Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Social Media Club Birmingham Workshop recap

For the first time on Monday, I got to speak/teach about social media in my home state. I was invited to join Ike Pigott, Scott Schablow and Chris Heuer in conducting a special one-day social media workshop for the Birmingham chapter of the Social Media Club. Social Media Club is conducting special one-day workshops across the country for many of their chapters, and on Monday it was Birmingham's turn.

The workshop itself focused on a morning session that covered the basics of social media, building community with social media, an introduction to social media marketing, and finally metrics and measuring the ROI of social media. In the afternoon portion, attendees were asked to examine their business, it's core focus, and its strategy. Then we worked to help attendees understand how social media could fit into the larger business strategy, instead of being a siloed effort.

The day-long workshop closed with a brief presentation by Ike on selling social media to your boss. Ike's deck was based off the classic video game Pac-Man, and was honestly about the best social media presentation I've ever seen. If Ike puts the deck up somewhere, I'll add a link here.

One thing I love about social media conferences/events/workshop is seeing where attendees are on the social media learning curve. As time goes by, people are only getting smarter and asking more intelligent questions. Last year it was 'What is Facebook?', this year it was 'I want to create a way to connect with my customers via social media, for my business would a blog or Facebook page work best?' As knowledge has grown, the questions are moving from a basic overview of what the tools are, to discussing which tools would work better as part of a larger strategy. And as I told many attendees yesterday, I love interacting with people that are new to this space, and hearing what they are learning as they dip their toes in the social media waters. I also learn as much if not more from attendees, than they do from me. Fresh eyes mean a fresh perspective and take on this entire space.

Thanks again to Chris, Ike and Scott for having me. It was great to meet everyone, including several people that I have known on Twitter for a while, including David Griner, Andre Natta, and Jessica Murray. And for those of you that couldn't make the event, here's my deck from my morning presentation on increasing engagement and building community via social media:


6 comments:

Jess said...

I really enjoyed your presentation at SMC Birmingham. I think the most important thing I took away from it was what you explained about, your wants and needs may not match mine. I think it's easy to get wrapped up in the whole SM world and we may forget that we all have different goals in the game. I particularly liked all the insightful links to companies who have really engaged their customers, few of them I didn't know anything about before yesterday.

Alli Denning said...

Hey Mack,

Your presentation was great. I love your emphasis on quality content and common sense in terms of communication norms. I am going to use your line (with credit :)) about "fishing where the fish are" in trying to get my clients to understand the importance of these activities.

Great job!

Anonymous said...

Mack, I'd love to post the deck somewhere, but none of the services I've tried have been able to handle the animation.

It's hard to glean the Ghost Behavior until you see things moving about...

;)

Unknown said...

great job with your presentation Mack - wish we had more time in the day to dig into your materials - you are a great teacher - really deep understanding of social media, translated into very practical, actionable advice

Mack Collier said...

Thank you Jessica! I know I love stories/case studies about companies that have been successful with social media, so I try to incorporate as many as I can into each presentation.

Alli I was lucky enough to learn early on to fish where the fish are! Thanks for the kind words, and I hate that we didn't get more time to talk, maybe the next time I am in Birmingham?

Ike the ghost movement and moving eyes definitely enhance the deck ;)

Thanks Chris, I think everyone appreciated how much time you spent on tying their social media efforts back to their larger business strategy and mission. Hope you make it back home safely!

Anonymous said...

Due diligence:
http://bit.ly/WUbJd