Being Cheryl: Columbus Social Media and Random Humor

I jumped on a webinar sponsored by the American Marketing Association titled “Social Media Is About Socializing” earlier today and I wanted to share some info from it.

The first thing I learned is that you should always double check timezones when scheduling something, because while you might ASSUME when you see 10 a.m. it means the webinar starts at 10 a.m., it really means 10 a.m. PST, not EST, so, uh, 1 p.m for you, Cheryl. Doh!

But moving on! The key take-aways regarding utilizing social media as a marketing tool:

* SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T ABOUT RUNNING A ONE-TIME CAMPAIGN OR SPAMMING PEOPLE WITH SALES LANGUAGE! It’s about blending your content into the social web, joining in the conversation with your customers and building a relationship with potential new customers and really LISTENING to what these people are saying to and about you

* Think about the WHOLE social space. You need to think about strategy, channel creation, profile creation, distribution, optimization, outreach, networking, maintenance, measurement and analysis for all of the sites you plan to target before you try to roll-out a social media campaign.

* Through feeds, widgets, chiclets (those cute little Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon etc. buttons after blog posts) etc. everything on the social web is interconnected. When you post a video to YouTube, for example, make sure you link to it on Facebook and Myspace, Tweet about it, embed it in your blog(s), e-mail it to subscribers, etc. etc. Make your content readily available so others can share it.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting webinar with some good case studies and ideas for tactics until my audio cut out 40 minutes in. I guess I’ll never know what I missed in those vital last few minutes… oh wait, yes I will. It will be available  online in a week. Not sure where to link you to for that yet, but if you’re interested shoot me an e-mail and I’ll forward it along.