Snow in Austin, TX? The theme for the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum 2011 was “Turn Up The Heat” but I didn’t realize they were talking about the weather! Rather than cancel the event, the MarketingProfs team really stepped up by working with the speakers and attendees who were caught in the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 by offering an online version of the conference for those who couldn’t make it in person, as well as rearranging sessions to allow for delayed keynote speakers.

I was honored to be a panelist on the Social Media Best Practices to Heat Up Your Marketing session and I was very happy that I was able to make it to the conference before the blizzard ruined my travel plans. Of the other panelists in my session only Jeff Cohen (@JeffreyLCohen) from Social Media B2B was able to make it. Unfortunately, Alan Belniak (@abelniak) was stuck in Boston and couldn’t attend our session in person, although he was with us in spirit.

Here is the description MarketingProfs used to describe our session:

Social Media Best Practices to Heat Up Your Marketing

Are you an expert marketer but new to social media marketing or need a refresher of best practices? Then don’t miss this session! We’ll talk about developing a social media strategy for your company, establishing social media guidelines, and tactics to integrate social media into your existing marketing programs to increase ROI. We’ll show you examples of companies using blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn successfully to meet their overall marketing and business objectives and how to measure the results.

MarketingProfs conferences are smaller than some other conferences I have spoken at, but one of the things I like best about them is that people come up with really good questions. We received several questions during our “live” session and there was even a question form the online audience! After the session, one of the fantastic MarketingProfs staffers forwarded this question from Sylvie H.:

What if you conduct some listening and learn that really people are not talking about you very much at all (and you’re a pretty big regional company). Is it still worth creating conversation in this space?

I emailed the following response:

If you aren’t participating much in social media or don’t have a solid brand presence, people may not be talking about you specifically. The question is, are they talking about what you do or topics you are interested in?

An example of this from today’s presentation is the Fiskateers from Fiskars scissors. There are few people talking about scissors online. Even fewer are discussing Fiskars brand scissors. But there is a lot of conversation going on around scrapbooking and by talking about something their customers were interested in, Fiskars developed top of mind presence when a scrapbooking fan is in need of advice on crafting and scrapbooking which lead 600% more brand mentions and ultimately more sales. If you want to read more about the Fiskateers case study, you can see it here:
http://www.whatsnextblog.com/2008/10/fiskateers_how_a_social_community_became_a_veritable_sales_force/

Basically, find the conversation and listen to what people are saying and then join in!

If you’re interested, you can find the slides to our presentation on SlideShare or contact MarketingProfs for a replay of all 26 hours of sessions so you can ask your own questions. You can also read what others had to say about our session here:

Spredfast Blog – Getting Back to the Basics – Social Media Marketing Best Practices

The Cross-Channel Conversation – Social Media Back to Basics Everyone Forgets

Search Marketing Sage – Social Media Best Practices To Heat Up Your Marketing

Plus, if you leave a comment below with the slide number for the “what NOT to do” example in our slide deck, you could win a tchotchke from the conference! I’ll pick one random comment on this post with the correct slide number and send them their choice of either the Einstein or Shark squeeze toy that I picked up at the Digital Marketing Forum vendor tables!