Today’s my first day in New York City for the Web 2.0 Expo. Although I’m not officially going to any sessions today, I’ve already met quite a few interesting folks: the lovely (and very stylish!) Daria Shualy from Sense of Fashion and Sharel Omer of KonoLive, who talked with me about whuffie and bloggers and web apps (some of my favorite things!) I had a quick lunch with Kelly Leondard from the Hachette Book Group, who very kindly offered to send me a copy of Six Pixels of Separation, the hot new title from Mitch Joel that everyone is raving about. I can’t wait to read it and will share my thoughts here (I’m overdue for a business book round-up.)
We heard from Pam that she landed safely in London and today is meeting with our friends from MOO cards. She promises to take lots of pictures of her official #sbbuzz bee enjoying the sights in London.
If you’re interested in following along with us, the Twitter hashtag for the general Web 2.0 conference is #w2e (each session has its own tag as well). Pam and I will be posting updates to our own accounts (@pmohara and @mriggen respectively) and we’ll be updating our Flickr stream and this blog as time allows. If you are at either event, please give us a shout! We’d love to meet you in person. That’s what makes going to all these conferences so fun.
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!
BatchBlue was a proud sponsor of Rhode Island’s second annual We Mean Business (WMB) conference, held last monday, September 29th. Since Stephanie and I tend to be more behind-the-scenesy here at BatchBlue, it was a treat for us to attend the conference.
In the organizers’ own words, here’s some info on what the WMB is all about:
We Mean Business is your connection to business success in Rhode Island. Get help connecting with the right governmental and non-profit business organizations to start or grow your business; access a network of public and private consultants that can give you advice based on your business needs and learn about financing programs especially for the small business owner.
The day’s presentations focused on networking strategies, marketing tips, and client acquisition and retention. Since we had to woman our booth the whole day, we palled around with the other sponsors, great folks like Precision Web Marketing (who ran a complimentary report card on BatchBlue’s marketing website – thanks, guys!), JobsInRI.com, and the RI Hospitality and Tourism Association.
The diversity of attendees really made this conference a fun and important one for BatchBlue, as it gives us insight into the range of industries ready and in need of some contact management luvvin’. Attendees ran the gamut from doulas (the lovely Kelly Klein of the newly-relocated Empowered Mamas), our best bud and people magnet “Uncle Jay” White from Best Buy, publicist & photographer Victoria Arocho of Rocka Rho Publishing, LLC, and Paul DeFruscio of Eco-FriendlyPackaging.com, our partner in green I even got to demo SuperTags to Governor Carcieri – this is why we love being a small business in Rhode Island!
Given that this event was both intimate and diverse, we took the opportunity to run some user tests of our marketing site. Both sponsors and Expo attendees participated in the testing, and as a result we received valuable feedback from them and they received a spiffy SuperTags t-shirt from us.
All in all, this was a great day of networking and listening to what a wide variety of business owners need and want in a contact management system. Stephanie and I received the unofficial Last Women Standing award, as we were literally the last people in the building to leave. Thanks to Little Rhody for providing such great opportunities and resources to its business owners and entrepreneurs! And thanks to WMB, Stephanie and I have one conference under our belts and are ready for the next one!
I even got to demo SuperTags to 
