Grand Rapids AIMWEST ( http://www.aimwest.org ) hosted an all day get together with the Marketing and Sales technology elites yesterday. This event drew about 250 of Sales and Marketing Geeks from around the West Michigan community. As Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIN and the general Blogosphere have grown over the last several years organizations are trying to get their arms around how to make money in this space, how to effectively listen, analyze, and interact with customers, prospects, and influentials. We were one of the session sponsors at this event. We set up our table and had a PPT running on the Social CRM addon for CRM.  

The event actually started the night before by meeting with several of the speakers. I got to spend time with the featured speaker, Laura Fitton (@pistachio), social marketing guru, and the writer of Twitter for Dummies. She has great ideas, and had loved the Civiche, and Risotto we had for dinner. I also have to say that she really won my heart when she ordered the second Guinness. 

Here are some Aha Moments for me:

• 70 million photos uploaded every day on Facebook -1/3 of all photos on Web
• People only invite on average 10 brands on their FB page
• The top 5% of my network gets notified when I become a fan of a brand on #facebook
• Social Networking is being used successfully as a recruiting tool for Colleges
• A LinkedIN Profile is much more powerful than a traditional resume
• Removing information from the internet is like getting pee out of a pool
• #Meijer is using Blogging as a way to share internal meeting notes
• Lost of small ideas are often better than 1 big one
• It is ok to Fail
• Actions are more important than anything you tell a customer
• Your methods define you, not the project work you do
• We need to stay connected to the outside as too much self think will make you slow, irrelevant, and predictable.
• The guy who started Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation, a wildly successful venture into social media, has left to work for Microsoft
• Google tried 37 shades of blue and picked the best one using analytics on click thru numbers
• Amway has about 5 full-time folks working on Social Media
• 51% Of the Social Brand Sentiment for Amway is negative
• They have lowered it by 4% by engaging the social consumers in the last year
• The more I was a little personal in my professional account, the more things took off for me
• About 5-8% of the crowd is dedicated to Social Media in their Org
• Poptarts are apparently the most popular food in the social media world... I've heard a lot about them today
• Per WalMart > Two products people are most likely to buy in days leading up to hurricane? PopTarts and beer
• Does it matter if platforms like Twitter die tomorrow? They're publishing RSS and being indexed by google - everything is portable.
• Build a Culture first, then a biz around that.... good luck!! only top 1% can do that like Zappos
• Does corporate culture need to change to accommodate Social Media?
• 80% of activity on Twitter is happening through its API

We showed the Microsoft CRM Social Media Accelerator at our table.   More on that in a later post.