Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Netvantage doesn’t market itself as a social media company, but we end up in a LOT of conversations about it, and Twitter in particular.  Small businesses are still trying to figure out Twitter, and without knowing a lot of detail about a company or industry it’s hard to just start throwing out universally valuable tactics that someone can use to start gaining value from Twitter.  Today I was catching up on Twitter and browsing through some of the folks I follow, I realized that Pubcon was underway (Pubcon is a big Internet marketing conference, for those that don’t know).

I wasn't at Pubcon, but this is what it felt like on Twitter.

I saw a Tweet from Chris Hooley that had the hashtag of #pubcon, and I hopped on over to Twitter search (or feel free to use another tool like Tweetdeck) and ran a search for #pubcon and let it run.  The result?  Boatloads of information, summaries of presentations and generally distilled goodness that would have cost me time away from the office that I just can’t afford at the moment.  I do this for any industry conference or event, and fortunately our industry is chock full of people who love to Tweet.  The truth is, though, that regardless of your industry, there are people sharing information at important events that you can benefit from.  So even if Twitter doesn’t act as a direct revenue tool, it can be your ticket to insights from thought leaders in your industry, and THAT can be valuable for small businesses dealing with limited resources.  So, if I was in a position of authority at a small business, I would make sure my company was doing the following:

• Identifying a handful of the most important individuals and companies (particularly competitors and key players up and down the value chain) and following them
• Keeping a calendar of major industry events (trade shows, conferences, training events, etc.) and running searches leading up to the event to identify hashtags of interest
• Run searches during and post event and have someone scan through and create a summary document of links to relevant presentations, blog posts and other summaries of key information on industry trends, competitors, etc.

From there your organization can streamline processes and figure out the most actionable way to use this information - whether it’s addressing changes to your own processes, new marketing opportunities or new competitive information.  But as more and more people jump on the Twitter bandwagon, it gives the little guy the opportunity to have a virtual ticket to almost anything…so why not open some doors that have long been unavailable?

I do worry, however, that there will be some sort of attempted crackdown at some point - particularly for paid conferences.  How long will people want to front big fees and travel costs to sit in on events that they can largely get the clif notes of for free?  Sound like Napster/file sharing to anyone else?  But the dams have already opened, so trying to stop the waters will be an effort in futility.  I think it will start putting the onus on the event coordinators to continually add value to fill seats, but that may well benefit everyone.