Meet Liz and Terry at the #SOBCon hashtag to talk SOBCon.
Meet up with your SOBCon friends or make some new ones! Join us for the fun!
We’ll be sharing secrets and swapping strategies. You can bet on that.
Share your SOBCon memories and blog posts again.
Hear more about SOBCon Colorado and get your questions answered.
Don’t worry, I’ll make sure Terry doesn’t sing … yet.
Liz
The minute we finished SOBCon2010, people were asking when 2011 would be. So we hustled our rear ends and got our acts together. We talked to Louise, the owner of the Summit Executive Center, and nailed down the dates.
Then Terry in the middle of huge business meetings, stopped long enough to put an event brite page so folks could reserve a seat. And folks signed up immediately!
Whoa! Thank you!
One of those folks was Eric who tweeted proud to be a SOBCon2011 pre-registrant!
I said, “It would fun to have a badge for that.”
And this came in my email today …
Isn’t it awesome?!!
Thank you Eric Lukazewski
Website: Echelon Design
Blog: Trade Show Insight
Twitter Name: @ericlukazewski
Laughing with gratitude. Thrilled with a smile.
Liz
It’s great when your hometown stand behind you …
The Chicago Social Media Club is doing just that.
I’m thrilled to announce that again this year, Social Media Club Chicago has offered to host an Opening Party for SOBCon2010! Terry and I will be there as will many of the speakers, panelists, and out-of-town attendees. It will be like a super-tweetup with a great conversation and an after party to boot!
Come see the great views! Meet the great people! Get in the spirit of Chicago Social Media!
Here’s a look at the 2009 SOBCon and Social Media Club Chicago event video.
We won’t make any promises – yet – about who might show up. Let’s just say that this might very well be the most connected night of your life.
5:30 – 6:15 Check-in and Networking
6:15 – 7:15 Program
7:15 – 8:00 Socializing Networking
After party – in planning stages
Sign up now so that you don’t miss a minute of meeting anyone who might be there!
Thank you, Barbara, Jeff, Amy and all of SMCC for honoring us again!
Intuit, the folks who make technology solutions to help small businesses succeed and our premier partner for SOBCon 2010, is giving you the opportunity to attend SOBCon for FREE. The company’s Love a Local Business program lets fans of local businesses nominate them to win small business grants. The next grand prize small business grant we are awarding is worth $30,000. Learn more about the program here.
To win a free ticket to SOBCon 2010 all you have to do is nominate one of your favorite small businesses and tweet about it, including LoveALocalBusiness.com and #SOBCon (e.g. You might vote for @MacaronChicago to win a $30K grant on LoveALocalBusiness.com. Vote for them too http://bit.ly/XXXXXX #SOBcon).
Any nominations tweeted between April 2 and April 16, 2010 will be entered to win free SOBCon admission plus three nights hotel accommodations and a $250 Visa Gift card.
If you already have a ticket, you can offer your free ticket to someone of your choosing. Bear in mind that the more businesses you nominate, the better your chances are to win!
You can even vote for your own business! Go for it!!
Here are some of the sponsors of this year’s event, we are all looking forward to talking with, and learning from, these companies:
With Intuit small business services, managing your business has never been easier! In addition to providing personal finance software, Intuit has been a supporter of small business for over 25 years, and now we are expanding our efforts to help small businesses thrive. You’ve always known us for providing easy financial software; now we offer fast and easy online marketing services, web hosting and website builder services, payroll services, and credit card processing as well. And we’re just getting started! We’re developing new services all the time — visit IntuitLabs to see some of our latest innovations.
The Allstate Corporation is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer. A Fortune 100 company, with $133 billion in total assets, Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance, including auto, property, life and commercial. Allstate also offers retirement and investment products and banking services. Allstate is widely known through the “You’re In Good Hands With Allstate®” slogan. Allstate was founded in 1931 and became a publicly traded company in 1993.
IZEA prides itself on the successful execution of social media marketing campaigns. We work hand-in-hand with agencies and brands to deliver ROI through buzz, clicks and conversions.
ReveNews is a trusted, unbiased source focusing on Internet related industries such as online marketing, SEM, affiliate marketing, retail (e-commerce), analytics, spyware, blogging and much more. ReveNews authors consist of highly respected thinkers, commentators and business people who have real experience and insight. ReveNews readers include industry gurus, top-level executives and CEO’s, plus many of the industry’s top net-repreneurs; all coming together to create a global Internet community to distribute, discuss and analyze the industry at hand.
SmartBrief is a media company on a mission to save you time and keep you smart.
The premise behind SmartBrief is simple: there’s too much information out there and too little time in the day to read it all. Our editors hand-pick the most relevant and important news from all over, summarize it, link to the original sources and deliver it — for FREE — in one-stop-shop e-newsletters.
Nearly 3 million business decision makers count on SmartBrief each day to provide “must-read” news in 25 key industries. Subscriptions are free of charge, offered in partnership with more than 100 leading trade associations. professional societies, non-profits and corporations.
At our subscribers’ request, we’ve developed a suite of best practices newsletters to keep busy professionals smart about their jobs.
And, once again, our SOBCon partners for accommodations and the conference space are Hotel 71 and the Summit Executive Center.
A Stylishly Different Chicago Hotel
Hotel 71 is a modern urban boutique hotel experience, perfectly located on the Chicago River at Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue, “the Magnificent Mile”. The hotel’s fresh style, large rooms and suites, beautifully appointed meeting space, friendly service and an unrivaled location at the epicenter of downtown Chicago, make it the best luxury hotel for both business and leisure travelers.
Summit Chicago
Our world-class facility, exceptional staff and outstanding cuisine provides you with all the tools you’ll need to successfully enhance your meeting.
Summit Executive Centre is downtown Chicago’s only accredited member of the prestigious International Association of Conference Centers. Our standard of quality is recognized by leading businesses and decision makers around the world.
Stuart Foster at The Lost Jacket has written a post recently about The Rise of Cloud Marketing:
“We’re all in.”
Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.
Microsoft has bet its future on this technology. You can find it being used to distribute .torrents, ease the pressure on servers and scale up and down appropriately. They’re “all in”, so why haven’t content creators jumped on board?
Fear and a loss of control.
The cloud breaks down and distributes and disseminates bits of information so they can be reassembled later in a more complete narrative. Marketing needs to work and think in this same way.
We can’t rely on our customers being able to see the entirety of an integrated campaign anymore. They’re far more likely to see bits and pieces of content here and there and only have a brief encounter with your messaging.
That last paragraph contains a powerful statement, and shows the inherent difficulty that businesses can have in creating marketing messages that are able to be used in different media. The difficulty is that one marketing vehicle, such as a 30-second TV spot, does not work on every platform. Sure we have seen this before, in a limited fashion, with the differences in print marketing vs TV or radio – but the entire game has changed now. Your marketing message needs to incorporate Social Media, web-based platforms, and mobile devices.
The old cliche about marketing used to be that a business knew that part of the money and effort spent on marketing was wasted, they just didn’t know which part. A recent survey mentioned in the WSJ shows that this perception is still true in the days of Social Media:
…a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.
The good news is that we can measure the effectiveness of these new media much better than the old media.
The bad news is that “…the latter survey’s respondents say it requires more effort than expected.” That’s right people, Social Media marketing is not a Golden Goose that lays marketing eggs for you. It takes work, it takes time. Engagement and relationship-building are the new means of marketing, even as the goal remains the same.
Find out where your customers are, then go there and listen, learn, and finally – get involved. Talk to them in their language using the tools that they use and you will have taken the first concrete steps toward integrating your marketing. Building a foundation that your business can grow on.