Social Fresh Charlotte, Recap

I recently attended the Social Fresh Social Media Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina geared toward marketers with a great showing from big brands and agencies.   One of the best parts of attending social media conferences is that when I get home I can experiment immediately with the few things that I learn.    By far, my favorite part of social media conferences is the networking at the pre/post parties and in between sessions.   Those who are the most passionate about social media seem to get the most out of the relationships made during quick conversations that happen between sessions at these conferences.  After the conference, they have to continue to grow these relationships online.   Social Fresh Cruise was created for the social media conference speakers, panelist, and attendees who want more time to truly build meaningful relations with other social media leaders.  A cruise is the most social form of vacationing and is very conducive to building life-long friendships. 

What did I learn at this Social Fresh Conference?  I learned that we have moved beyond is Social Media important to social media needs to be integrated with existing business practices and goal.   Social Media by itself is not the answer, but when properly integrated with your other marketing and branding activities the results can be awesome. 

I find Blue Sky Factory CEO,Greg Cangialosi to typically be about 6 months ahead of most others, and this year he was talking some Social CRM.  From Greg’s presentation, Social CRM will be one of the upcoming trends thanks in part to the slick new integration of Salesforce.com and Twitter.  In order to track ROI, we have to be able track leads from the source all the way to purchase.

Social Media is an ever expanding.  It now encompasses blogging, micro-blogging, Facebook, video creation and distribution, community management, mobile, monitoring, and much more.  As keynote Amber Naslund discussed future success will require a volunteer army from inside or outside the organization. In order to achieve success it needs to be integrated with business goals and with all traditional marketing efforts.

Photo by @TheRab.

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