Lynchburg ladies filled the Liberty room at the Hilton Garden Inn this last Wednesday for our first ever Women, Influence and Social Media luncheon. Cheryl Smith and I tried to empower women on ‘How to Make a Frikin Difference’ and how to use the social media tools to take relationships to a higher level.
Check out Cheryl Smith’s report and our powerpoint slides here >
What: Blog Competition
Who: Central Virginia residents who own and operate a weblog!
Deadline for Submissions: May 15th, 2009
Blog-Off Date: Friday, May 22nd @ 9 a.m.
Where: The Muse coffee shop in Wyndhurst
Why: To evaluate the effectiveness of local bloggers!
What is Friday 2.0?
Friday 2.0 is a local Virginia networking group who meets on Friday mornings at 9 a.m. at The Muse coffee shop in Wyndhurst. Friday 2.0’s goal is to get educated about social media tools and opportunities. The most passionate and curious professionals attend this un-meeting as a way to connect with like-minded individuals and discuss the topics and trends relevant to technology, social media and the future of social media. Everyone from the freshly-minted twitter-er, to the tech-advanced executive managing 500 people are encouraged to attend and participate. All voices are equal and welcome at Friday 2.0! Join our Facebook Friday 2.0 Group.
Battle of the Blogs!
Friday 2.0 meets every week to talk about the effectiveness of blogging. Each week leading up to our ‘Blog-Off’ our panel of judges will be presenting the criteria by which they will be judging!
By submitting your blog to our panel of four judges, you will be entered into our first ever ‘Blog-Off’. Your blog will be evaluated for:
Instructions on Submitting Your Blog to the ‘Blog-Off’:
To submit your blog you need to…
The Grand Prize:
Winner of the ‘Blog-Off’ will receive something so incredible, so amazing, that we can’t tell you what it is just yet.
What if you started getting calls from the media about your specific niche field? Wouldn’t that be cool? It would mean that you are a valuable resource within a specific target marketing!
Blogging is proven to build reputation because it builds credibility and gets you in “front” of more people. It creates visibility. This will help you become the center of influence within your industry.
1. Create a Good Impression
2. Position Yourself Above the Competition
3. Market Your Blog
You will probably need to test your readers/ audiences to see what works best for them – see what kind of topics are popular and track the results.
Women are social beings made for relationships! And with social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, women are in a unique position. Whether its for your job, your cause, your church or your family, join us for an inspiring lunch event discussing the critical position women are in and how social media tools can give us influence we cannot ignore.
WHAT A Luncheon for Women Only
WHEN April 29 @ 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
WHERE Hilton Garden Inn, Lynchburg
SPEAKERS Internet Marketing specialist Jennifer Bailey (formerly Mills) of Marketing-Helper.com, and Cheryl Smith, business coach at CultureSmithConsulting.com.
LUNCH The cost of lunch is $18
I was asked to speak on “The Etiquette of Social Media” for a group of realtors at John Stewart Walker tomorrow morning.
After agreeing I couldn’t help but laugh. Etiquette…?
Social media is an experiment. There are no rules… the sky is the limit. (Via @appomattox_news)
So instead of etiquette lets talk about what social media is and how you can use it to your advantage.
1. Social Media is a way for people to DO IT THEMSELVES.
Ahh! This is scary. If people can do it themselves… then why do they need us?
Social media is bringing people away from looking to the experts (CEOs of companies) and moving towards groups of people coming together regardless of title to share ideas, information, perspectives and to drive positive change. (via @joegerstandt).
But wait a second… this actually presents us with an opportunity. If people are listening to other people… then its our perfect chance to step in and show people why they need us.
2. Social Media is a Result of Companies Not Listening
We have two ears and one mouth, we need to use them proportionately. Social media is a result of the company not listening to the customer. via @joshjq
People are talking. If you hurt your own reputation… people are talking. If you create positive feedback… people are still talking.
3. Social media takes 6 degrees of separation and gives us closer access to people we are further away from
Social media is a way for us to expand our relationships. It brings networking and collaboration to a whole new level.
Thank you @chrisbrogan for the “20 Blog Topics to Get You Unstuck.”
I am constantly getting questions such as, “But if I had a blog, what would I write about?” and “Who would care?” The answer is simple:
Just write about things that would draw your target market to want to visit your website. If you sell hard wood floors, what do your customers need to know about choosing a wood… or cleaning them?
Now, to divert you back to the post topic: Ways to Convince the Boss to Try Twitter:
1. Use Twitter
Use twitter for your company, I mean. Find your boss a new customer, or make a much needed connection! Once I was in a meeting with a client who had never used twitter… but wanted some training. During the meeting they said “I need a video editor.” So while sitting there, I used twitter to get him 5 or 6 leads.
2. Stack articles about twitter’s effectiveness on their desk.
Here are a few stats to help you get started:
A survey by Coleman-Parkes Research indicates that companies who currently use social media reported improved feedback, improved customer satisfaction, customer support, increased sales and improved public perception of the company. Need more stats? There are 1 trillion unique URLs in Google’s index, 2 billion Google searches per day, 70 million youtube videos as of March 2008, and over 1 billion tweets to date.
3. Send them to the twitter yellow pages
Find people in your area or any category at twellow. Its better than a real phone book where you can make cold calls or do mailings… because twitter people want you to follow them!
4. Talk about your twitter success
Talk about how easy it is and the connections and people you have met through twitter. Haven’t met people? Then you are doing it all wrong!!
5. Your suggestions welcome
Please leave your story of how you got a friend, coworker or your boss to try twitter!
1. An Infinite Puzzle Piece
It is hard to put together because the pieces are always changing… molding themselves into what they are becoming. If that sounds like a circular statement… it is.
There are no rules in social media. It is an experiment… The sky is the limit. via @Appomattox_News
2. An Organism
It is alive. I once asked a group of colleagues what social media would look like In Real Life. Infinite blocks of cubicles… sometimes the cube people pop up and say something. Or a billion people on a river at one time… you never step in the same river twice, right?
A couple months ago people were still using URLs to link to websites. Now they are linked to twitter tweeple. If I leave this article here, on my blog, it will stay here. But if I turn it loose in social media… I can no longer control it. It becomes a living thing.
3. Tools for community
For sharing and discussing information on the web.
A method of allowing groups of people to come together regardless of title to share ideas, information, perspectives and to drive positive change. via @JoeGerstandt
Activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. Social media are distinct from industrial media, such as newspapers, television, and film. While social media are relatively cheap tools that enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, industrial media generally require significant financial capital to publish information via Wikipedia.
4. Another form of marketing
A method of gaining publicity through online communities and networks.
5. A revolution in human culture.
It is fundamentally shifting every element of human society: business, media, government, the arts, education, religion, family life… It’s almost as if the social web has enabled an era where trust is the core value and everything outside of trust (via our relationships online and off) is irrelevant. Is it about friendships? Yes. Is it more than that? Infinitely yes. via @socialmediariver @wiselywoven
There is a lot of talk about our social responsibility to social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.
…what do you mean, “Social responsibility?” Don’t I only have a responsibility to MY organization, MY cause, and MY paycheck?
And even I never really got past the fiscal goals of social media (costs less, increases sales), until I talked to @joegerstandt and @appomattox_news over the weekend at the Social Media Seminar.
“The way we approach leadership is shifting and that part of the future and part of the crossroads we are at now is that we are shifting away from relying on the “experts” at the top of the organizational charts and relying more on groups of people coming together regardless of title to share ideas, information, perspectives and to drive positive change.” (via @joegerstand on the Social Media River)
Imagine if you could double your donor base in a year? Imagine how many people you could reach with your cause message if you had 1,000 twitter followers… who all had 1,000 followers. Imagine if you could rally all of those people and their friends around your cause and your message to drive that positive change you have been working so hard for?
GuideStar gives us some more practical reasons, here.
Social Media Seminar 2009
Above, Joe Gerstandt @joegerstandt speaks about leadership and social media.
Earlier I spoke about social media tools and how to use them. Here are some tools you can use:
Slides and YouTube videos from today’s workshop
Be Social on the Web in 5 hours/week: checklist
Other Notes and Resources from Today’s Workshop
If you aren’t a web designer, know nothing about HTML, or just haven’t been using WordPress very long… then it may not be a good idea for you to use a custom WordPress theme. Unless you follow some simple rules:
1. Hire an expert. Ok… I am not trying to promote myself here. But seriously, if you are going to use custom themes, plugins, bells & whistles… but don’t know how to maneuver WordPress CMS… then don’t touch it. Ask an expert to do it. Many experts will let you hire them on retainer so they can this “stuff” for you when you need it.
I get calls all the time… “Help! I broke my site!”
A lot of you don’t have time to learn to fix it. So hire someone who can do it in a flash.
2. Learn to use WordPress CMS. CMS means content management system. And really, its easy. You can never be prepared for every emergency that might happen – but if you know the basics, you can save a lot of money on retaining that expert. This means knowing some simple HTML, too. And knowing how to maneuver an FTP program like Dreamweaver or just SmartFTP.
3. Check your site after every edit. EVERY. EDIT. If you make some changes to the image on your post… save it, then check it before doing any other edits. If you make some edits to a sidebar widget, check it every time you update. If you mess with the plugins, check it after each plugin update.
Some things to watch out for:
