How small businesses can use social media

Last Saturday Podcamp DC was held at Rosslyn in VA and I got the opportunity to talk about how Small Business can make use of Social media and connect with their customers using new channels.

The small business owner is already a instinctive marketer and a social person who has very little time. The 3 point formula is LISTEN, PARTICIPATE, CONTRIBUTE. I have listed tools on the slides and talked about examples. Read the whole article and see the video and slides.

Kenneth Yeung a DC Blogger took this video of the presentation . Thank you Kenneth.

There was an interesting discussion on adding your own web site or article to Social Bookmarking sites and the collective conclusion of the room was that it was a fair chance for people to put their work in front of an audience that decides and ranks it. Nick O’Neil editor of Social Times gave his advice on social bookmarking.

Jim Long from NBC generated a discussion on the pros and cons of distributing your video on multiple channels. Peter Corbett of Istrategylabs and Andy Carvin of NPR talked about use cases where it was important to drive traffic to one particular website. If you have a marketing campaign that focuses on driving audience to a particular website then posting the video to multiple websites would dilute the traffic. If it is important for the video to spread virally then you should post it on different channels.

As a gag as I assured my audience - Not all of them were Small business owners- that I will help them have a successful Thanksgiving i.e when their friends or relatives who are small business owners ask them for advice at Thanksgiving they can use my presentation

Thanks to Tammy Munson and Joel Mark Witt for pulling this terrific event together. Network Solutions helped this community effort by sponsoring lunch for podcamp DC.

Other Bloggers who have written about presentations from Podcamp DC that may interest you:

Kenneth’ Blog http://blog.thelettertwo.com

Andrew Feinberg on CapitolValley.net

Helen Mosher

Thursday Bram

caseysoftware

techrepublican

wireless muse

joelogon

Jim Long

Justin Thorp

Aaron Brazell

Rob Carlson

Russell Heimlich