julien smith | Amy Mengel

It’s been quiet around the blog lately. I’ve been traveling a lot for work (and some for fun) and blogging has taken a back seat. Plus, it seems like I haven’t felt like I’ve had too much to say. I’m resolving to get back on track, though.

Here’s some of what I’ve been up to over the last six weeks:

I guest lectured on social media to a graduate-level PR class at The College of Saint Rose and talked with them about how social media has influenced and changed PR over the last several years. The class is working on a social media strategy for a local non-profit and I gave them some ideas for ways to encourage volunteering and fundraising via content marketing. My slides from the class are below (and they’re pretty bland – I usually try to jazz up presentations more!)

Social Media and Public Relations

View more presentations from Amy Mengel.

I was a member of a panel of speakers on social media at the 2010 Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership Conference at the NYS Museum. I had never heard of this group before, but it’s fantastic! This national organization has chapters all over the US and brings together 10th graders from different schools for a weekend devoted to leadership and community service. The kids were excited, energetic and inquisitive. For my part of the panel, I talked to them about how social networking is an important component of online reputation management. When they’re applying for jobs or scholarships, people are going to Google them. They need to make sure that their social activity (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other online postings) reflects the type of person they want to show to the world. I also taught them how to Call the Dawgs.

I read Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. I received a copy of the book at last October’s Inbound Marketing Summit, when it was pretty new, but never got around to reading it. I thought it would be interesting to wait to read it until almost a year after it was published and see how well it held up. I’m generally not one to like social media books (or even business books in general). I’ll probably save my observations on the book for another post in the coming weeks.

I flew three round-trips to BWI for conferences about PR in higher education and communications in government. I talked with lots of readMedia clients (and hopefully future clients) about effective ways of reaching hyperlocal media, how to manage enterprise-level PR and communications within complex organizations, and how to ensure social media is baked into PR best practices so that it becomes a natural extension of communications activities. I go back to BWI in two weeks to present a workshop on social media for government communicators. I’m going to be the mayor of that airport in no time.

I finally pulled together a group of smart, hard-working people to help me keep Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley moving forward. The event has grown so much in the last year and was more than I could handle on my own – so I’m now happy to have a team behind me making it happen. We took a break from our typical early morning programming in June and instead hosted a social media happy hour at a local biergarten. Networking was greatly enhanced. We’re looking forward to bringing back regularly scheduled programming in August.

So, this post is a total cop-out, but I plan to be back to blogging (semi) regularly soon. Stay tuned…

Okay, so Albany may not be the first city that comes to mind when you think of innovation, digital marketing, a vibrant creative class or a social networking hotbed, but we have a budding community here that’s really becoming interested in all things social media. This morning was the region’s second Social Media Breakfast, and 80 people turned out at the Capital Repertory Theater in downtown Albany to hear Justin Levy describe how he’s used social media to improve business at his restuarant.

Capital Rep is in the middle of a production called Shear Madness, which takes place in a beauty salon, so it was pretty amusing to see Justin up on a pink and green stage with hair dryers and shampoo stations as a backdrop. Thanks to Annmarie Lanesey at MZA Multimedia, we livestreamed this event: click here to access the recording.

A few key takeaways from Justin:

Listening is the most important aspect of social media. It trumps any tool or service or platform. You have to listen to your customers.
You can have the best store or product in the world but if no one’s coming or knows about it, you’ll fail as a business
Each organization needs to be strategic with their use of social media and not just try tools or tactics because they are popular. Define what success looks like for your organization and develop a plan based around your goals.
Customers trust Google to give them the answers to their questions. They don’t understand SEO and don’t realize that big companies with huge marketing budgets can essentially “buy” the front page of Google results. You have to create good content that will get you ranked and help people discover and link to you.
Twitter is where you can be helpful, be a real person. A blog is your proving ground to show that you really know your stuff. Use many platforms in combination to reinforce your brand.

Justin also shared some key social media tools with the group:

Radian6 (paid) and Google alerts and Twitter search for monitoring mentions of your company online
Tubemogul as a single upload point for video that then deploys it across the web to video sites
Disqus and Backtype for managing comments on your blog and searching comments
BrightKite for location-based social networking and Twitter updates

And of course, Justin plugged Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s new book, Trust Agents, as a great source for understanding customer relationships.

Here are a few pics from the event (when I wasn’t running around setting up, moderating the Q&A, or live-tweeting!):

I’m really pleased at the turnout and reactions for the first two Social Media Breakfasts in Tech Valley and am excited to keep this going and continuing to see the local social media community grow. Thanks again to sponsor SUNY Cobleskill (and their twittering cow, @CAbunga) for sponsoring the event for the second time.

Check out the full Twitter transcript of SMBTV here.

Amy Mengel

I used to have a blog here.

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