On May 19th and 20th May I attended the SASCON conference with the Online Marketing Team. Initially I hadn’t intended on going due to the pressures of managing the business.

However, my team quickly pointed out that as the lead salesperson and MD of the company I needed to understand first hand what:

• Was happening in the industry
• What new technologies were available and
• What the benefits would be for our client base

The conference proved to be everything it promised and then some. Two days worth of frantically writing down tips, advice and plans for the future led to writer’s cramp. Looking around the room at the time I realised I was one of the few with a pad and pen. The more astute, including my team, were equipped with smart phones, iPads and laptops (we have now purchased two new iPad 2s and next year I will be prepared!).

One session I found particularly interesting was  a session called Stat-O-Rama, chaired by Bas van den Beld.

During this session the importance of Facebook for businesses was really highlighted. Up until this session it wasn’t something I highly recommended to our clients. However, with stats including 1 in every 10 visits to a website comes from Facebook and having a Global reach of over 500 million users it is hard to ignore its potential for businesses.

Another statement ‘agencies are shit at content’ really rang true. We are forever telling our clients that good original content wins every time. I am almost bored of hearing myself saying ‘be the expert’ or ‘become the authority’.

However, they also discussed the power of your customers with comments like ‘work the crowd’,  ’join the crowd’ and even ‘pay the crowd’. Our clients need to enable the public to comment and to drive the content.

So what has happened since then and what have been the high’s and low’s?

As you can imagine we all came back fired up and ready to let our ideas loose on our clients. The main problem was that all our previous conversations with clients regarding social media had always led to comments like:

• Social Media is a waste of time
• Social Media is for our children
• We don’t have the time
• Who will do it?
• How do we measure the return on investment?
• We just don’t understand it

But over the last few months we have found that more and more people are opening up to the idea of using social media. The problem was that they were still unsure how get started and had much more specific questions:

• We need to find out more
• We have set up Twitter / Facebook / Linked in but how do we now use them
• How often should we tweet and should it be personal or outsourced
• How do we measure success? Followers, re-tweets or enquiries etc

With this feedback and growing demand we have decided that we can add the most value by using our knowledge to coach our clients in all things social.

Our team are now planning focus groups, seminars and practical sessions focusing on all aspects of social media; from setting up a Twitter account, to developing a social strategy. We are hoping to run these later in the year in our offices, turning the UE building into a social hub and trying to re-create atmosphere we felt at SASCON.

So we can make sure we cover all the bases, and make each session as valuable and informative as possible, I’d like to invite you to tell us what you want to learn.

• What is the one thing you need to know regarding social media?
• Where are you having the most problems?
• What are your burning questions?

Add them to the comments section below and we’ll try our best to incorporate them. Alternatively get in touch via Twitter

In the meantime, stay tuned to the blog, as we’ll be announcing the dates of our sessions in the coming months.