Social Media Extravaganza: Tips For You To Do Now
July 10, 2010 
New ideas flew around the room at the four-hour Social Media Workshop, hosted by new media marketer Jeff Korhan (@jeffkorhan). Here’s a few interesting thoughts Korhan shared.
– One size fits all does not apply. Try things out. Experiment. It’s the only way to see if it will work for you.
– Get comfortable with authenticity. Be real and have conversations with people.
– Even if you’re not “on” social media, you are. Use Google Alerts to see who’s talking about you and what they’re saying.
– Think of the keywords that your customers will search for, and use those words often on your site, on your blog and in your social media.
– Sites that are updated more often are indexed more often by Google, bumping them up in the search rankings. Update often.
– Hang in there with blogging. Even if you don’t think you have any followers, you have one very important follower: Google.
– Some things that seem counterintuitive are extremely beneficial on social media. Ford gave away cars to some bloggers, giving them the fuel to share their thoughts on the cars with their social network.
– Traffic to Flickr and YouTube are growing. They’re morphing to become social networks themselves. Create accounts there, and your customers can subscribe to your accounts.
What should you post? Here are a few ideas: lists (Top Five Plants We Sold This Year), how to (How To Prune A Hydrangea) and favorite (My Favorite Plant Is…). Readers really respond to these types of posts and videos.
Maybe my favorite comment of the workshop: Pull back the curtain to show that the wizard behind the works is a guy just like you and me.
Some tools to check out to manage social media:
Tools To Help Integrate Social Media: SocialOomph, HootSuite, Seesmic, Ping.FM
Photo Tools: Picnik
Blog Tools: WordPress, TypePad
Twitter Tools: TweetDeck, UnTweeps, bit.ly
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