Offline still works!

I went offline today, attending a seminar on Monitoring Social Media & Responding To Its Messages
in downtown DC.  The seminar was well attended and very well run.

• The majority of the speaker’s time was spent sharing data not telling us about their company’s history.  Instead by sharing data and knowledge the speakers provided solid examples of why a business would want to work with their products/services.
• The seminar included an optional lunch which provided some great opportunities for networking.  The folks I sat with shared some great insights and I have some great ideas for widgets – both for business use and on my personal site.
• The seminar was not oversold – so there was room to stand-up and talk both before and after the session.

One of the things that intrigued me, and I guess it reflects on human nature in general, is that many of the “best” examples of uses of social media by organizations are how they responded to negative social media.  Since my company, Carfax, deals with a similar fear factor of people wanting to avoid a purchase of a bad car, I guess I should not be all that surprised. 

The seminar also reminded me, as I talked to Web Analytics guru Phil Kemelor, of how much data is available in a typical Web Analytics package like Omniture, Google etc.  Lots of nuggets on social media links to your business are in the analytics – but as with any database you need the time and the expertise to pull those nuggets out.