Nashville Technology Council

“Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through Social Networking”
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Microsoft Offices
2555 Meridian Blvd., Suite 300
Franklin, TN  37067

July 9, 2009

Registration is now closed.  You may register at the door.

Social media continues to empower business owners as a way to combat slimming budgets and still get the word out.  By leveraging social media, entrepreneurs can gain a competitive advantage through customer engagements and social interactions within the online marketplace.  However, typing a message on one of the social interfaces is not always the best way to utilize social media.  Social media can also help you gain a competitive insight on your competitors.  Just by reading comments on a site such as Twitter, one can learn the positives and negatives about a competitor’s service offering or product in order to avoid being blind-sided.

Our panel will focus on the do’s and don’t do’s to successfully utilize social media to its fullest extent.  They will also discuss some of the key strategies to optimize your effectiveness of using social media and what other options are out there besides the obvious – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  Anyone can enter into a social site such as Twitter or Facebook and post comments, but will your comments and message support your brand and help grow your company?

Panelists

Kate O’Neill, Founder / Managing Director, [meta] marketer

Kate O’Neill has earned a reputation as a passionate advocate for innovative, interactive online experiences in business. Working in online content in Silicon Valley during the 1990s heyday, she introduced the techniques of blogging (before it was called blogging and before there were fantastic tools like Wordpress) to many companies as an employee and later as a consultant. As social networks and social media have sprung up, Kate has been a vocal advocate for their inclusion in savvy business and marketing strategy, as well, both for the SEO boost they often imply and for the way they can strengthen a business’s relationship with its customers and enhance the customer experience.

Kate currently runs [meta]marketer, a web marketing un-agency and freelance consultancy she founded this year. She also maintains four blogs, three Twitter accounts, and dozens of other semi-neglected social media accounts.

 
Bill Seaver, Social Media Marketing Consultant, MicroExplosion Media

Bill Seaver is the founder of MicroExplosion Media, a social media marketing consulting firm based in Nashville, Tenn. After spending many years in traditional marketing, Seaver left his role as the Executive Vice President for a marketing firm to focus solely on social media marketing. For the last two years, Bill has spoken to thousands of people at seminars and training events about social media marketing. His clients range from non-profits to large businesses. His goal is to help people understand what social media marketing is and adopt the right mindset needed to use it effectively. Bill is an active blogger and podcaster. He can be found at MicroExplosion.com.

Registration is now CLOSED.  You may register at the door.