Live Blog - Social Media Surgery Tues 9th March

[Chi-chi Ekweozor]

This is a live blog of the Social Media Surgery at Innospace on 9th March.

If you were there and remember it differently, please let me know. Shout out in the comments!

Quick introductions round the room.

Companies represented:

Karsons Lettings
Melbourne Server Hosting
SESUK/Tutor Direct
Emerald Web Design
Tangerine Snap

Social Media Surgeons:

Bruce Thomas – Modern English – social media agency –slash-music label.
Chi-chi Ekweozor – Real Fresh TV - Internet TV and social media consultancy

Bruce is now sharing about using NetVibes for sentiment analysis. Advising trying to use a start page like this or PageFlakes to start finding out what is said about your company on social networking sites.

An example is a web designer that uses sentiment analysis on Twitter to find out how many jobs posted are being posted by web designers. Uses this to find out what new work is available...

Bruce on Web 2.0/social media:
It’s the first time in the history that consumers can work with the company to create the product together.

He suggests that SESUK, the new online tutoring service who join in the session to find out more about social media forego building a website altogether. Rather than recreating website, use Facebook’s existing community, he suggests.

Bruce's quick insights on Facebook:

Facebook Groups are best for lobbying – Pros: can mass mail people. Cons: Cannot view groups outside Facebook.

Fan Pages are best for companies/entities - Pros: viewable outside FB. Cons: Cannot mass mail 'fans'.

Bruce goes on to share the differences between widgets and applications.

Widget can ‘contain’ content e.g. ClearSpring’s video widgets. Just a bit of display.

Applications use the feature set of a social network to offer functionality outside of the social network. For example you can 'view friends on Facebook' on an application outside Facebook.

Facebook Pages more value than Apps going forward for business pages as Apps can be difficult to ‘seed’ and attract sign up from consumers.

Question from SESUK:

How do you use Twitter to market your business?

This was answered by Bruce Thomas by way of an example from digital agency Amaze who ran a Panic Valentine Flowers campaign using sentiment analysis on Twitter. They searched for people on Twitter tweeting about having forgotten to buy flowers on Valentine’s Day and contacted them offering last minute delivery on flowers.

We discussed using hashtags on Twitter at length, showing examples of successful uses.

Quick discussions on hashtags and on blogging – WordPress.com vs Blogger

Shared that I (Chi-chi!) would recommend WordPress.com over Blogger for a free blog because of the ‘blog export’ function available on WordPress.com. I also briefly talked about the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits of using a blogging platform like WordPress for your company website and/or blog.

For more blogging tips, check out this Introduction to Blogging Guide I wrote for Arts Council England.

Also discussed coming up with a workable schedule for blogging: I advise you choose a schedule you can manage. Try and tweet at least once a day, blog once every 7 days to begin with....

I also share some of the SEO benefits of having a blog: XML site structure allows blog content to be spidered quickly by search engine robots and thus added to a search engines index of websites faster. This allows pages from blogs to show up higher in results on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) than pages from static (non-XML structured) websites.

We ended with a discussion on the benefits of social media.

Bhavesh from Karsons Lettings shared that as a complete beginner to social media, the real eye opener for him from today’s session was discovering that social media was about “telling people who are interested in what you have to say about your services”.

He had been sceptical about marketing through social networking and social media in general because the benefits of using social media in a business context are often poorly articulated.

Hopefully mine and Bruce's suggestions clarified a way forward for developing a social media strategy for his lettings business.

It's a wrap!

The notes today are rather brief compared to the last two sessions but that’s because the discussion got very lively at certain points and I had to join in!

Thanks to Bruce Thomas for his lively and insightful comments on Facebook marketing and Facebook application development.

Please keep an eye on the Ning for news about the first late evening Social Media Surgery event on 13th April.

If you need some further support, my company provides training in using social media and social networking for marketing.

If you were at today's session and found it helpful, please share in the comments :) Thanks.