#SocialMediaWF Social Media Conference Full of Conversation

Earlier this week I attended the NYC Social Media Conference, which was full of amazing speakers ranging from Hershey’s to NBC and from Twitter to Yelp.

What a fun way to learn a bit more about the social media space. It’s incredible how much information is out there, isn’t it?

I swear I could just spend my days reading articles on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and how to increase your following, network, connect, share and inspire others that could be half way around the world.

I find it mind boggling and pretty amazing.  I learned an incredible amount of information from the different speakers and panels throughout the two day conference held in Manhattan.

I sat in on some informative panels. One included Claire Diaz Ortiz who works for Twitter.  She writes www.ClaireDiazOrtiz.com and you can follow her on Twitter @claired. Claire gave some interesting points and talked about Crisis Mapping, which I was not familiar with. To sum it up, Crisis Mapping is feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, SMS, RSS and others can be collated in real-time to provide detail of how a crisis is evolving and in-the-moment decision-support to users of a given crisis mapping platform enabling users to query the map, and test out different scenarios to identify the best course of action given a changing environment.

I also heard Colleen Curtis, Director of East Coast Marketing at Yelp speak. She writes colleenyelp.yelp.com. Colleen had some great points on how to expand your reach with social media beyond facebook and twitter. I thought this session was quite informative because everyone thinks that social media is driven by facebook and twitter but there are so many other social media platforms for us to use that are not given enough press or attention. I was excited to hear her thoughts about branching out and exploring other opportunities to broaden the scope of social media beyond facebook and twitter.

By favorite panel was titled, Blogging: Still the Ultimate Social Media Marketing Tool.  This session laid out incredible information and stats that showed how bloggers are more influential than advertisements and events. It’s amazing how a few bloggers can reach such a vast audience for not even a quarter of the price of a print magazine advertisement.  This session just proved even moreso how print is dying and digital is taking over. With SEO capabilities and the amount of online buzz that bloggers present, it’s no wonder these big brands want to work with bloggers rather than fork over their money to an advertising agency.

I attended so many panels both days…it was a nice mix of business and creativity advice, suggestions and guidance.  I created wonderful relationships that I am excited to chat with virtually.  Overall, it was a fun 2 days filled with action-packed social media.

Now, I’m ready to take on the social media space!