Social Media Success! Seminar = BIG HIT

A recap and some photos for those who couldn’t make it.

Thursday March 26, 2009 Rapport hosted a seminar called Social Media Success! with Scott Stratten, Un-Marketing.

Rapport’s interest in hosting a seminar on Social Media was to introduce this  somewhat new-to-mainstream tool to our clients as another means of executing their brand. We had almost a full house with people from wide range of businesses. Faith did a brief overview on social media and talked about how important it is to make it work with all of your marketing materials. Then, we learned a whole lot about Twitter from Scott Stratten.

In a nutshell…

Scott prefers Twitter over other platforms for many reasons:
the open-door nature (don’t have to ask permission to connect)
encourages natural relationship building before a ‘friends’ commitment
authenticity of the posts due to 140 character limit
ability to reply easily
potential of the retweet
easy to follow or un-follow whomever you want

Tips on making it work for you:
personalize your home page background
write an interesting profile
don’t simply put links to your site or blog in a tweet
don’t ask people to buy from you
interact by reading other tweets and replay or retweet
negative tweets are just not interesting and won’t get you followed
check out strangers who follow you, could be interesting
don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t put on a billboard that millions of people including your mom would drive by
you don’t have to be brilliant in every tweet, but….
try to write something re-tweetable everyday

How to keep it all straight:
Tweetdeck organizes who you follow and strings of conversation
Use sites like Twellow (Twitter yellow pages) to find Tweeters in certain industries or in your area
Visit sites that monitor your popularity through things like retweets
You don’t have to follow or reply to everyone that follows you

The most important thing to remember is the idea with all forms of social media (LinkedIn, flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc) is not to ask for sales, but to build relationships.

If you have any questions about tying use of social media in with the rest of your brand materials, please don’t hesitate to contact Faith or Bill.