This week we’re headed down to Austin, TX for the annual SXSW Interactive festival–the place where early adopters, tech geeks, and social media gurus head for their dose of emerging technologies, networking galore, and free food and alcohol.
You can keep up with what’s going on with us at SXSW by following Spiral16 on Twitter, our analytics guru Aaron Weber, and the newest addition to the S16 team, Ken Miner.
Earlier today, at the Social Media Marketing for Your Business panel, speakers President of 10e20 Chris Winfield and MySpace‘s Tony Adam described social media as a “a giant conversation online.”
For beginners who are just getting into the power of social media marketing, Chris mentioned it can:
- bring a wider audience
- create or improve reputation
- enhance credibility
- attract evangelists
- spread a PR message
- attract traffic to your site
Tony talked about the importance of understanding your ROI and setting goals and creating a plan to achieve those goals.
Both presenters talked about the importance of finding your audience online. Here at Spiral16, we always stress the idea that you not only need to find out where your customers are online, but you need to speak the same language they do in order to engage with them.
It’s always interesting to look at word clouds that aggregate site terms and see what the words are that your target audience are using. (Like this one from our recent Oscar Best Picture study.)
What’s even crazier is when you can see patterns and/or new slang emerging. The company that stays on top of that will always have the edge!
More from SXSW soon…
