Liverpool Chamber Of Commerce

First Social Media Marketing Goal

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 28, 2010

Two weeks ago I wrote two posts on social media marketing. The first was titled Do You Have A Social Media Strategy?. The second was called Goals For A Social Media Strategy. I was attempting to start a general conversation on the topics because I kind of had an ulterior motive planned. Some of you (Scott, Dennis) wanted more specifics on those goals; I didn’t want to give them up. Now I can talk about it a bit more.

On July 22nd, in Cortland NY, I’m going to be a big part of a workshop on social media marketing. Okay, truthfully I’m doing most of it, but my friend Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus is going to be doing a part of it as well. The topic is titled Make A Splash With Social Media Marketing For Business. This is a 6-hour presentation that will talk about social media strategies, mention special social media outlets and actually help people set things up as need be. We’re also doing the same presentation on August 19th, but I really want July to be successful.

We’re charging $149 for members of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and $169 for everyone else. That’s because the venue sponsoring us is Greek Peak Mountain Resort, a new member of the Chamber (for those who are local I know they’re not in Liverpool, but I don’t ask questions lol) who’s promoting their new attraction, Cascades Indoor Water Park. And if you think that’s a high price, Renée got a flyer in the mail last week for a similar presentation being given in Hawaii for $475 for the same time frame; this is a steal! And there’s a special price which makes it inviting to turn it into an all day thing with the family; coupons if you will. Here’s the flyer to download if you’d like to check it out.

The thing is I wasn’t initially a part of this event. I was asked if I would take over for someone else, and there were some circumstances that I wanted taken care of before I consented. Those have been taken care of, so now I’m a part of this thing. And I have a lot of work to do; I’ve already started on the initial outline, but this is at least 5 hours of talking, presenting, and hands on teaching, so it’s more than the traditional presentation for me.

Now, something I mentioned to my friend Scott is that I don’t believe all goals have to have a time frame on them, and I stick by that. He is correct that most trainers will say you must have a date on it, otherwise it won’t have a chance to be fulfilled. How many of you have lost the amount of weight you said you were going to lose by the date you set? I thought so. How many of you have lost at least some weight by the date you set? I’m betting that’s a different number, and that’s kind of my point. Sometimes the effort towards the goal is more important than the date on the goal; at least that’s how I’m dealing with this thing with my health club, as I’ve yet to lose any weight but have lost some inches.

Anyway, now I can reveal the goal that I really had, which is to have at least 50 people at this event in July. Actually, some of the things we’ve tried have already been put into motion, but I’ll talk about mine, since I’m going to be trying it the social media way. Once a week for the next 2 weeks I’ll be having a post on the event on this blog; that might mean two blog posts in a day, or it might be the only post on that day. In the last 10 days I’ll be throwing a blurb on here as well, and one of the posts will be a sticky post, which means visitors to the blog that come in through the mail page will see it at the top for those 10 days. I’ll also be writing about it on my business blog; I’m not sure I’ll be writing about it more than once on my finance blog, since the topics aren’t quite compatible.

I’ve already started talking about it on LinkedIn, albeit kind of discreetly. I’ve had 3 people contact me asking me to keep them in the loop when I knew more; that’s not a bad start, and now that I can be more free, I’m going for it. How am I going to do it? I’m going to use the 120 character box on the main page to mention it and link to it, and I’ll be throwing out something in some of the local LinkedIn groups I’m a part of. In the last few weeks my connections have grown, and now I’m sitting at around 235 people; that’s not so bad.

It will become a part of my Twitter marketing. Of course the messages will go out when the blogs post, since those messages go out automatically, but I’ll be wording the campaign differently when I mention it separately. The thing about Twitter is that you can miss a lot of people if you only post something once a day, since the stream moves fast. Lucky for me, I talk about so many other things, as well as talk to people in general, that hopefully it won’t be seen as spamming the masses too much. Oh yeah, there’s also a Tweetup on the 30th that I’m going to, and I’ll be talking about it there as well. It’s an offshoot of social media marketing, so it counts; my rules. And y’all can look to the right there to see how many folks I have following me there.

As for Facebook, first I hope more of you join my Facebook business page, for which the widget is there to the right, or you can click on this FB business link. I’m going to mention it in that group, and of course I’ll create an event link to market it as well. I have almost 450 friends there, but of course I’m only going to send a specific link to those people who are local. I’m also a part of a couple of local groups there as well, so you can bet they’ll hear about it.

Both Renée and I will be doing an email marketing campaign as well, as it’s part of social media marketing, old school as it were. We’ll be getting some help with that one via the Liverpool Chamber; ah, finally something that my paying a membership for is providing me. Renée will be using Constant Contact, and she’ll be presenting that since I know nothing about it except I market it as an affiliate.

One final thing we might be doing concerns the webinar we gave last year. I want to talk about YouTube in a bit more detail, so our plan is to take a piece out of that webinar we market and have a short video from it made so we can then create a YouTube page to put it on. I’m not sure how well that will be received, but it’s the next step in my overall social media marketing strategy, so I might as well get a jump on learning how to use it, right?

Anyway, time to end this one. As you can see, it’s an audacious goal, but we’re going to push this one hard. We have verbal commitments; now all we have to do is turn those verbals into actual paying customers. And now you know the rest of the story; thanks Paul Harvey. Stay tuned; at some point after the event I might let you know how successful we were. Oh yeah; future emails will be much shorter.

Advertisement, Social Media | 8 Comments

Workshop/Webinar In May

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 26, 2010

Man, I’ve been busy lately. But I guess I’m also a glutton for punishment when it comes to the real world, so I’m announcing two live presentations upcoming in May.

With my friend Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus, I’ll be doing a two-day presentation on the topic of customer service, and Renée will be doing the topic of Microsoft Excel. On May 6th, we’ll be doing the live workshop at the Homewood Suites in Liverpool, NY on 7th North Street. We’ll be doing both morning and afternoon presentations, and for those who pay to come to both workshops, we’re offering a free lunch.

Then on Friday, May 7th, we’ll be doing a version of the same presentations as a webinar, which of course for folks who might be located in places other than here in the Syracuse, NY area, and for folks who want something a little bit shorter, since the workshops are going to be 1 1/2 hours each, and the webinars at 60 minutes each. These will be recorded and sold as separate entities once they’ve been cleaned up a bit.

If you want more information, you can check out this link, which talks more about what each of our presentations will be about and our brief bios, as well as registering and paying for the events as well.

We’re trying something new when it comes to advertising this thing that’s much different than last year when I did the webinar on social media and SEO. One, the live part is something we didn’t venture to do last year. Two, we’re advertising it way in advance, and I’m thinking about making this a sticky within the last three weeks before the presentation to make sure people see it. How do those of you who run sticky posts do with them?

Three, Renée created flyers, which were set up for distribution at yesterday’s Syracuse Chamber Business Show, which was pretty neat I must say. The flyers were yellow; at long as they weren’t green I was good with it (I hate the color green). Four, we’re going to be getting some advertising on local radio, which is pretty neat, though I have no idea how that’s going to work since she’s handling all of that as well. And five, we’re getting a little bit of support from the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce in the form of some email advertising; that doesn’t upset me one bit either.

Our hope is to get a total of 40 people for the live presentation, and hopefully 10 to 20 for the webinar. That’s a lot of bodies, but the money wouldn’t be depressing. And the topics themselves are based on our survey results, which I posted in December.

Some of you might be wondering what the relationship is between what I’m doing and what Renée is doing. During my talk on customer service, I’m going to mention ways to set up customer service tracking, and Renée will be showing people how to do it in Excel in some fashion. Of course, those will only be peripheral issues for both of us, but I asked a friend of mine who’s an organizer how she pulled off a workshop that was similar last year, when she did office organizing (she has a newsletter also) and her friend did a presentation on Quickbooks. She said she mentioned organizing finances and then her friend could help show how to do that using Quickbooks. Hey, we’re giving it a shot.

So, if any of you are near the Syracuse NY area, we’d love to have you be a part of this; heck, help spread the word, though I know I’m going to talk about it often enough over the next six weeks. And if you’re not, think about participating in one of our webinars.

Microsoft Office Professional 2007