Had a great time at the PHONE+ The Channel Partners Conference in Las Vegas and met some very cool people.  I ran a session on Social Media in the Channel and was really impressed with the reception. There are three groups people usually fall into when it comes to social media:

1. Totally get-it, are drinking the kool-aid, might even be making the kool-aid
2. Realize it is important but aren’t quite sure how to measure or what it’s getting them
3. Skeptics who want to be proven wrong or are just in the room to heckle

By a show of hands we probably had 20%, 60%, and 20% respectively in the room.  While you can never convince everyone, I did see a couple of the self-admitted hecklers nodding their heads in agreement once in awhile.  Here are a few key take-aways to share:

• Creating valuable content is the  #1 key to success with social media
• Twitter is not for everyone, if you just aren’t going to use it correctly, don’t use it
• Cold-calling doesn’t work by itself anymore, get over it (note in conjunction with social media and other multi-touch elements it can be very successful)
• LinkedIn is the first step to acclimating yourself to social media, get in, make connections, look around, create discussions
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key but don’t just optimize for the obvious terms because your bigger, stronger, wealthier competitor is doing that…find your niche and identify keywords from there.

Boarding my red-eye, I leave you with this, if you had $10 (think of it as a percentage of your total investment) you could spend on social media this is how I would spend it:

• $2 SEO specialist to find the right keywords for you or a service like www.hubspot.com so you can do it internally
• $8 to create valuable content whether eBooks, webinars, videos that you can then post out using free platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn
• The rest of the investment is just time but well worth it!

Last point, have to give a huge shout out for www.mandalaybay.com which upgraded me to a ridiculous suite...we're talking media room people!