Social Media Club STL

in EVENTS by Justin Clerc — March 26, 2010 at 1:50 pm | 4 comments

On Thursday March 18th, I attended the SMCSTL event on location based social media. I was pleasantly surprised by the diverse group of attendees ranging from agencies to small one person businesses to marketing and PR professionals from large companies. Unlike many networking events where you attend and pitch someone your services and they pitch you theirs, SMCSTL is a gathering of people looking to learn more about this ever changing new channel social media. Here people with years of experience are learning from people just getting started and vice versa. SMCSTL’s tagline, “If you get it, share it” accurately describes the atmosphere of the event. People are there to share their experience with and knowledge of social media.

With so many different tools and strategies to use the location based social media event was focused on just a few represented by the panelists, Rachel Jelercic from Groupon, Abby Schwarz the St. Louis Community Manager at Yelp.com, and Jason Fiehler Founder and CEO of Infuz. Aside from noticing the St. Louis infatuation with provel cheese, there was a lot of good information to take from the event. Here are a few things I took away.

-       If you’re a business on Yelp.com and a disgruntled employee tries to sabotage your business, Yelp has ways of removing the review. They can tell the authenticity by the profile the comment came from. Also there is a organic protection system by the Yelpers noticing what is going on.

-       With programs like Gowalla and Foursquare, business owners will play the biggest factor in which programs are a success, though to date Foursquare has done a better job getting its name out there.

-       If you don’t try to reach your clients on social media, you may lose business to someone who is. However the only thing worse than doing it poorly is not doing it at all.

-       Social Media delves into the PR realm of trying to communicate with an audience, but most of the stats and research is being done by Ad Agencies.

-       Groupon doesn’t actually cost the business any money to use, revenues are just split from the sales that Groupon drives.

-       Many times when you use coupons you are treated like pond scum. With social media promotions, you are not characterized as the coupon cutter, but rather as someone who is looking for a cool place to go and doesn’t know where.

Surprisingly, over ninety percent of attendees had an iPhone and actively used programs like Groupon and Yelp. While this may not be characteristic of St. Louis as a whole, it does reflect the growing trend and the importance of having location based social media programs, especially for a B2C company.

If you’re interested in learning more about SMCSTL, click here.

Tags: Abby Schwarz Groupon.com Infuz Jason Fiedler Rachel Jelercic SMCSTL Social Media Club STL st. louis networking events Yelp St. Louis