Who doesn’t love a good Social Media Conference? Scores of nerds and nerd-adjacents from every NYC social media agency, thousands of tweets/hour, and free bananas and Vitamin Water everywhere you turn. The networking, ideation, and new data/case studies available at these conferences are excellent assets for all social media marketers, and given how young social is as a business segment, conferences play a vital role in the development of the industry infrastructure and future direction.
Conferences are great, but they’re not a way of life for most of us who do social media marketing in New York. Conferences are a break from routine, and then they end and we go back to work bloated with new ideas and passion. Those first 2 days back at our desks are crucial for putting our conference-born wisdom to work, and the sooner we use it, the less likely we’ll lose it. Having recently been immersed in Social Media Week in New York, here are some strategies for putting your conference knowledge to worthy use in your day to day:
- Find the pulse – have your antennae up for the major themes that are discussed at the conference, on stage, in follow-up sessions and cocktail parties. Identify the major discussions happening in the industry, and then plan ways to engage your agency in those issues.
- Find the present – plan out ways to use what you’ve learned for your current clients and campaigns. Social media is immediate, so attend the conference sessions with the mindset of “How can I put this to work right now to strengthen my work.”
- Find the future – indicators of the upcoming mega-issues of next year are crackling in the air of this year’s conferences, and if you learn how to listen for them you can gain a serious advantage in putting your NYC social media agency ahead of the industry curve.
- Find the fun – testing new strategies is the fun of social media, and conferences are the best place to gather several new strategies to try. Plan out in your head which strategies you’re going to play with, and how, and on which channels, and then go for it.
Conferences are prime learn time/party time for any marketer at a NYC social media agency, but the real value is determined by how what you’ve learned impacts how you do social media marketing in New York. If you’re developing a plan of how you’ll use your conference knowledge back at your office, then you’ll have a lot more to show for your time spent than a beer pong trophy and 30 new email subscribes.
