My first webinar

Yesterday I got a chance to attend my first ever webinar! Gotta love having so much free time.

I found out about this webinar from Social Media Examiner.com - one of my favorite resources for news and trends in the social media world. The format included three interviews with experts plus a Q&A during every session.

I got so much great information that I could hardly keep up with taking notes during the interviews. Here are just a few blurbs of info that I found the most interesting.

Michael Stelzner, the founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com, chose three great people to interview and also provided a lot of quality info himself during the webinar. Here's one of the very interesting points Mike brought up:

Imagine your business is a rocket ship, its fuel is the content you create – that is what makes you grow and what keeps you moving forward.

Mari Smith was the first interviewee. She focused more on relationship marketing:

• Thanking and replying back on Twitter is important. It would be nice to introduce a Twitter "Thank" button to save us time and make it easier to save every follower that mentions us in his or her post.
• You have to have good content, but connection is also crucial - engage your audience through your content.
• If you want to be an authority in a specific field, you have to be the AUTHOR. Create your content.

Jay Baer, creator of Convince and Convert Blog, brought a lot to the table in terms of content marketing:

• There's no such thing as too much content, but the quality has to be good.
• No matter what your company sells, you can always find a few things that your customers would find fascinating and write about them.
• Good content comes from good storytelling – different departments that know what's going on in your company should get together to decide what content to focus on.

Joe Pulizzi, author of the book Get Content Get Customers, had some really good insight on content
marketing and B2B:

•  Decide what you (your company) can be the leading expert in the world in - and center your content around that.
• Do your initial research - where are your customers hanging out on the web?
• Cut through the noise, establish trust – you have to give some secrets away to interest your audience.

Webinars are really a great way to explore the marketing industry. Free, interactive, and full of information!