Yesterday, Spiral16 attended the Free State Social, which was held 30 minutes west of us in lovely Lawrence, Kan. at the Oread Hotel on the KU campus. There were some great speakers and some good information about social media trends and ways to approach social media from a business, personal, and philosophical standpoint.

Here are some takeaways from the conference:

Chris Brogan – Adjusting your marketing spend and tactics for social media

As much as we all love being on top of the newest gadgets and trends, Brogan stressed that importance of concentrating on how you use them. “It’s not really about the tools, ” he said.

Adopting social media into your company is a culture change. Rather than having a social media department, everybody should be using social media to reach the goals of their respective departments. You should be thinking about the basics: “What can I do for my customers? How do I equip them for success?” Use social media tools to support that. A call to action is necessary. A question to ask yourself: How does what you’re doing in social media relate to your business?

A key thing to remember about social media is this: People want to feel like they are inside. He used the example of the movie “Fight Club.” There’s that scene where Edward Norton is flying all over the country and people with bruises on their faces wink and nod to each other, knowing that they are all secret members of this club. “You can’t buy your way in, ” he said. And that’s an empowering feeling once you’re in.

What’s wrong with PR today? Chris said there is a severe loss of friendship-making skills, something that can be accomplished with the right social media strategy. PR today is too direct and transparent, he said, and it sometime feels like the person who is greeting you for the first time is shoving their tongue down your throat.

Another question: What is more effective–great service or a marketing campaign? He said the service component wins every time.

He talked about what he terms The 3 Buckets of Social Media and said that if you only have two hours a day to concentrate on your social media initiatives, you should spend approximately:

• 30 minutes on listening (seeing what others are saying)

• 60 minutes on connecting (commenting on others’ blogs, conversing through social media channels)

• 30 minutes on publishing (creating original content)

Trends Chris sees for 2010 are integrated social CRM (something Jeremiah Owyang mentioned as well), the widespread use of mobile devices, and the spread of private or niche social communities.

Shawna Coronado spoke about building a personal brand and unifying your message. She also stressed the importance of having conversations with people online rather than just broadcasting your opinion.

When approaching personal versus corporate branding, Shawna says that you should work your personality into everything you do. The danger of this, of course, for companies, is that when someone leaves a company, they take their relationships and followers with them.

To build a personal brand, one should:

• Define your target market

• Define your key brand message/values

• Define your product

Sarah Evans spoke about How to Make Your Brand Stand Out Online.

• Find an opportunity to showcase your strengths

• Hijack a conversation and give others an opportunity to share – This means when you say a conversation starting online, create a way for discussion to flourish and integrate your brand into that discussion.

• Generate quality content – This is kind of a ‘duh,’ but Sarah stressed this the multimedia aspect of this and spoke about guest posting for as many other blogs as you can.

• Do it for a good cause

• Give freely, give often – Share, acknowledge, give, retweet, comment, post, and engage.

• Think like those you’re trying to reach – Our relationship with news is portable, personalized, and participatory.

This sparked a number of other ideas from the audience to expand your online brand, including aggregate content, forming offline relationships, translate news to others and show them how it applies to them, and helping connect like-minded people with each other. A lot of these audience-generated ideas are certainly easier of you have a big following already.

Jeremiah Owyang was the last speaker of the day and his presentation was Influence and the Future of the Social Web.

Jeremiah comes at things from a research and analytic standpoint. He began his talk by going over what he calls the Rings of Social Influence, which you can find a more in-depth explanation of on his blog. Jeremiah says he is experimenting with offering his research on a “freemium” model this year. Works for us!

Aside from explaining this framework, he stressed one of his main forward-thinking points and put it in a way everyone can understand it:

We are now empowered to never make mistakes again.

What he means by that is that with the proliferation of smart mobile devices, your friends are with you all the time. They are in your pocket and, having been to a restaurant or reviewed a product or been to a local event before you, you can now take their opinion into consideration before making your own decision. It’s true, although I see one limitation: I don’t always always agree with my friends.

Another presentation was the third in his trilogy of social strategy and was called Getting Your Company Ready.

Like Brogan, Owyang mentioned social CRM and stressed the need for focusing on business objectives. Figure out how your customers are using social media, he said, and then focus on your strategy. I shared Jeremiah’s detailed Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management report last month, which contains 18 helpful use cases for businesses.

When putting together your company’s social media strategy, don’t just say “We need a Facebook page” and make one. Always ask why. What strategic purpose does it serve? And make sure your company is prepared for it with a workflow in place for what happens once negative comments start pouring in. You need to know how you will deal with things before they happen because people will want a company response immediately. One of the scary new trends Jeremiah sees in social media is this: Real-time is not fast enough.

One big idea to think about that he mentioned was this: How will websites will integrate with social networks in the future? And a complementary idea that blew my mind: Will URLs/domains even matter?

There were so many valuable insights in his talk that you’d do well to check out the Getting Your Company Ready slideshow below.

Tagged as: 2010, brogan, conference, free state social, fssocial, helpful, kansas universtity, lawrence, owyang, sarah evans, social media tips, takeaways