HoCA Social Media Panel

This morning was a treat at the Heart of Cary Association (HoCA) meeting.  Not only was the meeting held at the Matthew's House, but the meeting was centered around a panel for Social Media!

What a great panel!

• Shelli Dallacqua, Shelten Media
• Hal Goodtree, CaryCitizen
• Michelle Muir, The Spoken Image
• Jennifer Fair
• Erin Smith, MMi Public Relations

My gripe I will get out and over quickly.  The e-mails announcing the event stated:

Also, because of the nature of the program we will not be able to solicit event updates from the membership or other’s in attendance. However if you would like to distribute ‘handouts’ please feel free to do so.

However, there was a long list of special reports and announcements that while interesting to the quite large group assembled shortened the time for the panel to only 20-25 minutes which did not allow much time to hear from such a great panel...

My takeaways:

1. Know your target audience and then decide which social media channel to use.
2. Get over your fear of using social media and start to develop your followers.
• What is important here is the quality of your followers and their engagement with your information, not the quantity of followers.
3. You need to know what is being posted about you on-line and this is an important part of your reputation management.
4. Your website is the hub and you need to tie everything into it.
• Your website represents you.  You must have an outstanding website!
5. Uniformity of your integration of the different social media channels is very important

Hal Goodtree by far had the best quote about how to define the young generation from the old in technology terms.  "It all depends on if you are a Digital native or a Digital immigrant"!  I hope you get a chance to hear this directly from Hal as it was funny and captivating.  (I'm not sure that was the actual quote, but it is what I remember...)

Oh, and by the way, the earth shook just before the panel was introduced...  Lyman Collins, Cultural Arts Manager for the Town of Cary, stated that the Town of Cary was moving to FaceBook, with their first pages for Lazy Daze, Spruce and an overall Town page!