SM2Day, Social Media Today, if you're just thinking about it you're way behind!

On Wednesday of this week I was honored to be a speaker as well as a guest at Rochester's first annual SM2Day, Social Media Today and Harvest Tomorrow conference. This was an event  hosted by Ana Roca Castro of Premier Social Media who started out building an online community called Family Eden and is now the principal of Premier Social Media. The event was centered around a visit from our keynote speaker, Chris Brogan, and expanded out from there to also include presentations from local social media professionals including the CMO of Kodak, Jeffrey Hayzlett who I've heard speak earlier this year and wrote about here in this post.

The afternoon consisted of a few panels which was a nice change up after lunch. I was part of the Corporate Blogging panel and ended up being the moderator of a great cross section of different bloggers. We had Jenny Cisney who is Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager for Kodak to talk about Kodak's blog, A Thousand Words and how she manages and schedules all the different bloggers. Then we got the agency perspective from John Marianetti who is Director of Digital Media Services at Martino Flynn and helps to manage the agency's very popular blog, Blip! (they have this post on the event) Then lastly, but not least, I was able to invite my blogging mentor, friend and founder of the Lip-sticking blog, Yvonne DiVita (see Yvonne's post on SM2Day where she talks about how she met someone at this event she's known online for sometime). Besides Lip-sticking, Yvonne also created and manages a pet blog called Scratchings and Sniffings which is sponsored by Purina as well as the Women Entrepreneur's blog for the Simon Graduate School of Business.

So we had some great discussions around why you should use a blog for business and the way it can become a cornerstone for integrating many different social media platforms. Beside our panel, there was some really great content shared from all the other great speakers. I was very proud to realize that Rochester has so many professionals that are doing some amazing things by integrating social media in their marketing efforts and well as for their client's. As Kevin Flynn from Martino Flynn said, "We're all marketers, so we first start with a plan." Jeff Hayzlett stated, "You need to move. If you're just thinking about social media, you're way behind".

We received a great case study example. Now I've been asked before by several CPA's and financial advisers to help educate them on social media, but most of them say that their companies restrict them from saying just about anything online. One woman even told me she couldn't even put the name of the firm she's currently employed by in her LinkedIn profile. 

This leads to Eric Majchrzak, marketing manager of Freed Maxick & Battaglia CPAs, one of Upstate NY’s Largest CPA firms. Beginning in 2005 Eric developed Freed Maxick’s inbound marketing system which utilized search engine optimization to generate hundreds of qualified leads which resulted in getting them listed on the first page of both Google's and Yahoo's search engine results page.  He has now integrated social media into the mix and is running different campaigns that you can find on LinkedIn, and in LinkedIn Groups, and on both their Facebook and Twitter pages. In total he expects the website, in conjunction with the social media sites, to bring in a total of $1.3 million this year in revenue. They are now the role model for any other CPA firm to follow.

However, I must admit that Chris Brogan was the real highlight of the day. He just spoke to us without any slides or support materials. I was trying to tweet as many of his great lines as I could. Here started out with a quote from David Ogilvy which was "The customer is not a moron, she's your wife" which built on the fact that it's all about relationships, even before social media was around. "Listening is the new black and good customer service is today's brown". He asked us to think about when the last time we, as a consumer, had a customer service representative make us feel smart. Not something that happens even rarely, is it? Then Chris went on to say that we're all looking to become humans again and putting more of our personal life into professional. The two worlds are truly blurring more and more each day.

Those of us at the event were all given a copy of Chris's new book, Trust Agents, which Ana ordered up a bunch for us. She confessed this was how she got Chris to come to Rochester. He was available during the lunch break to sign the books and I did get mine signed and a chance to chat briefly with him. Thanks Chris for visiting Rochester. It also was Jeff Hayzlett's birthday and Kelly Mullaney brought over a birthday cake lit with candles for him to blow out. I snapped this photo of it on my little Kodak digital camera.

A big thanks to Ana for organizing this event and bringing so many of us together under one roof for one day to talk about a topic we all seem so passionate about. We're all still blogging, tweeting, and talking about it even a few days after the event, so I hope the glow will last and that everyone that was there feels a little wiser now from each other.

Comments

[Mary]

It really was an amazing, informative conference. It was a pleasure meeting you, Donna. My wheels are still turning from all the good things I learned there.

[Donna DeClemente]

Thanks Mary for your comments. It was great to meet you as well. Let's stay in touch.

[Mutuelle]

The conference was very informative.

[Defiscalisation]

I like your post. Thank you for sharing.

[Rachat Credit]

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

[Jennifer Cisney]

Nice recap!