Dr. Neil Hair

Monday’s four hour training that I ran for Saunders and Digital Rochester’s Get Smarter program was extremely engaging, at least from my perspective. I always enjoy interacting with practitioners as the experience is very different from that of more traditional student audiences. For one there is no grading! I always find that practitioners are great at keeping us academics honest about the theories and strategies we promote. The session was structured so that delegates received a review of social media channels, and a heavy emphasis on a review of current business models in both B2C and B2B realms. Following dinner the session was geared towards establishing a marketing plan for social media and therefore much more experiential and personally relevant. Whereas there are many opportunities to attend talks on social media very few that I am aware of actually offer the take home of a plan of action. Granted, there is only so much you can accomplish in a four hour session but feedback suggested that the opportunity to work with smaller teams of 5 worked really well. Delegates were particularly pleased to be at least talking to like minded folk that are social media evangelists but work in environments that are not ‘currently’ accepting of the social media cause. Therapeutic one imagines! One interesting reflection on the session was that the vast majority of the 80 participants were from the B2B area. I counted less than ten representing B2C companies.  Thankfully for the majority, my research tends to focus on the B2B applications of social media so we had lots to talk about. The live tweet feed worked well also. I asked a number of questions throughout the session aimed at polling the wisdom of the team. The contents of this feed will be the subject matter for a number of follow up blog posts so worry not – I’ll share those discussions once I have content analyzed the feed. I was also happy that most of the participants were already experimenting in the space which meant I got to kick the discussions up a notch and not have to pitch the analysis at the level of the beginner. The most pleasing aspect of the event was the passion people shared, to an extent I was preaching to the converted, but hopefully the session helped arm delegates with details on how you can build, and frame politically the case for social media in their organizations. I look forward to continuing the conversation with this fantastic group of people. There are even a number of tweet pics out there from the session Thanks Julie and Donna for helping to organize this event and thanks again to those who were there that made it such a success!