On Thursday morning, I enjoyed yet another delicious breakfast with a few social media enthusiasts at the Gaithersburg Hilton in Maryland. The snow waited just long enough for us to enjoy an amazing warm breakfast with excellent 
conversation.
The guest of honor was Beth Schillaci (@bethschillaci), founder of VillageWorks Communications and top 50 female blogger ( remember she was on a Network Solutions’ Tweet chat a few months ago http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/07/how-to-blog-effectively-to-market-your-small-business.html). She has just released her first book, “Your Social Media Roadmap“. Beth imparts her wisdom from her years as a small business social media consultant to help anyone get started with their social media plan. Beth told us about her journey as an author—a job title she never thought she would have!
For more info on her book, check it out on Amazon and click here for the book’s website.
In addition to Beth we were joined by a number of local small business and social media enthusiasts. We all went around the table and shared some of our “brags, begs and what if…?s” (I learned this from the AMI conference) One that sparked the most conversation was Nakeva Corothers, (@nakeva) an entrepreneur, talented social media enthusiast and photographer. Nakeva asked the group to brainstorm about new marketing ideas for her photography business.
Some of the best tips were:
- Form a partnership- Nakeva is a photographer, so if she reaches out and forms relationships with event planners, they may recommend her to their clients as an event photographer.
- Tag Away- Upload all of your pictures to your Flickr stream and tag them like crazy. That way, if people searching see your photos and like them, they can hire you.
Another conversation revolved around how to get your boss to blog. Your boss wants to do it, but actually producing a blog post never seems to happen.
- Start by Ghostwriting, and ask for your boss sign off on it. It actually helps if he/she’s picky, because then he/she will want to do it their selves even more.
- Send a calendar invite for the day you will brainstorm a post with your boss, and another invite for the actual due date. Seeing it on the calendar may help.
- My personal favorite… Leverage—if they don’t give you the blog post, they don’t get the status report you promised!
We enjoyed fantastic conversation with Beth Schilacci (@bethschillaci), Jessica Hibbard (@jesshib), Nakeva Carruthers (@nakeva), I.J. Hudson (@ijh), Matthew Brock (@matthewbbrock), Robin Ferrier (@rferrier), K.N. Vinod (@kvinod), Alli Allage (@ali_allage), Rosalie Morton (@rosaliemo) and Joseph Zuccaro (@JoeZuc).
Image of Social Media Road Map Cover provided by Beth Schilacci.
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