Convince and Convert

I had the pleasure of attending the Oregon Governor's Conference on tourism over the last three days.  It is probably one of my favorite conferences I go to, because I always bring home some nuggets of information that I can actually apply to my day job.  It gets me thinking creatively about everything.  There were many great things about the conference which I will share with you as I can apply them.

I can truly say the highlight of the conference was a session called "One Tough Mother".  For those of you who don't know, that is a title of the book written about the iconic matriarch, Gert Boyle, from Columbia Sportswear, right here in Portland.  At 89 years old, she is one of the spunkiest, tell it like it is ladies I have ever had the pleasure to come across.  She doesn't give you that "CEO answer" to the tough questions.  She basically just says "this is how I roll, what?".  Things are not that complicated.  She worked her butt off after her husband passed away because she didn't want to be poor.  Why else? Here is one of her commercials in a series she did with her son for a brief insight to how bad ass she is - watch here!  Anyhow, a great life story and she gave us a copy of her book so I am excited to learn more!

Among the educational sessions, there were two led by Jay Baer of Convince and Convert in Bloomington, Indiana - where I got most of my information nuggets from at the conference.  He led a general session over lunch (he had to follow Gert, which even he admitted was a tough act to follow), about creating "Youtlity".  Smart organizations are helping, not selling.  My nugget:
Smart companies sell more by selling less.  If we focus of providing massively useful information, not promotions, our name will be at the forefront when they are in the market to make a purchase.

His second session was How to Create a Killer Social Media Strategy in 8 steps (which I will also share as I am able to apply).  My two main nuggets:
1. Focus on how to be social - not about how to do social media!  Genius!  He explained that social media is just another shift in how we communicate with customers.  It is not the first (telephone, fax machines, email) and it will not be the last.
2. Ask yourself when you are choosing how to measure your social media efforts or anything really - "And this matters because?"  If you can't answer that, then why are you measuring it.  He explained a weak measurement would be number of Facebook "likes".  Almost everyone measures that because it's easy, and it's public.  Everyone can see it.  And that matters because? Facebook "likes" do not pay the bills.  We are not in the business to get people to "like" us.  A better measure would be the engagement rate of your fans.  He shared a formula of Total Fans/Likes+Comments+Shares=engagement percentage.  If you are over 1% that is good!

I took a solid two pages of notes from the session that I plan to put into place both in my full time job and here so stay tuned!

In the meantime - I highly suggest you check out his company blog here.  You can also quickly and easily sign up for their newsletter and a free e-book on how to measure content marketing.

Cheers,
Kristen