The ghost of Colonel McCormick chuckled along with the audience during Tracy Schmidt’s interactive panel “Social Media for Small Businesses: Designing Your Strategy” in the famed McCormick Room at the Tribune Tower. Miss Schmidt is the Manager of Educational Programs with Tribune Media Group and spoke to a lively crowd of business owners, PR agents, community managers, and social media rookies on Monday, September 19.
While Miss Schmidt was tremendously knowledgeable about her subject, she was witty and affable too. She engaged her audience in Q & A throughout the presentation; the room broke out in peals of laughter when a man named Gregg (two gs, he explained) mentioned that he didn’t want to see pets when combing Linkedin profiles for new recruits.
Amidst the merriment was brass tacks social media etiquette: the do’s and don’ts of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Linkedin, Yelp, Foursquare and the like. We covered an impressive amount of terrain—galloping through the social media galaxy—but of all the information disseminated, most crucial was Miss Schmidt’s breakdown of the nine steps necessary for creating a social media infrastructure. She suggested that business owners update their website, improve seo, research competition, decide on a platform, enlist resources, train their employees, establish guidelines, test the waters and, lastly, evolve and adapt.
What Miss Schmidt proposed was a multitiered platform strategy for speaking directly to one’s preferred social media community. She explained that it’s not enough to simply use social media; one has to use social plug ins to express brand, voice, and personality in the rapidly accelerating media landscape.
Miss Schmidt is holding an additional class on Friday (which you can still register for) and a Master Class session October 13th on social media but until then, here are some quick tips: keep up with Mashable.com (the leading site for social media strategy), don’t only operate with Facebook as google can’t index activity there (it’s a private network, harrumph!), respond with care and attention to your customer’s comments and complaints via Yelp, Twitter, and Facebook, and recycle what you already have by posting company photos, in-house newsletters, calenders, and updates.
And remember: the world of social media is your friend! Use its riches to express yourself and you’ll be successful in branding yourself and expanding your market.
A big thank you to Tracy for her social media wisdom, The Chicago Tribune, and Mr. McCormick for his drafty digs.
