Sessions at BlogWorld New York 2012 about Business on Tuesday 5th June

Being social is good for business, most of us know that. But what happens when it isn’t? Greed, lust, envy and the rest of the sins are alive and well in business and they seem to thrive when people try to engage online. This session will cover what not to do when engaging an audience, not only in social media but offline as well. Does a unicorn really die if you ask the ROI of social media? Can Pinterest save your unread blog? Can you legally smack somebody who adds you to their mailing list after getting your card at an event? These and many more sinful questions will be answered.

Finding the right type of content to create can be a challenge. However, getting people plugged into your content can be even more difficult. With the onslaught of information hitting us, how can a business stand out and make an impression? The answer is communication. How an individual or business communicates to someone makes the difference. Content can get someones attention, but if there is no connection, there will be no sale. It’s not just about content. Real communication through content will help increase your bottom line.

Key Points
Attendees of this session will walk away knowing:
1. The difference between creating content and connecting customers with their content.
2. How to increase sales and referrals through effective communication with effective content.
3. How different types of content speak differently to audiences, and how to best use certain channels.

Blogging for business comes down to one challenge: finding what problem you can solve for your readers. That can be tough, unless you look at the intersection of three areas: What they’re passionate about. What they’re talented at. What customers will pay for. If they’re passionate and talented, but customers won’t pay for their solution… they’ll be broke. If they are talented with paying customers, but lack passion… they’ll burn out. If they’re passionate with paying customers, but aren’t actually talented… they’ll get busted. But when they find the thing that meets all three criteria, THAT is the sweet spot!

Key Points
We'll use a diagram to show each section and suggest 3 steps in order to test whether an idea or solution falls into each of the 3 areas, to help bloggers truly determine:
1. What they're passionate about.
2. What they're talented at.
3. What customers will pay for.

This session will teach attendees how to create and build a blogger outreach program from scratch for their business or nonprofit. It will feature case studies and showcase best practices, how to find bloggers, successful pitching, relationship building, and effective tracking and reporting. If you’ve ever wanted to get bloggers to write about you, and you want to avoid your emails getting sent to the spam folder, this session is for you!

Key Points
1. How to find bloggers interested in writing about you.
2. How to successfully pitch bloggers.
3. Tracking and monitoring your program.

While the number of people, businesses, and organizations active on social platforms continues to grow daily, not everyone is sold on the value of social media marketing. And while you may “get it”—the whys and hows of social media marketing—sometimes it seems like an impossible task to convince skeptics to suspend their disbelief and dive in. This session explores what skeptics want and need at every stage of their belief, and how to deliver that to them.

Key Points
1. How to identify the key questions in skeptics' heads—and how to use them to build your case
2. A seven-step process that every "Social Skeptic" goes through, from Shock to Integration
3. How to recognize where skeptics are in that process, and what information they need (and in what format!) to help move them to the next phase

If your blog shares your deepest, darkest secrets about your passion for Jersey Shore or troll head dolls, this is not the session for you. This is the session for serious bloggers who want their online musings to play a meaningful role in their business. Join Jay Baer in a practical, focused, advice-filled session filled with real world examples and lessons learned from his own journey from blogger with zero readers to well-known social media personality.

Key Points
1. How to move your blog from a creative outlet to a driver of business success.
2. How to prioritize the activities necessary to build a blogging community.
3. How to create a blogging approach that creates readership and notoriety, without selling your soul or being a jerk.

Everyone always asks, “How can I rank #1 in Google for X?” While Google changes their algorithm almost too frequently to keep up with, there is one constant of internet marketing: link building. Building links will not only help you perform better in the search engines, but also bring more attention to your site. Link building is really relationship building; learn how to accomplish that with social media, as well as good ol’ fashion hustle. Using several easy tools and strategies, you will be building links in no time.

Key Points
1. More links = more site exposure and better rankings
2. Social media is an easy linkbuilding tool
3. Research methods to linkbuilding

Ever get jealous that the open, unstructured social media efforts of the community completely trounce your well-planned and even well-funded social media programs? Are you frustrated when your own social media efforts are thwarted by inter-departmental competition? These problems are common, and we can no longer blame them on people “not getting” social media. The blame actually lies in the way we run our organizations. In this session the authors of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World will explore how to create organizations that are more human, thus more compatible with social media.

Key Points
Learning objectives:
1. Understand the subtle ways in which our organizational “best practices” have been sabotaging our social media efforts for some time now.
2. Understand a new framework for changing culture, process, and behavior in organizations in ways that is more aligned with the power of social media.
3. Begin to develop specific strategies for changing their own organization on at least one of those three levels.