = Personal Profile + fan page for business
• MySpace
• Yelp = Local businesses
• LinkedIn = Professional Profile
• BLIP.fm = Music Social Network
• Seesmic = Video
• BriteKite = GeoTagging
• Flikr = photo sharing (shared to twitter and blog)
• 12seconds.tv = Video (documentally = funny)

Twitter Corporate Voice Examples:

• Better Homes and Gardens
• BHGrealestate
• WholeFoods
• TravelChannel
• Comcast Cares

A Few Twitter Tools:

Twirl, TweetDeck, SocialTool, Twengager, TwitterFeed.com (blog)

Other Social Examples:

Coke Cola Blog
AMEX Open Network (Small businesses)
Miamism.com (Miami Blog)

Reputation Management Cycles:

Profile -> Identity -> Reputation -> Trust

What are you posting and sharing:

Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon

Social Tips:

• Claim your handle
• Create a profile that can be replicated across several platforms
• Be Genuine
• Be Consistent
• Have Fun
• Listen & Read First
• Try things – You cannot break the Internet

Other Tools:

Checkusername.com = check if your username is taken across other social media sites
squarespace = blog service

Speaker: Marsha Collier, Author, eBay For Dummies Series
Conference Notes:

Changing mindset of the customer

1. Online customers are more sophisticated and demand to be engaged
2. Returning back to the personalized, engaging business mindset of your local business
3. People want personalized, meaningful, relevant information – not spam or just product promotions

• Good Example: Zappos advertising on LAX security bin when you place your shoes and items during security check
• Bad Example:Overstock running a promotion on “Free Shipping” when they only charge $2.95 for shipping on all purchases.

Engage the customer beyond just products and price

1. Don’t rule out any target audience
2. Use social media (MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) to reach audience that you may not have anticipated