Connie Bensen

One of my highlights each year is Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. What I love about it is that it brings together everyone that is passionate about social media. Spending time with peers is invaluable!

Blog World has a special place in my heart because it was the first event where I met all the people who had mentored and supported me as I established an online presence. I had spent over a year interacting with these people on their blogs, Twitter and Facebook and had come to know them very well. But meeting them in person took it all to a new level. Working remotely is ideal because I accomplished more than I could have dreamed of, but you really do need to meet the people behind the blogs. And Blog World Expo offers that opportunity. Each year at Blog World is better than the last one.

This past year I wanted to capture the best on video and share it here. Blog World is all about reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones. It’s an experience that can’t be duplicated anywhere else.

This video features Deb Ng who organized Blog World this past year. She was a very busy lady as she worked to make sure everything went smoothly. Ingrid Tappin is a new friend that I met at lunch. She is from Amsterdam and I will reconnect with her when I’m there in January. Liz Strauss talks about the difference between drive and passion. Shashi Bellamkonda is an old friend that asked many questions about the Community Manager role back in 2007. He took my suggestions and implemented them at Network Solutions. In 2008 he invited me to work with him. That’s a case of: ‘What goes around comes around’ in the most positive sense! And finally, the Betsy’s … Betsy Weber is the amazing community person at Techsmith. And Betsy Aoki manages social media for Bing.

Every month we have a webinar. Last month my topic was Best Practices for Monitoring Social Media. You can view the past recordings here.

This month, my colleague, Marcus Tewksbury has the stage with ‘How to Implement a Social Media Strategy’.

Marcus will be talking about how to add social media channels to your lead generation efforts. He will also be providing ideas on how social media marketing can be integrated in with traditional marketing efforts such as email marketing, PPC campaigns, and search. The webinar is on Thursday, December 17th 10:00am Central / 16.00 UK

Register here

Here’s a sneak peak on what he’ll be presenting.

It’s a busy time of year! Next week I’ll be in San Francisco for two events. I’m doing a 3 hour workshop at Enterprise 2.0 on Frameworks for utilizing social media. The diagram in my last blog post outlines the potential that a community manager offers an organization.

I will share how to use social media to:

Michael Leander Nielson of Oslo  invited me to present a webinar on Business Objectives for Social Media Monitoring. It’s a popular topic and we had great attendance!

I covered the following:

• Which objectives to consider when defining your social media monitoring (SMM) strategy
• What types of tools are available
• How to make sense of the data that is gathered
• The ROI and benefits of social media monitoring

During the webinar it was interesting the exchange of Twitter usernames transition to  requesting to continue the conversation in a community. It underlined how people with a similar affinity will want to gather! Everyone is welcome to join our Community .

One of the challenges that I have in presenting webinars is that I feel like I’m talking to an empty space. But that wasn’t the case in this one. There was a lot of conversation happening in the chat box. I had 5 poll questions and that generated more conversation on the side as well making much more interactive. Here are the results:

Many of those that chose ‘Other’ posted their background in the chat.

I found this to be very interesting that the majority were B2B’s!

This explains why we’re so busy. Social Media monitoring isn’t mainstream yet. People are still learning.

Attendees were primarily from Europe, and there were a lot of questions about language capabilities.

It’s really important to know what your objective is for listening.

I will post a link to the recording of the webinar when it is available.