Social media sales & marketing event a success in Newbury
A sell out audience discovered the secrets to social media when the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce held its first Sales & Marketing Forum in Newbury, West Berkshire today.
The Chamber holds many such specialist forums for its members; however this was the first sales and marketing forum run in West Berkshire run by the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce and had been held in response to a demand by members. They had asked for social media to be the topic and Morgan PR was invited to be one of the speakers, together with Moira Clark - a professor of strategic marketing at Henley Business School and Emma Daly, marketing manager at solicitors Charles Lucas & Marshall, who is a terrific case study how her use of Twitter via @clmlawbits has raised the legal firm’s profile and brought in new business.
While Moira Clark, a director of the Henley Centre for Customer Management explored social networking as a customer management tool and how the growth of social media and allows businesses to better engage with their customers, I took the audience through the different ways social media can increase your business.
I explained that Twitter and Facebook can be used to promote their business and explained how Organic PR can be used to leverage the opportunities within their organisations through different social media channels. For example a single blog post can be promoted through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – all driving traffic to the blog (which is preferably within your website and part of your conversion architecture) then you can use the blog post in your newsletter, on a press release and so on. Terrific leverage of a single opportunity wouldn’t you agree?
I juxtaposed Twitter and Facebook – where you should chase lots of followers and friends to get the best leverage, with LinkedIn, which is about personal relationships. I repeated my mantra about keeping your LinkedIn network as nature (and LinkedIn’s rules) intended and strictly limited to people who you know and trust and to especially avoid the so-called LIONS – the predatory LinkedIn Open Networkers who play the numbers game and want access to your network. We've blogged a warning about LIONS before.
One of the audience members shot their hand up and said they were a LinkedIn LION and used a huge network to manipulate sales worth many thousands of pounds. The use of the phrase ‘manipulate’ was interesting, but I focused on how LinkedIn prefers people to use the service within their own known network and allowing unknown people into your network compromises this trusting approach. I guess it allows LIONS to ‘manipulate’ those in your network to their own ends!
I urged the audience to determine what they wanted to achieve from social media before jumping in and to be sure to be abundant – keeping it 80% social and only 20% business is a sure fire mix to keep people interested and supportive of your social media Finally I urged them to put quality over quantity – and whatever they did, to be consistent to help the search engines know when best to index your efforts.
Emma Daly’s explanation of how Charles Lucas & Marshall came to explore using Twitter proved an excellent case study and no doubt answered many question about why a company should use the micro blogging service. I love this example of how a client mentions @clmlawbits which the audience were shown.
There were plenty of questions revolving around return on investment and how much time that investment required and when the event ended there was a considerable queue of people keen to know more and it looks like we will be seeing some on our forthcoming Twitter Workshops and others were interested in our social media strategies.