Last night a crew of is7 teammates saw Chris Brogan speak at the SMCDallas event in Mockingbird Station. And how was the event? I think I speak for everyone that the meeting was top notch all the way around. Obviously, having a Social Media celebrity like Chris Brogan come speak is great but  the food from Margarita Ranch tasty, drinks included with admission and a copy of the book were all nice add-ons.

Overall the speech by Brogan echoed many of the things our Social Media evangelists have been saying and provided some excellent insights in terms of business applications. Below are some of the key points from his presentations:

• Every person is in the sales and customer service business regardless of your job title. It is all our collective job to boost our bottom line through sales and take excellent care of our clients.
• Social networking isn’t about the platform or application – it is about genuine relationship building. Building relationships means being friends with people, promoting others and helping not collecting business cards, talking only about yourself or constantly pitching something.
• To be successful with Social Media, you must be where the people are (whatever network or platform that might be) and you must be there before you need to make the sale. We buy from people we like and know. To be that kind of company means you need to have a presence. Anything else is just butting in.
• Reciprocity is what makes Social Media work. You do good for others consistently and it pays off in a big way. He listed several case and points from Dell’s twitter success to how a case of beer and an event sponsorship led to multimillion dollar business for his email provider.
• If you’re not spending 60% of your time on social networks listening, you’re missing out on the real value.

Here are a few snippets from some of the team members who attended. Feel free to follow up with them on Twitter for all of their event postings and more.

@Cymberly Practice honesty, integrity, sincerity. Life principles can actually apply to business principles as well!

@KirbyRenee In Social Media you need to listen, share and connect

@Miiacom Chris Brogan recommends building equity in relationships before asking for anything. The challenge is to determine the optimal timing and method for non-profits to form and manage relationships with donors before asking for donations. We already know how to engage them as donors. But building and managing a community of interest around the non-profit’s mission that remains relevant to prospective donors until they decide to give? Not so much. We have work to do.

And last but not least feel free to check out some of the pics and video we collected while out. We’ll be prepared with better equipment next time we’re out…

I also heard about Nomee, a platform aggregator tool for basically every major social network. We’ll spin through it at the is7 media lab and let you know what we think.

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Tags: Chris Brogan, events, SMCDallas, social media, tweetup

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