Reflection on Toby Srebnik's Speech

Today Toby Srebnik, Director of Social Media from O'Connell & Goldberg PR gave us a speech as a guest speaker on the topic of Social media evolution and audience engagement.

In the world of socialnomics, social media really matters to brands. Social media sites can showcase an entity's personality, drive traffic to the entity's locations and web presence, build trust-based relations, create buzz, establish a dialogue and following with fans, communicate values, and mitigate negative public relations, etc.

Amongst the various social media sites like Twitter, FB, Linkedin, and Foursquare, Srebnik specified in Twitter use for business. He offered some tips on Twitter for business:
(1) Telling the story in your bio: be clear upfront of who you are; (2) interaction: a two-way conversation enables business growth; (3) personality: it is important to make sure the customers receive  fastest and effective response and convey a consistant corporate voice, but cleverness and fun to some extent helps; (4) ask questions of your followers to initiate conversation; (5) retweeting helpful tips: this serves as a way of reminding and emphasize.

The company which runs its brand on Twitter should remember that Twitter must be a conversation, and the person who tweets should have something valuable to contribute. Like anything, over time Twitter becomes second nature, not a burden or one additional thing to do. This is when Twitter as a marketing or PR tool is incorporated into the strategic communication plan of a company.

While Twitter is all about branding and brand reinforcement, FB is more of a storefront (store hours, address, photo gallaries, customer interaction) which is indispensable in social media branding as well. To achieve a well-rounded social media strategy, Linkedin and Blog are another two important social media tools to reach targeted audience.

In order to see what people are saying about your entity before or after you launch your
social media presence, there are multiple websites to use as measurement.  Several of these sites
are FREE including on sites: socialmention.com and www.toolreach.com.

I really agree with one of his line in the speech: Entities that give followers a true sense of community
succeed with social media. In building up a community, companies need to do something that will stand out, and also, implement different social media tactics according to different social media sites or tools.