Social Media Jungle – Event Wrapup

Spent today at Jeff Pulver‘s Social Media Jungle, Boston (Waltham actually) and enjoyed the day immensely. Here are my notes from the sessions. There was a lot of good content provided and I will list the one-liners I jotted down that were thought provoking or valuable to note.

The speakers included:

• Jeff Pulver – “ Sometimes You need to be Vulnerable”
• C.C. Chapman – “It isn’t a numbers game. The human side of social media”
• Richard Dale – “Twitter as the universal information stream: What if the Twitter stream told us every time a can of soda is sold?”
• Joe Cascio – “The Compuserve Era of Social Media – when and how will it end?”
• Doug Levin – “Panel on Social commerce, R-commerce” – Doug Levin, Founder & CEO of Zingero LLC; Jason Jacobs, President, FitnessKeeper, Inc.;  Leah Busque, Founder, RUNmyERRAND.com
• Laura Fitton – “Social Media for Social Good”
• Steve Garfield – “New Media Tools you can use to tell your story RIGHT NOW!”
• Alex Chriss - Intuit
• Justin Levy – “ How Small Business can use Inbound Marketing/Social Media to Help Increase Their Business”
• Chris Penn – “It IS a numbers game – thinking about what numbers actually matter”
• Steven Dill – “Social Media Lessons Learned: From the perspective of a skeptical Online Marketer”
• Leslie Poston -”Bringing Generations Together For Success In The New Millennium”
• Matthew Mamet – “Using online video to strengthen your relationship with your online community.”
• Maria Thurrell – “Social Media: Make new friends but keep the old ones.”
• Mike Langford – “The evolution of conversation”

Words of wisdom from the presenters:

• The magic of sharing has become contagious.
• People follow you for the three R’s – respect, reputation and responsibility to your network
• Connect with people as people, not brands
• Drop the walls, be yourself and you will understand social media better
• Numbers are important but so are the people and many forget there are humans on the other side of the media
• As marketers, we are responsible for making money, saving money and ROI, but that’s not all we should be considering
• Twitter has become an information stream – what other uses can that stream have that will change the way we find and access information?
• Not about the goods, but about the experience – we have to blue the lines between your online and offline community
• If you are only serving yourself, you will be discovered and people will unfollow you
• Turn your message inside out and make it about them – spark conversations
• Tie your use of social media to a business objective – if you know what you need to do, you will know how to track it
• Successful businesses always hustle, engage and learn from the experts, engage and learn from their customers, show passion for what they do and have a strategy to get it done (HELPS)
• Metrics – What, Why and Now What? What metrics tell you what happened (revenue, unique visitors, etc). Why metrics give you a context for what happened and are associated with a verb that can be tweaked such as open rate, click throughs, conversions.
• You do have time for social media – pick something that truly interests you and focus.
• Form groups of varying generations to learn from each other – millenials, GenX and boomers – all have something of value to add to the mix.
• Social media is about relationships – you never know what might happen when you connect with someone.
• The conversation is changing, the paradigm for conversation is changing. Get out of your comfort zone and experience it!

I enjoyed meeting many new folks, networking and being social face to face. There is a Social Media Jungle in NYC on March 19th. If you are from the NYC area, you should check this out. It’s a day well spent with folks who live and breath social media.