OpenSource Connections
Category: Community
On March 25th I moderated a panel on the use of social media by businesses, and it was a lot of fun. Many thanks go to all of the roughly 90 attendees for being there, and my fellow CBIC members for all their work putting together the event. The audience asked great questions, put up with my jokes, and the panelists had great advice. So thanks again to our panelists: Ryan Adams from Intalgent, Suzanne Henry from Four Leaf PR, and Scott Hildebrand from BoldMouth. There was also a mention of the event on CBS19.
At the event I had an iPhoto slideshow going of screen shots from local Charlottesville businesses who are already using social media to promote their businesses. These are actually some pretty good examples I think, so as promised, Im including all those photos here along with a quick tag line describing the picture.
In no particular order, here they are….
Jim Duncan is a Charlottesville area realtor who uses Twitter to communicate with potential clients and the community as a whole about the real estate market. His use of blogs and twitter have helped establish him as an expert locally and lead to more publicity for him and his clients.
Business Bullpen is using a Facebook Fan Page to communicate with their potential clients.
Trees On Fire is a local Charlottsville band that is using Facebook events to invite people to their shows. Perhaps your business should be using Facebook to invite people to your sales or events too?
Newswise is a Charlottesville based company that distributes press releases on behalf of their clients. They are using Twitter as an additional channel to distribute releases to journalists.
High Tech Cville is a creation of OpenSource Connections own Eric Pugh, and is a site that aggregates information about technology professionals in Charlottesville automatically from a number of social media sites.
OpenSpace Coworking is using social media to promote the upcoming launch of their new coworking office space, and building excitement and interest ahead of time.
The Charlottesville Business Innovation Council has a group you can join on LinkedIn, which is another way to keep up to date with upcoming CBIC events.
Facebook Fundraising is a facebook app that I am building which is still under development, but Im using Twitter to keep potential users apprised of its upcoming release and to start to build a little excitement about it. After release, it will be a facebook app that helps indirectly promote my business Donor Town Square (though it can be used with my competitors services as well).
Ryan Adams started the Charlottesville Tech LinkedIn Group as another place to go to discuss the tech community in Charlottesville.
The Charlottesville Airport has its own blog on its website GoCho.com, where airport staff can keep the community up to date with whats going on at our eeggional airport and tell travel stories.
Scott Hildebrand, CEO of BoldMouth, was one of our panelists and brought a lot of great insight about his experiences working with large companies on social media branding campaigns.
Ryan Adams of Intalgent software was another one of our panelists, and brought a lot of great insight into how he has secured many leads and contracts through LinkedIn, and how to use social media to advance your personal career growth.
Quadruplicity is a conference recently put on by the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, and they used Facebook to help promote the event. OSCs own Jason Hull ran a social media panel at that conference.
OpenSource Connections uses their blog for technical posts, announcements of company events and speaking engagements, and for commentary on various technology areas related to our expertise. It helps to establish our credentials and we often point potential clients to blog posts that are related to their projects.
Suzanne Henry, President of Four Leaf PR, was a panelist in our discussion, and provided a great perspective on how social media has been used by her clients, how businesses can get started developing their message, and unleashing the power of social media to promote their business.
Local gym ACAC has setup a Facebook page for their gym that promotes special events, and provides a way for gym members to interact with staff.
CBIC has incorporated a twitter feed into our homepage. If you twitter using the hashtag #cbic (which just means putting #cbic anywhere in your tweet), then your tweet will appear on CBICs homepage. You can use this to comment on CBIC events, and CBIC volunteers are using it as a quick way to post announcements and reminders on the CBIC homepage.
My company Donor Town Square has started to use a twitter feed to announce updates to our services, feature changes, or updates on planned outages. This provides a quick way that customers can get up to the minute updates.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, based in Charlottesville, uses a YouTube channel to promote vidoes about their advocacy efforts.
Shergold Studio is a dance Studio in Charlottesville that has setup a Facebook page where their students interact and post videos of their performances. Panelist Suzanne Henry described them as having less than 100 supporters on their page, which is not a huge number, but is “the right 100 people” for their demographic, since it is a very devoted fan base of the business.
Thats it! This was certainly not a comprehensive list of all the ways Charlottesville businesses are using social media to grow, but I hope its given you a range of ideas for how to grow your own business. And if those plans involve custom software development or Facebook Apps, dont forget to call us at OpenSource Connections and we can help. If you need help with general social media marketing tasks, you should also look up the panelists we had – they did a great job at the event and Im sure could help your business too.
Thanks again to all who attended the CBIC event, and please feel free to leave comments about the event or other uses for social media in the comments below!