The Inaugural Social Media Summit was a great success

The first inaugural Social Media Summit took place earlier this week in the Aviva Stadium and it will be running again next year. The Social Media Summit was held over two days, with the first day concentrating on workshops and the second day concentrating on social media tips and talks from leading experts.

The first day left you with quite a conundrum as there was always two workshops running side by side, and you had to think carefully about which workshops you wanted to attend. The workshops covered all the major social media platforms as well as digital PR and why you should use social media.

One of the most eye opening workshops was Steve Dotto’s YouTube workshop. Steve was the main presenter of Dotto Tech a popular tech show on Canadian TV, and after it got cancelled in 2009, he decided to move online. His YouTube channel has 714 videos, over 106,000 subscribers and with millions of hits you would expect healthy advertising revenue, but surprisingly only two and a half  thousand Canadian dollars is earned each month.

What was eye opening for me was the fact how little money Steve makes in advertising from his YouTube videos, and as a blogger with a small following I know that I don’t earn much from Google advertising ,but I assumed that someone with a big following like Steve would be earning good money from advertising revenue. What Steve said about YouTube can relate to any Social Media platform you are using and the bigger following that you have does not equate to a healthy advertising revenue.

On the second day leading experts gave great social media tips and the highlight of the day was the keynote speaker Ted Rubin, who gave some great insights and tips for any person

or business who uses Social Media. Ted was handing out plenty of great sound bites and one that is still stuck in my mind is “It’s real easy to work hard it’s really hard to work smart.”

One of Ted’s pet hates is companies or people using social media badly and he  gave one great example of this. He mentioned that after getting in touch with Fedex via Twitter he got no thank you or acknowledgement because Fedex policy dictates that you have to go through four people to get reply to your tweet. Some of Ted’s great tips are listed below:

• Listen
• Make it about THEM
• Ask “How can I serve you?”
• Aim for ongoing engagement
• Look people in the eye digitally, you can find out about them and get personal
• Amplify Customer Experience
• Make it better by really listening to them
• Always address them by name
• Be useful, be interesting and stay clear of one time fits all
• People love to share so make it easy for them to do this
• Engage captivate and make remarkable
• Empower your Employees and they’ll power your brand
• What doesn’t work for social media strategy is not being social

Ted left us with a lot of food for thought and as the Social Media Summit closed we got a video message from Joel Comm, the American author and internet marketer, who will be delivering the key note speech at next years Social Media Summit. If the Social Media Summit is to become a permanent tech conference then it has to have speakers of the caliber of Ted Rubin and Joel Comm, and I hope this is the case.