Sway is one of Wisconsin’s premier social media agencies with an impressive client list of social media clients on their roster.  In true social media fashion, Caitlin put out a quick blog post on her upcoming speaking opportunity and got back over a dozen emails with helpful advice on how to handle a speaking engagement. That’s what social media is all about - it’s about helping others.

Caitlin shared some stats from the MarketingSherpa social media guide stating that social media is one of the top items that marketers are putting funding into.  This is interesting, as it dispels two myths - 1) marketers are still spending in the economy and 2) social media is not “free” as some would like to believe.

One of the social networking communities that Caitlin brought up is Gimme 20.  I’ve not yet heard of them, but it sounds like a great fitness community.

Seasoned skewers is a Sway client that faced an interesting ’search’ problem and instead of taking on the major kitchen supply folks, they went straight to the grilling communities and started the conversation with them.  Talk about a great targeted social media approach.

Sway has some great recommendations for video:

1. Free - YouTube
2. Sharing - Metacafe
3. Blogs
4. Paid placement

Caitlin covered some common mistakes:

1. Don’t just setup a facebook page, do more than just
2. She doesn’t recommend seeding blogs
3. It’s about content- no content = no social media

Don’t worry about the technology. That’s interesting - think about it, everyone’s working on the technology. It’s all about the content - people are comfortable with beta or ‘bad’ content if it has the information they need.

Caitlin references IKEA a lot in her presentation. They’re not covered often in the social media space, but they’ve been doing some great stuff and getting great results.  They have one of the better YouTube channels as well.

More on YouTube - here’s a post on a few of the best brands in YouTube from social media influence.

How do we handle negative reviews? Start at Yacktrack.com.

5 Things to do today in social media:

1. Comment on blogs
2. Check in brands “link in”
3. Monitor buzz on YackTrack
4. Open a twitter account and follow the industry
5. Collect your assets to see what you can use online in social media