On September 23, 2009, Rebecca and I attended the first annual Social Media FTW Conference in Portland, Maine.  This was a collaborative effort of several social media savvy people from Maine who put together a great collection of speakers presenting to a sold-out crowd at the University of Southern Maine’s Abromson Center.  While mostly dedicated to teaching the Social Media basics, this was a great time to think about the purpose of all of this activity and the best practices to achieve success.  For me, being on Twitter is all about building personal trust for our business.  Here is my take on the programs that I attended during this half-day conference.

Twitter 101 for Business was presented by @ccmaine, better known as Christie Corns, who is the Social Media guru at Where.com.  In just a few years, she has taken this product from a few followers on Twitter to over 8,000 people who follow this navigation aid software for smart phones.  Every day she searches for conversations about her company and the product and engages customers directly.  I was really impressed with the concept of creating a goal for your business social media marketing and the concept of a “business voice.”  The best reference that came out was the 8 Steps to Marketing Success on Twitter which was written by Jeff Machado for Hubspot.  Crystie did a great job of telling us all the whys and hows of being a success on Twitter.  The key is to engage and develop conversations.  This is the essence of personal communication and building trust.  I am just so enthusiastic about this approach.

Business Blogging was the next Seminar.  This was a panel with @mainebusiness (Carl Natale from the Portland Press Herald’s web division), @sarah_wallace (Sarah Wallace, a great freelance writer), and @lynelle (Lynelle Wilson from Bold Vision Consulting).  They covered the basics of business blogging in a question and answer format.  The same concepts kept coming up.  Blogging should be an essential marketing tool for any company.  It adds content to the website, helps SEO, and drives traffic to your website.  It helps brand your company and products and adds personal trust to your business.  The writers on the panel emphasized making it short and sweet; concise is always better (do I ever need to learn that lesson!).  Carl Natale basically advised us all to write something every day, to make it a habit. 

The final panel for me was presented by @therichbrooks (Rich Brooks from Flyte New Media).   Rich and his company were one of the developers of the conference, and he has a natural enthusiasm for all things involved with Social Media.  His presentation was entitled “SEO and Social Media.”   Look for the slides when they come up on Slide Share or his blog.  His approach is self-described as “holistic web marketing.”  The goal is attraction, retention, conversion and measurement.  Attraction means driving traffic to the website; plain and simple.  Retention uses techniques such as email and newsletters to keep them interested and coming back.  Conversion is all about getting listeners to sign up or “convert” to full time with such things as contact forms, sign-ups for newsletters, and RSS feeds.  Finally, you need to measure the impact of all of this social media with tools such as Google Analytics. 

For Rich Brooks the basics with respect to social media includes your blog to drive traffic, social media websites like LinkedIn and Facebook, microblogs like Twitter, photo sharing sites like Flicr, video sharing sites like YouTube, and social media publishing sites like Squidoo.  For Social Media, he would focus first on the big three:  Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. 

For Rich, the starting place is keyword analysis.   This tells you what to blog about and how to optimize the search results for all of the various parts of your overall marketing media.  You need to use keyword rich words in all of your blogging, tweets, profiles etc. so that the people that you are targeting will find you.   He describes this all as “web juice.”  His bottom line was that Social Media is clearly a part of the overall strategic marketing plan.  You need to connect and build audiences and promote others as well (sort of “coopetition” where a rising tide floats all boats).  FInally, you need to repeat, repeat and repeat again to make it all work. 

Overall a great conference.

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