The first 45 minutes was spent mingling and devouring the delicious pizza and sandwiches that were provided by our food sponsor, Neo’s Pizza. Elysa Rice got things started by welcoming guests and thanking the sponsors.
Eddy Badrina kicked things off by talking about the importance having a Social Media Strategy and Objectives. He stressed that it’s important to arm your brand ambassadors with useful, shareable information.
When thinking about market strategy, think about the trend that’s driving the “trendy”. The most important thing is to ask yourself – “what is the hook? Why would people want to pass this along to others?”
Next up was Colin Alsheimer who stressed the importance of Creating a Listening Station.
Start by determining your search terms, and always consider if they can and should be geo-targeted. The easy way to start is to use free sites like Twitter Search, Google Alerts and Social Mention, plug in your keywords and plug that RSS feed to a Google Reader. Boardreader is a site to search forums.
The last topic was led by Mike D. Merrill who talked about Social Media Measurement and ROI.
He pointed out that it costs 5-8x more to attract the customer vs. maintaining them. Mike pointed that that social media is not the end all/be all. ““I can drive a lot of traffic to your website [via social media], but if your website sucks, it doesn’t matter” Amen, brotha.
He also predicted that eventually we will stop calling it “Social Media Marketing” and just call it “Marketing”.
As usual, it was a fun evening with a great group of folks who are passionate about the social marketing revolution.
Next month’s SMC meeting should be fantastic and I hope to see you all there!!!! The featured speaker will be Scott Stratten.
Scott Stratten is the President of Un-Marketing.com. He is an expert in Viral, Social, and Authentic Marketing which he calls Un-Marketing. It’s all about positioning yourself as a trusted expert in front of target market, so when they have the need, they choose you, That’s UN-Marketing.
Over 50,000 people follow his daily rantings on Twitter and was voted one of the top influencers on the site with over 90 million users . His book “UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging” is due to hit the shelves in the Fall of 2010 from Wiley & Sons.
Registration is now open!
Posted via email from Gangway Advertising
About this blog: Gangway Advertising is a Dallas-based marketing firm and social media agency. Our specialty is working with companies to create marketing strategies and solutions that allow your business to compete at any level in the marketplace. We specialize in making small companies seem bigger. The posts within this blog are written to show you that social media and marketing is affordable, achievable and should not be ignored! No budget is too small and no idea is too big. Bring it on.