Ah, the final portion of the day for a $1000 loan online.  At this point in the day, all the speakers have been top notch!  On the agenda are two more singular presentations and another panel!

First up is Adam Shoenfeld from Row Feeder, who talked about using time to guide social media efforts.  When you choose to do something in social media matters (time, day, etc).  Understanding these factors can help your big picture presence and your plan.  Other marketers have been scientific about time as well, so this isn’t a new concept.  People spend a lot of time thinking about time :).  Social media is slightly different since the activity is happening on someone else’s property, and you don’t have real data for when people are active.  It is a real-time world, so keep this in mind.  Generally on Twitter, there’s a concentration between 11am-5pm EST, and a higher concentration of tweets mid-week on Wednesday and Thursday. It also depends on what you’re talking about – business type stuff happens during business hours and other types of activity can center on other times.  For example, if you’re tweeting about Mad Men or something else you think those viewers would be interested in, you’d want to tweet during the show airing Sunday nights for maximum exposure.  You have to make sure you clearly define your goals.  Depending on what the goals are will help to decide what times/days you should target.  There’s a ton of data available to help you decide “when” to do something in social media.  Your opportunities will be specific to your targeted audience.

Next we heard from Pierre Zorokian from Submit Express.  Reputation management does affect your SEO, so you need to pay attention to what sites you do NOT want to be on!  It’s bad to be on RipOffReport.com, ComplaintsBoard.com, RippedOffOnline.com, PissedConsumer.com, or Complaints.com.  Once you’re on one of these sites, it’s NOT easy to get off.  Your goal should be to generate better content that will push those negative search engine results further down the page or onto farther out pages to bury this data.  Some of these sites charge outrageous fees ($20k+) to remove.

You should monitor Yelp and the Better Business Bureau since reviews on those sites could be good or bad.  Both sites will help moderate disputes if a customer is posting false information.  Other sites to monitor would be Merchant Circle, City Search, some industry related sites are Amazon marketplace reviews or Trip Advisor.  If you have negative listings, ask customers to post positive comments and reviews when they have a good experience.  You want to have way more positive reviews than negative.  Another way to push those results down would be to create new sites that rank, create a lot of social media profiles, and release press releases or articles that will rank well for your keywords.

There are free tools like Google & Yahoo alerts, Social Oomph, Technorati, Backtype, Yacktracks, BoardTracker, Board Reader, Big Boards, Whos Talkin.  Most brands will be okay with the free tools.  Own your brand – you should be the top 10 in Google.

Bringing up the rear, we ended the day with a panel.  The panelists were Jenny Zeszut from Lithium, Ben Straley from Meteor Solutions, and Marcel LeBrun from Radian6, moderated by Jennifer Neeley Lindsay talking about ROI.  Social media is just another tactic, so we need to talk about either growing revenue/customers or decreasing costs.  The biggest ROI comes from understanding the multiple use of social media across many aspects and departments in your business.  Execs want to know if this influence is working and how social media is building their brands.  What they’ve seen work in terms of benchmarks is content.  Create content and an experience that demonstrates that you’re listening and engaged.  This is one of the best ways to get PR and awareness for your brand.

Overall, this was a great conference!  I look forward to attending more events hosted by Murray and Influence People.  Another huge thank you to Murray for allowing me to live-blog this event for all of you while he runs the show!

All of the slides from today’s event are available on the Influence People Slideshare page.

Trisha Lyn Fawver is a blogger at TrishaLyn.com and works as the client services specialist at For Me To Coupon, an automated affiliate coupon feed.