Come See ‘Social Media Marketing for Your Business’ at SXSW
Mar 11, 2010 by Chris Winfield | Conferences and EventsOn March 12th (Friday) I’m presenting on a great panel called ‘Social Media Marketing for your Business‘ at the annual South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX. I’ll be joined by my good friend Tony Adam (former Yahoo! guy, former PayPal guy, current BillShrinker) and we are dedicated to giving the audience some real actionable advice on how to use social media to really help your business. Here’s the quick rundown of the panel:
Learn to look further than Twitter and Facebook when it comes to using social media to help your business succeed on the web. Learn solid strategies, how to measure success, and all the tools you need to succeed in the fastest growing marketing medium on the web.
When: Friday, March 12 at 02:00 PM
Where: Hilton D
Who Will Be There? Hopefully YOU!
Check out the full session information here.
Follow me on Twitter for lots of updates right here.
Greg and I are out in (usually) sunny California this week for the annual SMX West conference. The whole crew at Third Door Media always puts on an amazing conference and this one looks to be no different so far!
Greg and I will each be speaking on a panel on Day 2’s ‘Social Media Track’. We’re going to bring some secrets and some simple things that you can do to help succeed more in social media marketing – so you won’t want to miss either session!
Greg is up first on at 1:30pm (March 3rd) on this panel:
Free Ways To Market On Facebook:
Your Facebook pages – your wall, groups and fan pages — are a parallel universe to your public web pages. Just as you implement search engine optimization tactics to improve web page rankings, Facebook features many opportunities to enhance your visibility. Viral distribution via Facebook’s social tools is an example, but there are many, many others. Expert SEOs on this panel will share field-proven tactics that reveal how to leverage the power of Facebook.
Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Will Scott, President, Search Influence
Speakers:
Greg Finn, Director of Internet Marketing, 10e20
Jon Fougner, Associate, Ads Product Marketing, Facebook
Bill Parkes, EVP / Chief Digital Officer, nFusion
Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC
I will then be speaking at 4:45pm (March 3rd) on this excellent session:
60 Minutes Per Day For Social Media Success:
Got a small staff? Just don’t have a lot of time? This session looks at how to succeed with social media marketing by spending an hour per day — or less! Tools and techniques to keep you from feeling swamped in the social media quagmire.
Moderator: Jennifer Laycock, Social Media Strategist & Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
Q&A Moderator: Will Scott, President, Search Influence
Speakers:
Jennifer Laycock, Social Media Strategist & Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
Matt Siltala, President, Dream Systems Media
Chris Winfield, President, 10e20
I hope to see you at BOTH sessions, you’ll be glad you made it.
A couple of other quick notes.
- If you aren’t able to attend the show this year, I would highly recommend following Lisa Barone’s coverage on Outspoken Media, it’s simply excellent. I usually wind up missing most sessions due to meetings so she even keeps me up to date.
- As always, mention this post to me and I’ll buy you a drink of your choice
Have a great week!
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Starting on March 2nd and going through March 4th – search, social media, affiliate & just about everyone else in our industry will be invading Santa Clara for SMX West 2010. Greg and I will be heading out there to speak on a couple of really good panels. We’re both going to be presenting on Day 2 (March 3rd) on the social media marketing track. First up will be Greg dropping some serious Facebook marketing knowledge on this panel:
- Panel: Free Ways To Market On Facebook
- Date/Time: March 3rd at 1:30pm PST
- Description: Your Facebook pages – your wall, groups and fan pages — are a parallel universe to your public web pages. Just as you implement search engine optimization tactics to improve web page rankings, Facebook features many opportunities to enhance your visibility. Viral distribution via Facebook’s social tools is an example, but there are many, many others. Expert SEOs on this panel will share field-proven tactics that reveal how to leverage the power of Facebook.
- Panelists: Greg will be joined byJon Fougner (Facebook), Bill Parkes (nFusion), Tony Wright (WrightIMC) and the panel will be moderated by the conference chair, Danny Sullivan.
- Panel: 60 Minutes Per Day For Social Media Success
- Date/Time: March 3rd at 4:45pm PST
- Description: Got a small staff? Just don’t have a lot of time? This session looks at how to succeed with social media marketing by spending an hour per day — or less! Tools and techniques to keep you from feeling swamped in the social media quagmire.
- Panelists: I will joined by Jennifer Laycock (Search Engine Guide) and Matt Siltala (Dream Systems Media).
This week at Affiliate Summit west there was a Women of SEO site clinic. The site clinic was no different than the previous day’s SEO Site Review clinic with Greg Boser, Michael Gray, Michael Streko and Rae Hoffman except for the fact that it had 75% more estrogen (on the high end, anyway — the two Michaels were on the panel, after all ;P). Rae has expressed previous sentiments about the whole “Women of SEO” hoopla and balked at the idea of being asked to be on a female-only panel (via this post at WhoisAndrewWee.com):
“I personally would have been offended to be asked to be on that panel. I’m on a panel because I’m good at what I do and not because I wear a bra. I’m not knocking the skills of any of the ladies appearing on that panel…[but] find the whole idea of the panel a bit gimmicky and a bit of a put down, as if there needs to be a “all female panel” to get smart women on stage.”
I see her point — I mean, it’s not like organizers would go out of their way to have an all-black or an all-Asian panel unless the session specifically marketed their point of view as a selling point (e.g., “How Female-Friendly is Your Website?”). It is a bit gimmicky, and I can see how some females would be offended — it’s hard to be treated equally if you’re singled out for being different.
On the other hand, I understand that conferences need to get butts into seats and take various measures to pique interest, whether that’s by having a “Smackdown,” a “Black Hat vs. White Hat” panel, or an all-female lineup. Plus, it’s not like these women wouldn’t have otherwise spoken or presented if there were no “Women of SEO” panel — conferences usually assemble talented, savvy females instead of just plucking three or four people with the required anatomy (or lack thereof) out of the Expo Hall and shoving them towards the stage.
So is it offensive to have a female-only panel at a conference, or to specifically require X-number of female speakers at at event in order to create more of a balance, or is it not a big deal? I pinged Kristy Bolsinger, Christa Watson and Kate Morris, three of the participants of the Women of SEO site clinic panel (along with Carolyn Shelby and Jane Copland — poor Lyndsay Walker got denied entry into the US), for their input. Check out the brief video interview below:
Kristy, Christa and Kate — Girl Power at Affiliate Summit West from 10e20 on Vimeo.
Personally, I’ve seen an increase of females in Internet marketing in the past four years of my career, and I think it’s great that the industry’s becoming more diverse. I don’t really mind the “female” angle at conferences so long as they’re featuring the best possible people (instead of females for “females’ sake”), whether it’s for a women-only panel or if there’s a mix of men and women speakers. What do you think about the treatment of females in the Internet marketing industry (or other male-dominated industries)? Are we on equal footing, or are we given special treatment?
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Top Tips from the SEO Site Clinic at Affiliate Summit West
Jan 19, 2010 by Rebecca Kelley | Conferences and EventsYesterday at Affiliate Summit West I attended an all-star SEO site clinic featuring some of the top SEOs in our industry. Rae Hoffman, Greg Boser, Michael Gray and Mike Streko were all on the panel and politely eviscerated audience members’ websites, dishing out invaluable information and giving great advice. Below I’ve compiled some of the top tips and tactics every webmaster should keep in mind:
SEO Site Clinic panelists
- Stay on top of those status codes! Make sure you’re checking your status codes so that your site is returning the proper codes for appropriate situations. One man’s site page was returning a 400, and Michael Gray urged him to look into what was causing the 400 and fixing the bad request.
- Move that site off Blogger! Greg Boser said that “serious” sites need to move off Blogger and other hosted service sites. You’ll bring traffic and links to your own domain rather than the parent domain/host, and it’s just more professional and better for business to have a separate set up.
- Make sure your Javascript/CSS is on external files. Greg also said that so much can go wrong when Javascript/CSS is on the page, so keep them external to avoid any issues.
- Linking to unrelated sites can raise red flags. All of the panelists noted that one attendee’s site was linking to a poker ad at the bottom of the page. The site they were analyzing wasn’t poker-related, so this link could potentially be harmful since Google could see it as being unrelated and possibly spammy or a paid link. Indeed, the woman noted that her page’s PR had dropped 2 spots and the panelists said that a good start would be to remove the questionable link.
- Check your site for canonical issues. One man’s site had multiple copies — the www and non-www version of his site was resolving, and he also had his domain with no dashes and the domain with dashes (e.g., 10e20.com vs. 10-e-20.com). Make sure that you’re sticking with a canonical version of your website (e.g., www.nodashurl.com) and 301-redirecting other versions and iterations to this central version.
- Be aware of what your webmaster is doing. During one man’s site review, the panelists found a few one pixel by one pixel links on the homepage — holy 2001 spam, Batman! The site owner had no idea these links existed and said that he has a webmaster/programmer who handles everything. After urging him to fire his webmaster, the panelists all pointed out that you need to make sure you’re aware of what your webmaster is up to and check his work to make sure that he’s not doing anything shady (either intentionally or otherwise).
- Use a theme pyramid for information architecture. Rae suggested a “theme pyramid” approach for your website content (e.g., home page –> main categories –> sub-categories –> content), as it’s the most logical and best layout for users and for crawlers.
- The faster the server, the better. The faster your server responds, the quicker your site can get crawled and the more content will get indexed.
My absolute favorite piece of advice came from Greg Boser, who suggested that you monitor questions that pop up on Yahoo! Answers, and instead of answering them right away, pay attention to which questions seem to pop up over and over again, then author up relevant blog posts that address these questions. That way, you can cite your blog post as a reference which can drive traffic to your site and establish yourself as an expert/relevant resource. Awesome tip!
The site clinic was definitely a success and was one of the best I attended at ASW. I hope you all enjoyed some of the tidbits I shared from the panel!
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PubCon 2009 Recap: Twitter Landscape – Hot Topics and Trends
Nov 20, 2009 by Greg Finn | Conferences and EventsWhile I attended Pubcon last week, I had a chance to catch the “Twitter Landscape – Hot Topics and Trends” panel. It was one of the first Twitter panels in a very heavy Twitter lineup. The session had some great speakers (including 10e20 bossman Chris Winfield) and ended up with a really big turnout! I took some notes from the session and wanted to share them on the blog. Here you go!
First up was Warren Witlock, who wrote the book “Twitter Revolution.” His presentation was titled “the Secret to Selling Stuff on Twitter.” Yet he let us in on a secret: The key to selling stuff on Twitter is to not try to sell stuff on Twitter. There are a few easy steps to doing well with Twitter. They are:
Step 1: Listen
The key is to listen and read what people are saying. While Twitter might not be around in 5 years, the effect of the revolution will be. We will be communicating differently and those that listen will prosper.
Step 2: Love
Let someone know you care Don’t be too promotional – the message needs to be genuine for it to be effective.
At the end of the day, social media can grow 100x what it is today. It is worth the time to put in the effort and do it right.
Warren said that PeopleBrowsr was a good tool to use and you should probably check it out.
Next up was Dan Zarrella from HubSpot. Dan wrote an article about the Science of Retweets and this presentation is about that article. He started by dropping some retweet knowledge. 3% of all tweets are retweets and over 60% of retweets have links in them. The URL shorteners can have a big affect on the “retweetability.’ From what he has seen, Bit.ly works the best.
The top keyword for retweets is “you,” followed closely by “Please” and “Retweet” as 2nd and 3rd respectively. The least retweetable words are descriptions of what people are doing. Smarter comments and saying something new tend to get retweeted a bit more. Nouns are also great for retweets, as tweets about things are highly shareable. Obviously, news is also a great topic for retweets.
For more information, you can download his entire report.
Next up was Chris Winfield (Disclaimer – this is my boss) from the one and only 10e20. For him, Twitter is about asking questions. To Chris it is just a tool for communication. What exactly is “pulling a Winfield”? It is using questions as tools to help accomplish tasks. Twitter wrote a blog post for him. Twitter did a presentation for him at SES Toronto (275 answers in 90 minutes!). Twitter questions can do a lot of things and are quite powerful. Current example – he used a question about Pubcon to find out who would be at the conference, then made a Twitter list with the answers to track his Pubcon friends.
Don’t just make it all about business; help build your relationships. Chris shared a great story about how USA Today did a full story on Michael Dorausch because of Twitter.
Some tips for asking questions on Twitter:
- Use mystery for your tweets
- Ask qualified questions that people can answer
- Don’t make it all about business
- Respond to answers – make it a two-way communication
How can asking questions help your business?
- Conduct polls to learn more about customers, or send people to polls on your site (PollDaddy and Twtpoll are some nice tools)
- Poll the masses — 10e20 accomplished some important tasks based off of suggestions
- Actually converse with your audience. By monitoring his conversations, Chris landed a large Fortune 100 client.
Next was Kate Morris, freelance search marketer from Austin, Texas. Kate took a look at the landscape as a whole. A lot of things have changed over the past few months. RIM is developing a Native Blackberry Twitter app – businesses are getting involved and embracing this communication. Twitter is changing the way people build things. Motorola is making a phone that has instant access to Twitter and Facebook. .
What does this mean to you? To sum it up, three things: Marketing, Brand Development & Word of Mouth Influence. Twitter is huge for these, and these are so important to your business. Also, customer service is really important and that is where the power of Twitter is really prevalent.
Overall, this was a well rounded panel that got a great response from the audience and had a solid Q and A to follow. Great job all!
This is one of the first Twitter panels in a very heavy Twitter lineup and has some great speakers (including bossman Winfield) and has a really big turnout! Let’s get it on.
First up is Warren Witlock who wrote the book “Twitter Revolution”. His presentation is titled “the Secret to selling stuff on Twitter:” Yet he lets us in on a secret: The Key to selling stuff on twitter – don’t try to sell stuff on twitter. There are a few easy steps to doing well with Twitter, they are:
Step 1: Listen
The key is to listen, read what people are saying. While Twitter might not be around in 5 years, the effect of the revolution will be. We will be communicating differently and those that listen will prosper.
Step 2: Love
Let someone know you care Don’t be too promotional – the message needs to be genuine for it to be effective.
At the end of the day, social media can grow 100x what it is today. It is worth the time to put in the effort and do it right.
Then Warren said that PeopleBrowsr was a good tool to use s and you should probably check it out.
Next up is Dan Zarrella from HubSpot. Dan wrote an article about the Science of Retweets and this presentation is about that article. He starts by dropping some retweet knowledge. 3% of all tweets are retweets and over 60% of retweets have links in them. The URL shortners can have a big affect on the “retweetability’,” bit.ly works the best from what he has seen.
The top keyword for retweets is “you” followed closely by “Please” and “Retweet” as 2nd and 3rd respectively. The least retweetable words are descriptions of what people are doing. Smarter comments and saying something new tend to get retweeted a bit more. Nouns are also great for retweets, as tweets about things are highly shareable. Obviously, news is also a great topic for retweets.
For more information, you can download his entire report.
Next up is Chris Winfield (Disclaimer – This is my boss) from the one and only 10e20. Twitter is about asking questions for him. To Chris it is just a tool for communication; he uses Twitter for asking questions. What exactly is “pulling a Winfield”? It is using questions as tools to help accomplish tasks. Twitter wrote a blog post for him. Twitter did a presentation for him at SES Toronto (275 answers in 90 minutes!) Twitter questions can do a lot of things and are quite powerful. Current example – he used a question about Pubcon to find out who will be at this conference then made a Twitter list with the answers to track his Pubcon friends.
Don’t just make it all about business, help build your relationships. Chris shares a great story about how USA Today did a full story on Michael Dorausch because of Twitter.
Tips:
· Use mystery for your tweets
· Ask qualified questions that people can answer
· Don’t make it all about business
· Respond to answers – make it a two way communication
How can this help my business?
· Conduct polls to learn more about customers, or send people to polls on your site. (PollDaddy and Twtpoll are some nice tools)
· Poll the masses, 10e20 accomplished some important tasks based off of suggestions
· Actually converse with your audience. By monitoring his conversations, Chris landed a large fortune 100 client.
Next is Kate Morris, freelance search marketer from Austin, Texas. Kate is taking a look at the landscape as a whole. A lot of things have changed over the past few months. RIM is developing a Native Blackberry Twitter app – businesses are getting involved and embracing this communication. Twitter is changing the way people build things. Motorola is making a phone that has instant access to Twitter and Facebook. .
What does this mean to you? To sum it up, three things: Marketing, Brand Development & Word of Mouth Influence. Twitter is huge for these, and these are so important to your business. Also, customer service is really important and that is where the power of Twitter is really prevalent.
Overall, this was a well rounded panel and got a great response from the audience and had a solid Q and A to follow. Great job all!
The best session I attended this week at Pubcon was Competitive Intelligence: Know Thy Competitor Well. It had a great lineup of speakers and the place was packed full of attendees. In case you missed the panel and wanted to learn a bit more about how to monitor your competitors, I’ve got a recap handy for your reading (and monitoring) pleasure.
If you’re new to competitive monitoring and don’t know where to start, here are some tips:
- Hubs. Find and identify the easy ones. Look for places to find content ideas, links, sites that can help with keyword research and sites linking to more than one competitor.
- Press. How is your competition using press? This can help generate ideas by keeping up with trending opportunities, linking opportunities, etc.
- Review sites. Where are your competitors getting talked about? Who’s writing about them? How are these reviews getting done?
- Forums. Which forums are your competitors hanging out in, and how are they participating?
- Local search. How does your competition stack up on local search? Do they have any sort of local presence?
- Directories. Find the sites/directories that are linking to more than one competitor and see if you can get added to them.
- Anchor text. Find and identify everything there is to know about how the competition ranks.
- Unique domains linking in. Analyze how many unique domains are linking to your competitor to get a better idea of the work that’s ahead of you to get equivalent rankings.
- Strong content. Keep an eye on your competitors’ strongest pages.
Michael shared a bunch of sites that he uses for competitive monitoring:
- Quarkbase — find out everything about a website, such as the most recent and popular pages people have submitted from this site to social media sites.
- Topsy
- Viralconversations.com
- Bit.ly — how many people have clicked on a particular link
- Tweetmeme
Use more than one site when monitoring, because each site will pull up slightly different information, and it’s important to have a comprehensive and varied view. Pay attention to who is talking about your competitors and note any patterns you find.
Plan a competitive monitoring course of action:
- Research how, where, and when your competition is engaging in social media
- Look for points with high levels of engagement or other success metrics
- Dissect their network, looking for their inner circle
- Join their network or build your own
The other Michael on this panel recommended using incompetence to your advantage. Find out who’s linking to your competitors and point out any misspellings, outdated information, etc that you come across to see if they’d rather link to you instead. According to Streko, if it’s on the web, it’s fair game. Snoop snoop snoop. What they hide from the engines is your advantage.
Know your competitors’ presence:
- Monitor their social activity
- Use alerts to your advantage
- Use organic and paid keyword tracking
- Use SEM Rush
Use tools to compete. Watch their Alexa ranking, know their Compete score and use Quantcast data if it’s available. Set up similar sites if you can, then open up the lines of communication and request a link exchange. Also consider advertising on their site, since Adwords should give you a semi-accurate reading of their traffic.
Andy went through a great list of different things to track. For your competition, track the company name, its CEO, its products and locations, etc. Keep an eye out for new products and features, media placements, sympathetic bloggers, etc.
For rants, track your company’s brand plus words like “sucks,” “defective,” “crap,” “poor,” “expensive,” etc. Try to poach their unhappy clients and customers, promote your alternative product, or use their feedback to improve your products.
Also track your competitors’ employees. Keep an eye on their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos and social presence on the web. “Loose lips sink brands,” as Andy put it. You can gather damaging evidence, glean new information about upcoming products or company news, or find potential hires. Also scour your competition’s job listings to find out information about new locations opening up, job turnover, expansion, products in development, etc.
You can also use Google to track a lot of competitor activity:
- Google.com/alerts via email or RSS
- Google Sidewiki
- Local listings
And you should be paying attention to Facebook. Read/monitor your competition’s fan pages and identify who their fans are. Search posts on Facebook and mentions to see who’s talking about them and in what way.
Track your competitors’ URLs too. Andy shared some good resources you can use:
- – Domaintools.com/registrant-alert will send you an alert any time a certain email address is used to register a domain name
- Domaintools.com/mark-alert will give you trademark alerts (whenever a competitor is registering a trademark)
- Oodle.com/job will alert you to job postings (the company name, location, skills/position)
Here are some advanced competitive monitoring tools. They vary in price but are worth checking out.
- Socialmention.com
- Trackur.com
- Radian6.com
- Visibletechnologies.com
It’s been a hectic week in Las Vegas for Pubcon, but I’ve managed to sit in on a couple sessions and pick up a few tidbits of advice from the panelists. Below are some helpful tips about PR and brand management that I gleaned from two sessions this week.
Social Media and PR
Top tips from the Social Media and PR session:
- Online PR should incorporate search and social media reach (via Guillaume Bouchard)
- Capitalize on social media for PR by building and leveraging relationships, researching where you need to spend your time (be social where you need to be), and enabling your message to be shared by optimizing for the social audience (via Joanna Lord)
- If you’re not building trust, you need to evaluate what it is you’re doing and how you’re doing it (via Pat Strader)
Online Brand Management Strategies
Top tips from the Online Brand Management Strategies session:
- The different stages of the sales funnel are Category Awareness, Brand Awareness, Brand Consideration, Brand Preference, Purchase Intent, Purchase, Customer Retention, and Advocates. Each of these stages is impacted by branding. (via Sean Jackson)
- Build and maintain your social media profiles — don’t just “set it and forget it.” Also, build links to your social media profiles so that they can rank better for brand and reputation management purposes (via Kenny Hyder).
- When it comes to crisis communication, you need to have strong internal communication with your staff. Policies must be laid out in advance to advice employees how they can respond in a crisis, and honesty and accountability are typically the best policies with employees and vendors (via Tony Wright).
- 6 tips for dealing with negativity online (via Krista Neher):
- Humanize your brand (it’s easier to hate a company than a person)
- Listen and try to understand the problem
- Thank them for caring
- Be transparent and explain
- Build a community of passionate brand defenders
- Know when to walk away
Next week Greg, Rebecca and I will be heading to Pubcon in Las Vegas. Pubcon is always one of my favorite conferences because I get to see so many old friends, learn a bunch of new things and perhaps most importantly, meet some great new connections. In the Internet marketing industry having a strong network of people to work with, refer business to, bounce ideas off of and help you grow your business is one of the most important things that I can think of. A conference like Pubcon is a great place to help build that network. Be sure to check out Rebecca’s great post from yesterday about 7 Ways to Network and Be Social at Conferences to help make this easier for you.
10e20 Session Schedule
Here’s a quick look at our session schedule for the week:
I will be speaking on the first session of the first day (it starts at 10am and is in Salon C – be there! 
Twitter Landscape – Hot Topics and Trends
Date: 11/10/09 (Tuesday)
Time: 10am
Location: Salon C
Twitter is the trending topic. Find out more about the state of the tweetscape and where things are headed. We’ll take a look at where Twitter is and where it’s headed. If your strategy doesn’t include Twitter, your marketing campaign is incomplete.
This session is moderated by Krista Neher and will also have Warren Whitlock, Dan Zarrella & Kate Morris dropping their Twitter knowledge.
On Wednesday I will be moderating (with the help of Greg Finn on Q&A) a really cool session called:
Social Media & Press Relations
Date: 11/11/09 (Wednesday)
Time: 1:30pm
Location: Salon C
The relationship between social media and press relations is red hot. Companies and PR agencies all over the country are have problems setting policy on how to tweet, when they tweet, who is cleared to tweet, and what about Facebook? Should my company be worried if our CEO puts a new resume on LinkedIn?
We have some great speakers for this one, such as Guillaume Bouchard, Pat Strader, Giovanni Gallucci & Joanna Lord.
Then our very own Rebecca Kelley has a great presentation lined up for this session on Day 2:
Going For the Gold – Optimizing for the Social Media Pay Day
Date: 10/11/09 (Wednesday)
Time: 2:55pm
Location: Salon C
This session will discuss the latest ways to engage social media and prove that it is a viable revenue source.
This session will be moderated by Dixon Jones and Rebecca will be joined by Big Dave Snyder, Jay Berkowitz, and Reem Abeidoh.
Networking & Having Fun
The majority of my time at Pubcon will be spent meeting with people. I already have a ton of meetings setup (hint – use your social networks ahead of time to put the word out and start setting up meetings). Another big event that will be going on is…
dk’s Super Happy Funland in Vegas
Actually, I’m not sure what he’s actually calling his week of events, but that’s what they will equal. Check out the whole lineup on Puropose Inc. The main event that will cap it off is his now famous Texas Hold ‘Em Poker Tournament which takes place starting at 8pm at the Mirage Hotel. If you want to be a part of it, check out this post here.
We hope to see you there! As always, mention this post to me and I’ll buy you a drink of your choice!
Also, be sure to follow @10e20on Twitter here.
Location: Salon C
The relationship between social media and press relations is red hot. Companies and PR agencies all over the country are have problems setting policy on how to tweet, when they tweet, who is cleared to tweet, and what about Facebook? Should my company be worried if our CEO puts a new resume on LinkedIn?
Moderator: Chris Winfield
Speakers:
Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI
Pat Strader, Founder & Managing Partner, Matterhorn Marketing
giovanni gallucci, social media ninja, giovanni gallucci
Joanna Lord, CMO, YourJobStop.com
7 Ways to Network and Be Social at Conferences
Nov 2, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | Conferences and EventsConference season is upon us, and you might find yourself at an event with the specific instruction to “Network” commanded by your boss. While interacting with real-life humans can be daunting (omg, eye contact and physical contact!), networking is arguably the most important part of attending conferences and industry events. Below I’ve outlined a few simple ways you can get the ball rolling and break the ice to make some contacts and collect those business cards.
1. Get There Early and Mingle Over Muffins
Freshly baked morsels of ice breaking goodness…
Many conferences will offer some sort of morning coffee/tea/pastry combo in conjunction with registration, so get there early and mingle with fellow attendees. Don’t be overly enthusiastic — you don’t want to be That Guy so early in the morning — but usually pre-conference am mingling is a bit quieter and less overwhelming than other events throughout the day, so it’s a nice chance to quietly and casually meet some new people.
2. Sit with People You Don’t Know
Yes, even pigs
It can be hard to cut the cord and venture away from your entourage, but you really need to branch off on your own and meet new people if you want your trip to be valuable. Get to a session a bit early and ask to sit next to a stranger, then introduce yourself and strike up a conversation before the panel starts. Sit with new people each day at lunch and chat about what they do. Talk about yourself but also ask a lot of questions about them. Collect some business cards and follow up with everyone you meet — even if someone doesn’t seem like an appropriate client, they might prove to be a valuable colleague or contact for later down the road.
3. Be the Prepared Guy (or Girl)
Hey, you never know…
Be the person who has the power adapter, an extra pen and some paper, gum, candy, an extra copy of the session agenda, the wifi code, etc. Lots of people show up unprepared (or unprepared and hungover) to sessions, so if you can offer up whatever they need (Tylenol, notes, a foolproof hangover cure), you’ll look like the conference hero (not to be confused with the Jukebox Hero). Just be sure to follow up on opportunities like this — don’t just hand over a pen and say nothing, introduce yourself and get to know the person in need.
4. Attend Evening Events
Alcohol: the ultimate social lubricant
If someone’s hosting a post-conference networking event and you can attend, do it. You don’t have to stay out every night until 4 am, but you should strive to attend as many parties, mixers and dinners you can score invites to. Oftentimes the most valuable contacts are made in bars and at post-conference events, probably because people are less formal and more at ease when they’ve got a belly full of food and a drink in their hand.
5. Be Generous (if you can afford it)
Close enough…
If you can, offer to host a dinner or buy a round of drinks. You don’t have to do anything huge like sponsor a huge event, but if you can take a few folks out to dinner or buy some beers for a group, definitely do it. If you’re operating on a much smaller budget, give out candy, cookies, stickers, anything you can — you’d be surprised how many people are suckers for free stuff.
6. Have a Unique Business Card
It also may help to be Matt Inman
Patick posted last week about how you can blend social media into your business card, and this week he’ll tackle some more business card tactics. Creative cards build buzz and attract attention. If you have any say over how your business cards are designed, try to think of something a bit creative and different to stand out amongst the throngs of folks touting little 3.5×2 inch pieces of paper.
7. Don’t Try Too Hard
I hate you, Guy Fieri
You want to stand out at events, but don’t do it at the expense of your integrity or who you are. Be yourself — do you normally wear stupidly garish t-shirts? If not, why would you don one at a conference just to get attention? If you’re knowledgeable about something, work its way into a conversation naturally; don’t start spouting off stuff that you know in order to seem like an expert. You’ll probably end up alienating yourself and seeming like a know-it-all. Just be confident in yourself and play upon your strengths. If you’re funny, crack a few jokes. If you’re generous, buy some drinks. If you’re organized, share some notes. If you’re smart, help people answer some tough questions they need help with. If you’re none of the above and have no discernible personality or skill whatsoever…well, then maybe your boss needs to send someone else to these things.
What other ways can you think of to be social at conferences? Bruce Clay shared some networking tips last year, but if you have any new ones, let us know by commenting or tweeting at 10e20!
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