Guest Speakers Ann Evanston and Patrick Schwerdtfeger
Last week Gather Your Crowd proudly sponsored Phyllis Garland’s Women Entrepreneurs of the Bay Area event, “Harnessing the Power of Social Media Workshop – Part 2”, where Carla and I met many successful entrepreneurs and had the opportunity to interview guest speakers Ann Evanston and Patrick Schwerdtfeger. This blog post is a quick survey of what Ann and Patrick, two powerhouses on the topic, have to say about harnessing the power of social media.
Ann talked about “Facebookology: The Social Psychology of Doing Business with Facebook Pages, Groups and Profiles” and covered a lot of great relationship building tips, including her four objectives in using Facebook for business. She illustrated with examples how to (1) create raving fans, (2) why you want to go viral, (3) how to encourage referrals, and (4) finding potential customers that will buy from you. In order to do this, she stressed the importance of handling relationships on Facebook through 70% engagement and 30% influence. Asserting influence more that 30% of the time is the equivalent to spamming your friends. Ann says that people hire you because you have an opinion and they know where you stand.
Here is what Ann has to say when we asked her to talk about Facebookology and Twitterology:
Patrick shared with the WEBA group a host of “Social Media Victories – Real Businesses, Real Campaigns, Real Results” through his fresh perspective: it is not who you are but the content you share that will ultimately get you noticed. According to Patrick this is the Cultural Revolution taking place whereby it is not the SOURCE that is important; rather it is CONTENT that takes primacy on the social web, especially when it pushes this Cultural Revolution forward. While some may view places like Twitter a waste of time, Patrick finds only opportunity. Amidst the statistics that say, “40% of Tweets are pointless babble, 38% are conversational between users, 8.5% are self-promotion and/or spam,” Patrick enjoys the fact that “only 8.7% of Tweets have pass-along value,” such that with these odds, it is easier to be noticed when you have value to pass along.
Gather Your Crowd asked Patrick share with us his favorite social media platform and why. Here is what he has to say:
On July 22nd Gather Your Crowd will present to Phyllis Garland’s WEBA meetup the “Secrets of Blogging”. Join our crowd on Facebook or Twitter to keep you posted on upcoming events!
Gather Your Crowd Meets other Women Entrepreneurs of the Bay Area