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Have you heard the buzz about Social Media Success Summit 2011—the web’s largest online social media marketing conference?

Before I tell you how this virtual summit will help your business attract great customers and prospects, gain a unique competitive advantage, and measure your social media results, let me share a story with you.

PROOF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING WORKS…

In October 2009, Michael Stelzner started Social Media Examiner, a blog for marketers and small business owners. Almost overnight, his site became one of the top business blogs in the world.

He didn’t advertise, didn’t rely on the press and almost none of his traffic came from search engines.
Slightly more than a year later, his site has more than 57,000 email subscribers, over 31,000 Facebook fans, a half-million page views a month, and has generated nearly $2 million in sales.

Everything he does focuses on delivering high-quality content coupled with intelligent social media marketing.
Michael’s story is not unique. A significant 73% of business owners and marketers plan to increase their use of social media in 2011 (2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report).

What’s the connection? Your customers (and prospects) are using social media every day. Social media is a new marketing frontier because it bypasses all the costly middlemen and allows you to engage directly with your customers and prospects! AND this presents an enormous opportunity for you.

SO WHAT’S THIS ABOUT?
Michael (and his team) have been working for months to bring the best minds in social media together in a fully online event called Social Media Success Summit 2011.

A significant 2,500 marketers and business owners from around the world attended his last Social Media Success Summit. Businesses were transformed. In fact, 96% of attendees said they’d attend again.

This summit’s focus is to empower you to implement successful social media marketing tactics, track and measure your social media ROI, and see how successful social media campaigns were executed. Twenty-two of the world’s leading social media superstars will be summit instructors.

Presenters include Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), Brian Solis (author, Engage), Frank Eliason (Citigroup), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Erik Qualman (author, Socialnomics), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Dan Zarrella (author, The Social Media Marketing Book), and experts from Boeing, Intel, Verizon, Cisco and LinkedIn.

Plus join Andy Sernovitz (author, Word of Mouth Marketing), David Meerman Scott (author, Real-Time Marketing & PR), Jay Baer (co-author, The Now Revolution), Hollis Thomases (author, Twitter Marketing), Steve Garfield (author, Get Seen), and Ann Handley (MarketingProfs)–just to name a few.

Attendees at our two last summits included well-known organizations such as General Electric, American Express, Staples, General Mills, Microsoft, Harvard, San Francisco Giants, MetLife, Kraft Foods, Hyatt Hotels, Stanford, Ben & Jerry’s, IDG and Disney. But you don’t need to be a big business to benefit!

This is the world’s largest online social media event designed to empower marketers and business owners to master social media marketing. And the great news is it’s a live online conference you can attend from your home or office.
Go here now to learn more.

Here’s to your success!
Joann Whetstine

P.S. Twenty-two of the most successful social media pros will show you how to use social media to market and grow your business. Remember, the experts teach the sessions live (and it’s all online). So you don’t need to leave your home or office! Go here to see how this works!

P.P.S. As a way of saying “thanks” for checking out the summit, there’s a gift just for marketers called “8 Steps to Creating a Winning Social Media Strategy” by Jay Baer (valued at $59) waiting for you. Go get it here.

The Social Media Success Summit #SMSS10 continues to deliver powerful information on how you can utilize social media marketing in your business.

“8 Steps to Creating a Winning Social Media Strategy”
@JayBaer wants us to remember that tools change, so, start with a strong strategic plan for your social media efforts. Make sure you have a team at your office to support it. Decide who your audience is and don’t forget to listen to them. The best way to break through is make the company human. Tell stories or your customer’s stories (remember Jared from Subway?). Get beyond the features and benefits and make people feel your passion.

“How Mobile Marketing Can Improve Social Media”
@kimdushinkski wants you to know that even if you don’t think you are mobile, if you are sending email and someone checks it from their phone you are! You should even consider having a web page to your main site that is optimized for mobile so people can easily see how to contact you on their 2 inch phone screen. If you are ready to dip your toe into the mobile marketing waters, both Twitter and Facebook offer SMS test message feeds your fans and followers can subscribe to.

“The Future of Social Media”
@steverubel says that trends develop slowly but are timeless. Remember that people need to hear your message 3 to 5 times from 3 to 5 different sources for it to sink in. Tap into free tools online and become a data junkie to figure out what unmet needs are on the rise that you can provide the solution for and create content that will be passed around. All roads to content lead through Google, so, make friends with Google Insights. You could rise to the top of a search category if you are digitally visible in enough places. Klout.com is a great place to find out “who the world is listening to”.

Wednesday May 5th was the first full day of webinars for the Social Media Success Summit 2010 #SMSS10. Here’s a quick recap of some the great social media marketing takeaways from the three webinars:

Optimizing Your Facebook Fan Page
@MariSmith gave a great class on “Optimizing Your Facebook Fan Page”. What I loved the most was seeing all the great examples of Facebook welcome pages. Did you know that your Facebook Fan page does not have to be just your wall of posts? You can have fans land on any page you like and if you have access to a great graphic designer, make use of Faceboook Markup Language (the FBML app) and create something that meets your business objectives like one of these:

1. This one makes you click “like” button to see it interact with you: facebook.com/CarrotCreative
2. This one uses video to engage you: facebook.com/stevespangler
3. This one lands you right on a product page to purchase and has the “like” widget next to each item: facebook.com/threadless
4. More video and a great example for a company that is not product oriented: facebook.com/EZINEARTICLES

The main goal of your Fan page should be to create a call to action. What do you want someone to do when they visit you? Become a fan? (or, now, show they “like” you?) Collect their email address? Order product? Use your Fan page to meet your business objectives. Plus, you can split test welcome pages, as each one has a unique URL. See which one works best for you!

5 Ways to Measure Social Media
@JasonFalls spoke about “5 Ways to Measure Social Media”.
I liked these 3 points regarding how to measure social media success (besides just strictly sales and google analytics):

1. Community: Fiskars has a great example of how they created a “community” of ambassadors for their product at: http://www.fiskateers.com/ Always good to keep people singing your praises!
2. Customer Service: You can measure effectiveness of social media if your customers are using it to get answers so you get less contacts to customer service, or your call center. Plus, the more ways a customer can contact you = happy customers. Compare survey results for more concrete results.
3. R&D: Use social media to help you come up with new or improved product/service ideas. No cost way to generate market research. Ie.) Dell “Idea Storm” http://www.ideastorm.com/ has received 13,000 comments. 415 ideas were used and many were revenue generating. Also, Joffrey’s Coffee http://www.joffreys.com/ reached out to bloggers and said “what coffee flavor do you like?” and created a new one based on their input called “coffee 2.0” which was then in turn blogged by them out to their followers.

Creating Ravings Fans with Social Media
And, finally, @Ramon_Deleon the Chicago Dominos Pizza owner who uses social media to WOW his customers daily talked about “Creating Ravings Fans with Social Media”:
Ramon has a huge audience of college kids on twitter and Facebook and as these kids move into corporate life, he keeps in touch with them regularly. He’s built a strong brand for himself and really keeps customers engaged in his social media spaces. I like these tips he shared:

1. Think about how you can help the customer and give them positive reasons to talk about you.
2. Promote them so they will tweet about you and share.

For example, he prints up a flyer that he puts on his pizza boxes with his favorite customers twitter handles on it, it has big impact. This is a case of doing someone a favor before they ask, so, you are on their good side when you need something. He also volunteers at many events in Chicago and always has a big Dominos sign along to get lots of photos taken to share in Facebook. He’s also great at quick videos to thank customers and even apologize for errors if needed. All these techniques using social media keep him top of mind to the customer and when someone thinks of pizza in Chicago, they think of him first.

Social Media Success Summit 2010

Ready to get on the social media marketing train but don’t know where to start? There is an awesome online conference you must know about! Social Media Success Summit 2010 is the web’s largest live virtual marketing conference that will empower you to use social media to gain more exposure, better engage customers and grow your business.

Attend webinars from 24 of the world’s leading social media gurus, such as: Guy Kawasaki (author, Art of the Start), Chris Brogan (author, Social Media 101), Darren Rowse (author, ProBlogger), Mari Smith (author, Facebook Marketing), Greg Jarboe (author, YouTube and Video Marketing), Kim Dushinski (author, Mobile Marketing Handbook); experts from Best Buy, Home Depot, Whole Foods, Foursquare and Groupon; Steve Rubel (Edelman), Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Jason Falls (Social Media Explorer), Jay Baer (Convince & Convert) and Ramon De Leon (Chicago Domino’s Pizza)—just to mention a few!

This is the place where the social media thought leaders come together to talk about what’s happening in social media marketing and considering the online world is so dynamic and changes so quickly, you’ll want to know what other business have learned and are doing so you can put your social media marketing strategy in place.

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO SAVE 50% (Expires at Midnight Pacific on Thursday April 15th)

This virtual, online summit starts Tuesday, May 4 and runs through May 25. It will be spread over many weeks (and recorded for later playback) so, even if you have a schedule conflict, you can still play back any of the webinars at a later date.

“Consider this: 97% of last year’s attendees said they’d recommend the summit to a friend and attend again,” says Michael A. Stelzner, #SMSS10 Event founder. “Studies show that consumers prefer to work with businesses that have a strong social media presence. It’s not too late to get your business engaged with customers via social media. But if you wait, you’ll be giving your competitors a significant advantage that’ll be hard to overcome.”

I attended last year and I can’t wait to find out what this amazing group has to share with us this year! This event is THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING EVENT for any business who wants to be successful using social media to generate leads and build strong business partnerships.