In addition to the great networking and ideas that come with that many minds in one place, I came away rejuvenated and validated in my practices and approach.

The first session was Social Media Hospitality, presented by Brian Simpson, Director, Digital Media Vikram Chatwal Hotels, NYC. Brian spoke realistically and frankly about why we need to stop building our audience and start trying to engage the people who are already our fans. Stop worrying about the ‘Likes’ and focus on the conversation.

The lessons that he really hammered home for me included:

• Stop talking about how awesome you are and start engaging. Start working yourself into the conversation.
• An audience will watch you fight your battles; a community will help you fight. Use social media to help you build a community, not an audience.
• Don’t respond to every single social site comment – reduce the signal to noise ratio.
• An agency can never articulate as clearly or communicate as well as a voice from inside your organization.
• A great way to monitor your social media success includes taking lots and lots of screenshots of conversations, tweets, mentions, comments, and posts.

My favorite quote of the day reminds me that the social media space is crowded and loud. Its a noisy, busy place and we need to work hard to build true relationships organically and sincerely – not be the loudest voice. From Buddha, in all his wisdom, “Don’t speak unless it improves the silence.“

To me, the payoff is obvious.

Relationships are created, fostered and flourish.  Friendships form.  Conversations are held.  Clients and customers are engaged.

Twitter is especially difficult for people who don’t already get it.

In general, I advise my clients to spend 10 minutes each morning logging in to Twitter and/or Facebook; retweeting interesting articles or posts; replying to customers or interesting tweets; generally engaging and interacting.  Ten minutes.  A good place to start.

For clients who really want to get involved though, I learned a really great tip from the small business roundtable that I hosted at the Social Fresh conference in Tampa today.

(I really wish I could remember the name of the fantastic guy who gave us these tips, so if you’re out there, please comment and let me know!)

Five Tweets to Send Every Morning (for new Twitter users)

1. Tweet a link to an article that you find interesting from a publication you read regularly.  This can be industry specific or locaation-specific or just something you find funny.  Doesn’t matter. Share good information.
2. Find 2 people who you would like to notice your business, and retweet or reply to something they have written, tweeted or posted.  If that’s a writer at a newspaper or an influential blogger or a big customer, doesn’t matter.  Engage them on Twitter.
3. Find 2 people looking for information about your business or industry and retweet, reply or engage them somehow.  If you’re a caterer, these are brides talking about getting married.  If you’re a digital document storage company, these are lawyers or HR folks or people complaining about filing.

If you can stick to just these 5 tweets and keep up with the conversations that start, you’ll be one step closer to landing those new big clients and introducing your company to new customers.

Sure beats cold calling, right?