Liveworld’s Bryan Person, the founder of the Social Media Breakfast movement, flew in from Austin to spark the event, and also followed up with a great video reflecting on the morning from NYC’s beautiful Bryant Park. The video is below, and to get a real time feel for the event, check out all the live tweets.

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A huge thank you to Paul Borgese from the Associated Press who gave a thought-provoking presentation that sparked a great deal of questions from the audience. Aaron Uhrmacher and Selina McCusker also put a great deal of time and effort setting up the event. Finally, an important thank you to all the New Yorkers who dragged themselves out of bed on a drizzly Manhattan morning to join us.

Further SMBNYCs are in the pipeline. If you’re a New Yorker and you’d like to assist us with planning, speakers or sponsorship for future events please feel free to reach out directly to myself or Aaron Uhrmacher. After this event sold out in a matter of hours it’s seems like the SMB are even hotter than the Knicks (thankfully we’ve also got a better record…).

SMBSD #2 Theme: Social Media Case Studies: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

When discussing Social Media in businesses from large to small, profit to non-profit or even local to international one thing always comes up…Are there examples of this working? Not Working? Building the brand? Destroying the brand? Getting attention? Not getting any attention at all?

The answer is: YES!

For SMBSD #2 we will cover Social Media case studies.  We will learn about companies that have made it work and companies that have tried without success.  Becky Carroll of Brickfish and the “Customers Rock” blog will lead us through this interesting discussion of Social Media: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

Register for SMBSD here and join the conversation.

About the Sponsor:
Brickfish is a social media advertising network that engages consumers with brands in an ongoing dialogue. It provides a brand platform that turbo-charges viral sharing among consumers via the social web

—> Register here.

SMB10 Theme: Getting ROI Out of Social Media

SMB10 will feature three, eight-minute presentations on examining new ways to evaluate and measure the success of social media engagements and community building programs.

The hard line ROI analysis that have traditionally been used in Marketing – sales leads, conversion rates and reach metrics - don’t easily translate to social media engagement driven programs - where you’re no longer buying your way into the conversation to influence potential customers.

Today’s visionary companies are engaging their customers directly – realistically, authentically and transparently - sharing ideas, spurring conversations, responding to industry trends and developing valuable digital content that helps propel their brand as an engaged trusted source.  This strategy can also dramatically improve SEO rankings and inbound marketing efforts leading to great findability and sales opportunities.

The Presenters

Brian Halligan, Founder and CEO at HubSpot

Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor with Harvard Business School

Matt Cutler, Vice President, Marketing & Analytics at Visible Measures

Sponsor
Boston’s Social Media Breakfast 10 is sponsored by HubSpot, an Internet marketing system that helps your company get found online, generate more inbound leads and convert a higher percentage of them into paying customers.

As a Sponsor, HubSpot has offered to provide the attendees of SMB10 with a Website Grader analysis that measures the SEO and marketing effectiveness of your website or blog.  If you would like an analysis conducted - please just include the URL of your site as part of the Eventbrite registration.   HubSpot will also have a few Internet Marketing Consultant available to answer questions about your Website Grader reports.

Links

* Directions to the Ryles Jazz Club (Nearest T stops: Central Square and Harvard Square on the Red Line). Free and metered parking is available.

* Official Social Media Breakfast website

* SMB FriendFeed room

Creating Content / Making Media?

* Please use the tags #SMB10.

Questions?

Boston’s Social Media Breakfast is organized by Bob Collins and brings together social media experts and newbies alike for a morning of eating, meeting, sharing and learning.  It is free to attend.

Please contact Bob Collins at Bob - AT - SHIFTComm - DOT - com.

The theme for the October 16th breakfast was “Starting Community Building Programs with a Reluctant Executive” and brought together Jaime Pappas of EMC, David Alston of Radian 6, and Peter Kim of the stealth Dachis Corporation to share some of their experiences dealing with executives and community building programs.

Thanks to EMC for sponsoring the event and keeping us all fed!

(Left to Right: Jaime Pappas, David Alston, Peter Kim and Bob Collins)

(Left to Right: Jaime Pappas, David Alston and Peter Kim)

Via Steve Garfield

While I have always been very impressed by the lineup of speakers that Bryan Person, and now Bob Collins, puts together for these events, it is connecting with familiar faces in the crowd that makes these events so popular and successful.

Via Steve Garfield

There is yours truly hanging out right in the front row during the presentations.

The two things that stuck with me most were from David Alston and Peter Kim.

David talked about relating to executives by asking them what they would do if someone was on the street outside of your company’s building yelling into a megaphone “This Company Sucks!” How long would it take for your PR guy (or security) to come down and deal with them?  Ignoring the online community is just like ignoring the guy on your lawn, except when online, your megaphone is a whole lot bigger and louder.   David also reminded us that Google was everyone’s new home page - and that when people search for a Company - the first or most interesting search result may no longer be the Company website.

Peter Kim talked a lot about making business sense of social media and the short lifespan of CMOs. CMO tenure is down to almost 23 months, about half that of an average CEO’s tenure.   He also talked about the extra pressure on CMOs to justify the results of their spending and prove that marketing is actually delivering value to the business.

To check out other’s reactions to the event and what they got from it, check out the twitter stream for #smb9 or check out these posts from Peter Kim, Bryan Person, Gina, and Tangyslice.

Some topics that people are really interested in include:

• Social Media Measurement and Analytics
• Social Media for Social Good
• Social Video
• Non-Profits place in Social Media
• Case Studies!!!
• International
• Mobile
• The career of a Community Organizer
• and the list goes on

With all the great ideas for future topics it is hard to not be excited about what will come out of SMB in SD.  Follow along on Twitter SMBSD or on Social Media Breakfast San Diego.

If you were great at this, I’d imagine you’d never ever have trouble finding good work.”

For Breakfast 4 hosted by our new series sponsor - Gowlings - we’ve found some Ottawa greatness for you and will be bringing together a panel of experts to talk about Online Communities:

Luc Levesque, Founder & General Manager, TravelPod (A TripAdvisor / Expedia Company)

Gérard Métrailler, Senior Director, Product Management, Graphics, Corel Corporation

Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing, Eclipse Foundation

Moderating our panel will be Jen Evans, Founder & Chief Strategist, Sequentia Environics.

Join our experts as they discuss how they have leveraged various forms of social media to cultivate online communities to help:

• engage stakeholders for business insight
• connect with customers to promote their brands and to monitor & protect their firms’ reputations
• leverage ‘conversation’ for the traditional marketing and public relations functions
• gather enthusiast customers to improve products & services and hone messaging
• access and harness the collective intelligence of its market to solve customer care issues
• promote and leverage an open source development environment

In what promises to be a lively conversation, hear about the best practices and lessons learned from experienced community practitioners — valuable information we can all use when considering and implementing online community building activities during an economic downturn!

Interested? Sign up today by selecting the ‘Register Now’ button at http://smbottawa4.eventbrite.com.

Some Breakfast Business

Post Breakfast 3, we did a draw for the door prize of a bamboo cutting board (with carving knife and fork) provided by our event sponsor, the Chicken Farmers of Canada. Amanda Hudson is our winner! Congratulations! We’ll be in touch to get it out to you in time for the weekend ‘Chicken’ Day festivities!

If you have any announcements appropriate to the Breakfast 4 audience (e.g. upcoming events, job openings, etc.), please contact the author (Simon Chen) directly. Said author was also remiss in not sending out a Breakfast 3 Feedback Survey - please contact him with any comments and suggestions.

We know many of you have blogged, Twittered, podcasted, posted pics and vids about our Breakfasts. Thank you for that! To make your content findable and discoverable, please use the tag: SMBOttawa

Finally, please keep in touch with us at this blog, on Facebook and LinkedIn. Going forward, we’re going to build and make use of a public group located at http://smbottawa.sixent.com — Check back next week as we’ll have some interviews with our Breakfast 4 panelists linked from there.

Peter Kim led a spirited discussion on the value of social media marketing at Austin’s Social Media Breakfast 3, held this morning at Rudy’s “Country Store” & Bar-B-Q.

Peter, who’s currently building an Austin Ventures-backed enterprise social computing startup, asked several pointed questions of our group:

• Does social media marketing matter at all?
• Does social media marketing scale?
• Why are enterprises still blocking employee access to social computing tools and applications?
• Do A-list bloggers really care about “the conversation?”

Peter’s generally not shy about stirring things up, and today was no exception.

Take a listen to my own conversation with Peter, immediately following the breakfast

To keep up with Peter’s daily take on social media marketing, follow his Being Peter Kim blog.

Other business

• Dave Evans gave away two copies of his just-released book, Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Bob Carlton is leading Austin’s effort for Blog Action Day 2008 to help “change the face of poverty,” and he’s looking for help. Read Bob’s blog post to find out how to get involved.

Media links from Austin’s Social Media Breakfast 3

• Event description and attendee list
• Twitter posts tagged #SMBAustin
• Flickr photos
• Tim Walker: ‘Austin Social Media Breakfast 3 gets the juices flowing’
• Jon Lebkowsky: ‘Social media for breakfast’

Registration: Registration is HIGHLY recommended, but for the first event feel free to bring a friend.  We have space for up to 60 attendees.  In the future, Registration will be required

Date: Friday, October 10, 2008, from 9:00to 11:00 am
Location: Java Jones

631 9th Ave (between G St and Market St), San Diego CA 92101

Cost: Free thanks to our sponsor, Geary Interactive

Questions? Contact Holly Matson at holly.matson @ Yahoo Dot Com
Register for Social Media Breakfast San Diego.

About our Sponsor: Geary Interactive is a digital marketing agency offering interactive services and experience that consistently deliver results.  As an integrated, strategically-focused agency, Geary provides clients with a one-stop solution for all of their online advertising needs.

What better way to wrap up the month of October and start your Halloween weekend than to meet up with your local social media peeps? How about how about a chance to talk social media with the bestselling author of the hit book The New Rules of Marketing & PR: David Meerman Scott? In addition we’ll have a chance to talk with startup entrepreneur Steve Nielsen, President & CEO PartnerUp, a Deluxe Corporation Company.

The fine folks at Fallon will talk about their Twitter campaign for SciFi’s “Eureka”. Each attendee will get a free copy of David’s Book (up to 100 attendees), which he’ll be happy to sign — courtesy of our friends at New Horizons Computer Learning Centers.

Event Info:

• Where: Deluxe Corporate Headquarters, 3680 Victoria Street North, Shoreview, MN 55126 (Map it!)
• When: October 31st, 2008 from 8am to 10am

Agenda:

• David Meerman Scott - “Thought Leadership & Viral Marketing Strategist”
  • Each attendee will get a free copy of David’s Book (up to
    100 attendees), which he’ll be happy to sign — courtesy of
    our friends at New Horizons Computer Learning Centers.
    (link: www.nhmn.com)
• Steve Nielsen, President & CEO PartnerUp, a Deluxe Corporation Company.
• Fallon folks talks about their Twitter campaign for SciFi’s “Eureka”
  
• Post-Networking with David, Steve, and everyone else!
• Our continuing conversation on social media in Minneapolis & St. Paul

RSVP at our EventBrite page:
http://smbmsp8.eventbrite.com/
Sponsors:

It happens that I was waiting for Ryan to send me his presentation slides before writing an event recap. Instead, Ryan posted a great summary at his blog - The New PR. As there is nothing new for me to add, I’ve asked Ryan for (and received) his permission to cross-post his entry. I’ll be writing again before the end of this week with some announcements about our Breakfast 3 contest winner, our new season sponsor and details about our October Breakfast.

~ Simon Chen

Reputation 2.0 at the Social Media Breakfast

by Ryan Anderson, The New PR, 24 September 2008

Last Tuesday, I gave a presentation on Reputation 2.0 - reputation management in a social media environment.  I was asked by a few people to put my slides up online, but since they have no real context without me standing in front of them talking, I figured I would write this to accompany the disembodied Powerpoint.  So, as you read this, just imagine me standing in front of the slides saying it.  Then imagine me extremely charming and eloquent, rather than bleary and uncaffeinated from getting up at 5 to set things up.  Got it?  Perfect.

It seems like every week I read more stats about the state of the blogosphere, or new data about who’s using the internet.  These numbers are great for making a point, but they don’t really matter, and they often conflict with one another.  The real information lies in between all of these omnibus studies and online surveys that we cite in our presentations, and that is the fact that most people in North America use the internet, and most of those - especially among the younger and more affluent - are in some way involved in social media.

Reputation, and by extension, the protection of that reputation, has been around as long as self-awareness.  Likewise, as long as there have been companies and brands, there has been a need for companies to maintain their reputation.

Reputation management as a formal business function is relatively new, only surfacing in the early 1900s, but little has changed with regard to the basic principles.  At its core, reputation is the sum of actions, and the perception of those actions.  When media was much more scarce than it is now, most of reputation management centred around perception - it was much easier to spin your way out of a bad spot when there a lack of widely distributed media made it much harder for the public to see through a public statement or key message.

Now, however, media has advanced to the point where anyone has the ability to publish their thoughts to the world, whether they are the smaller percentage of creators - bloggers, podcasters and the like, or the much larger percentage of commenters - those who do not necessarily publish their own content, but add to public review sites like Yelp,ePinions or public forums that emerge around products and brands.

This democratization of production and distribution of product reviews has led to a mediascape that makes it exceptionally easy for consumers to see objective and community-edited opinions on products and companies, and makes it virtually impossible for companies to bamboozle its consumers.  For this reason, reputation 2.0 must focus more on changing a company’s actions than changing the perception of those actions.

Managing your reputation online requires three key elements: listening, analysis and influence.

Listen

The first element is one that every company needs to take to heart. Without actively monitoring the myriad public conversations that are happening every minute of every day in blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, public forums and review sites, managing reputation is impossible.  You can’t change what people are saying about you if you don’t even know what that is.

Start with a simple Google blog search, and find out what people are saying about your brand, about your products, about your company or about your employees.  Listening doesn’t have to be complicated right off the bat, and at the point where you require a more complex system, you can always switch to an enterprise solution like Radian6.

But keep in mind that it’s not only blogs you should be listening to.  As I’ve remarked before, many conversations are moving to Twitter or Friendfeed.  People are sharing photos of your brand on Flickr, videos about it on Youtube and possibly even creating Facebook groups - either for or against - and sharing them with their entire social graph.

Analyze

The second step of any monitoring effort is analysis.  What are people saying about your brand or your company?  Is it overwhelmingly positive or negative?  Is there one thing that many people are harping on?  Is it one segment that is talking about it the most?

These are the questions that should shape your analysis, and will eventually shape what you do to improve or maintain your online reputation.  Look for the good and the bad, and try to really understand what is being said, and especially how these conversations affect your business.  Are people being scared away by bad reviews?  Are they coming in droves because of positive buzz?

Secondly, ask yourself how these comments reflect your actual business?  Take a step back, and try to understand the comments in terms of customer experience.  One comment about customer service doesn’t mean you have a customer service problem, but 100 comments certainly suggests it.  The social web provides you with a persistent focus group - don’t ignore what it has to say.

Influence

The final step of effective online reputation management is influence.  Once we understand what is being said, how do we change it if it is negative, or leverage it if it is positive?

To really influence anything online, you first need to be there - the journey of 1000 miles begins with showing up.  This doesn’t mean you have to spend 30 hours a week blogging, but it does mean that you should be active on Twitter, in comments, and it wouldn’t kill you to have a blog to aggregate it all at one place.

Influence also requires participation - which means engaging with detractors or fans, and going beyond just listening to actively soliciting feedback.  Participation means creating content that places your side of the story in public record - hopefully before you have to react to the other sides negative comments.  Admitting mistakes before anyone else jumps on it can often sway the conversation in your favour, rather than requiring your apologies.  Participation is also about creating a network of sympathetic people who will go out of their way to understand you, and who will eventually help defend you against unwarranted attacks.

There’s a lot of talk about “joining the conversation,” and while that sentiment is 100% valid, there’s one aspect of being active in social media that is rarely talked about.  Dell is active in the blogosphere, and has many sites dedicated to listening and participating, but to suggest that they are there simply because they as an organization are passionate about social media would be silly.  By creating so much content, a search for Dell now requires an entire front page of their side of the story, which is obviously positive, rather than a page of someone else’s side of the story, which isn’t always.

Of course, if your reputation is under fire, you likely won’t be able to SEO your way out of it.  Just like spin doesn’t work as well online, it’s very difficult to suppress the truth through search results.  Google is smarter than that, and is objective in a way that human beings can’t be.  Dell improved its reputation by listening to the commentary about its brand, and changing.  It’s a popular sentiment that we’re no longer in control of our brand - the consumer is.  Of course, that’s not true - companies ultimately control their product, and the content that they produce, but the consumer certainly has a louder voice.  But it’s not because the voice is louder that we should be listening to it - it’s because they’re our customers.  This is not a social media revalation - this is a basic principle of business that was somehow forgotten along the way.

The bottom line to this whole presentation is that on the web, you’ll be seen for who you are and for what is said about you.  If you’re not part of that coversation, you’re not in control of your reputation, and that’s a dangerous thing.

A stage manager I worked with once in my theatre days was asked by a director why he was always so calm, when other stage manager spent so much time dealing with crises.  He replied “being able to put out fires is important, but I prefer to keep the candles away from the drapes.”

Take control of your online reputation, and figure out how to keep the candles away from the drapes.  It’s way easier than putting out fires.