I had the opportunity to attend a Social:IRL event recently in Kansas City put on by our friend Ben Smith. The conference “Rethinking Business in the Age of the Social Consumer” has definitely been a hot topic lately. The bottom line the main speaker, Valeria Maltoni, made was this: our business objectives overall have not changed. Instead of letting social media intimidate you, find a way to integrate social to achieve these goals. There were a few themes I saw throughout the conference that resonated with me. The main topics were relevant content, brand integrity, and influence. And an amazing fact that was shared to prove how important social has become (as if we didn’t already know) Coca-Cola’s budget for social media 5 years ago was 3% of their marketing budget. Today it’s 20%! Relevant Content One of the things Valeria opened with was “TGiF”. Everyone puts so much emphasis on social channels like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook being perfect. But people often miss the most important letter there. I is for information and what you are actually sharing. A lot of people like to say that your content needs to be relevant. Relevance can depend on a variety of … Read More