How to boil down a 75 minute conference workshop into a shortish microblog post? I thought maybe a list of the top five things I took away from each workshop would be my best bet, so I give you the John-Cusack-in-High-Fidelity-inspired Top Five Things.
First session of my day was Social Media and Your Marketing Plan. Top Five Things:
1. Develop a social media policy. I know what you’re thinking. I know because I wrote it in the Notes section of my conference program. It goes something like, ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Not another policy!’ But seriously, this one is a good idea, because it allows you to be thoughtful about your social media efforts and concentrate them where they’ll be the most useful. Decide which platforms you want to use and what kind of content you’ll use it for.
2. Develop a schedule for your content. I know I tend to post only when I feel like it, but if you plan out what you’re going to post and when you’re going to post it, you’ll be providing a consistent flow of content instead of letting three weeks go by before you realize, ‘Gosh, I haven’t blogged in three weeks!’ (And when I say ‘you,’ I mean ‘me.’)
3. Feel free to drop a social media tool if it isn’t working for you. More isn’t necessarily better; the key is to be able to use a few of them really well.
4. Have a crisis plan in place for ‘when social media goes wrong.’ Because even though that’d be a great title for a 50s-style pulp novel (the cover alone!) nobody would want to actually experience it.
5. Be aware of disruptive technologies, including visual pinboards and QR codes (or as I like to think of them, those funky squares). Here’s a handy link to the slides from this portion of the presentation.