Social Media Breakfast Seattle podcast: Influencer Engagement with Sean O'Driscoll

The second episode of the Seattle Social Media Breakfast podcast is up! This month's guest is Sean O'Driscoll of Ant's Eye View and formerly of the Microsoft MVP program, talking about how to find and engage your brand advocates and take advantage of key influencers.

If you're in Seattle, please join us for the event on January 19, 2010, at 7:30 a.m.; there are still about a dozen tickets available, but they are going fast! Full information is on the SMB Seattle blog, or register for SMB Seattle here.

Podcast: SMB Seattle 2: Influencer Engagement

Download the mp3 directly!

0:00-1:30 Introduction

1:30 Sean O'Driscoll covers influencer engagement

• Goals for the new year
• Twitter as an emotion delivery vehicle
• Key to relevance is listening first and setting goals
• "If I had a dream, it's that social media is about operational excellence"
• Figure out how to get into people's workflows and participate and insert discoverable content, not how to launch your own workflow
• What is an influencer and how do you find them?--the user who answered 10,000 questions in Microsoft forums--as a hobby!
• Learning the lesson of "evangelism" versus helping other users
• The effect of influencer engagement on customer experience at Microsoft--call center versus forum engagement

18:10 Question: how do you measure the impact and scale in a large organization? (submitted by Adam Shoenfield)

• Follow-up: what's if it's a marketing initiative instead of support or service-based?
• Defining objectives: "once you declare what your objective is, measuring it isn't all that hard"
• Regarding scaling: "If you don't believe in the value you are getting, you probably won't invest in the discovery process"

Event information:

Date: Tuesday, January 19, 2009

Time: Networking – 7:30-8:00 a.m., Program – 8:00-9:00 a.m.
Location: RealNetworks
Cost: $10
Event tag: #smbseattle