Presentation: Social Media for Business
- Posted June 8th, 2009
- Filed under: Community, Events/Presentation
Michelle and I recently spoke at the 22nd Annual Maine Telecommunications Users Group (MTUG) conference up in Portland, Maine. Our presentation, called “Social Media for Business”, provided an overview of the types of social media sites out there, how you can get yourself or your business involved, and how we at BatchBlue have found success using social media.
In slides 3–31, we cover the types of social media sites, who the big players are, and some usage and demographic statistics. In slides 32–35, Michelle talked about some examples of how we’re using social media.
In slides 36–41, Michelle shared some stories of people we originally met on Twitter who have become and important part of our business. In the presentation, those slides merely show photos of these wonderful people, so I wanted to take a moment to call them out here.
- Slide 37: Saul Colt (@saulcolt on Twitter), now with Zoocasa.com, was with FreshBooks when we met him down at SXSW in 2008. We happened to walk up to a pancake breakfast held by the FreshBooks folks and mentioned we’re customers. FreshBooks then took BatchBook out to dinner and surprise, surprise—FreshBooks and BatchBook hooked up.
- Slide 38: TJ Sondermann (@sondernagle) is the closest thing BatchBlue has to a mascot. Not only is he a great friend and full of great ideas, he actually came up with the concept of our wildly popular Twitter tee shirt (shown on Slide 39).
- Slide 40: Michelle Wolverton (@chelpixie) is another great friend that was met quite a long time ago on Twitter. She’s now our virtual project manager for a whole bunch of things.
- Slide 41: Adam Tucker (@adamjt) is our brand new Systems Administrator here at BatchBlue. And we first met him on Twitter. In fact, I vividly remember “meeting” him—Michelle and I were meeting at The Coffee Depot in Warren, RI. Suddenly, I got a new follower notification from someone in Warren, RI (it was Adam—he lived in Warren at the time). I remember standing up and looking around the place, thinking someone was looking over our shoulders.
We closed with (Slide 42) a list of things the attendees could do to get started in social media.
The crowd was very new to social media (just one person had a Twitter account). My favorite question was “Can I legally require all new employees to become friends with our HR person on Facebook?”. I liked that for a few reasons—not only does it show how social media is permeating the workplace, it also shows the sense of fear from employers combined with the knee-jerk reaction to (try to) control usage. Our favorite answer to these types of questions is that you simply need to hire responsible people and everything will take care of itself (and perhaps provide some simple and clear guidelines).
Thanks to Steve Hand and Norman Houle of MTUG for asking us to talk. We had a lot of fun!
