After what seems like an eternity of a hiatus, a resurgence is in the works for Social Media Club of Salt Lake City. We are back with some exciting plans for event formats, education, and networking with plans to kick things off this summer.

P.S. Email Krista with any comments, questions, or suggestions (krista.parry@gmail.com)

Many Utah social media and traditional marketers braved the storm to hear Guy Kawasaki and Jeremiah Owyang speak. The state has proven its ability to attract high-caliber speakers before, but it makes each event no less exciting.

There are two things worth recapping for those who missed the event: first, the role Allegiance played in making the event social media-friendly (something all Utah businesses could learn to do better) and second, the actual content of the presentations.

Social Media Event Planning

The Engage Summit is held annually, not only as a user meeting for Allegiance clients (Allegiance deals in web-based data collection and analysis tools), but also as a broader net for those interested in “voice of customer” analytics.

What did Allegiance do that other businesses can learn from?

1. Location. Hosting the event at The Chateau in Deer Valley made the event memorable, and likely attracted a more diverse group than if they had held it in Salt Lake City (weather notwithstanding).
2. Speakers. Give credit to Adam Edmunds, Chris Cottle, and the Allegiance team for knowing the social media landscape well enough to know who would attract an audience. In addition to Kawasaki and Owyang, they brought other known business leaders like Arkadi Kuhlmann, President of ING.
3. Social integration. Allegiance (@allegiancetweet) had hashtags for the event (#VOC and #EngageSummit – don’t ask me why they had two) and made time at the beginning of the day to highlight the previous day’s “best of” tweets. They even gave out awards for the most active tweeters and the funniest tweets of the previous day. I think that was a great approach to multi-day conference. The use of Eventbrite was also smart, as it allowed people to post registration to their social profiles.

What to rethink?

The only difficulties I had with the conference were sketchiness of the wi-fi (a major barrier to social sharing and one reason they’ll be moving the event to Vegas next year) and the lack of pre-event networking that could have been smoothed over either by making the Eventbrite attendee list open or by encouraging interaction with a LinkedIn event or Facebook event. At very least the conference should have its own Facebook page, which I couldn’t find.

Top Content Takeaways From Guy Kawasaki

As a former Apple evangelist, Guy is all about flair and entertainment. He currently curates for Alltop, notoriously uses ghost tweeters, has written numerous books including the recently published “Enchantment” and he likes hockey.

Guy reminded the audience that life is good for marketers right now. There are more ways to reach more people than ever before.

• How to be effective in social media? You either need to provide (1) information, (2) insights, or (3) assistance.
• Remember the truth about the A-listers online. They don’t make companies succeed. They just report on successful companies.
• Before your team launches anything, consider having a “pre-mortem” meeting, where you evaluate in advance why you might fail, and take steps to curb each excuse.
• Your social media plan needs to scale. Focus on being able to engage fast, often, and with many people.
• Be enchanting. Enchantment as an individual starts with likeability, which includes physical qualities (genuine smile, dress to match the occasion, good handshake) and professional qualities (doing the dirty work).

Top Content Takeaways From Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah comes from a background of research and practitioning. He consults on web strategy and is plenty popular as a social media pundit and tech blogger.

Jeremiah focused on tools and strategy for effective social implementation.

Social strategy should be grounded in:

Socialgraphics (along with demographics, psychographics, etc). This includes being able to answer

• Where are your customers online?
• What are their behaviors online?
• What social information do they rely on?
• What is their influence online? Who else trusts them?
• How do they use technology in the context of your products?

Rapid Response Process. Companies like the US Airforce, Gatorade, and Pizza Hut are using command centers and decision models for quick response to positive and negative feedback in social channels.

Social CRM. There are over 150 companies designed to monitor the web for real-time customer feedback, but most companies are doing very little in the way of tracking individual customers. At a basic level, several companies use something like Radian 6 paired with Salesforce to accomplish this.

Social Sign-on. Companies should ditch registration in favor of other social sign-on capabilities that will help them learn more about visitor behaviors and enable them to build social customer profiles.

Jeremiah also covered a concept called the Customer Hourglass, as a way to track and serve customers at every step of their pre- and post-purchase stage, which you can read more about in the presentation on his blog.

Social Media Club of Salt Lake City is hosting this Photography workshop for you! We will have several of the areas best photographers conducting focused workshops on areas like: squeezing the best quality out of a $200 camera, how to really use that DSLR and What can you really do with your iPhone camera. These are just possible topics. We will post the specifics as they become available.

Plan on meeting from 6-8pm. Further details will be here and the eventbrite page.

As you have likely seen on TV, heard on radio and read in both print and online media, FICTIONIST is competing to win the Cover of the Rolling Stone Magazine.  This is a huge honor and a great opportunity to place our band on the global music scene.

FICTIONIST was selected as one of 16 bands competing to win the “Choose the Cover” contest hosted by Rolling Stone and Atlantic Records. The contest is tournament style with the winners advancing based on public online voting (sorry, the Rolling Stone voting widget is not mobile enabled).  Already, the field has narrowed to 8 bands. The second round ends in just two weeks and the field will be narrowed to 4 bands. The final two bands get to perform at the Bonnaroo music festival in June.  In addition to being featured on the Cover of the Rolling Stone, the winner will get a recording deal with Atlantic, will be put on a national tour and will be featured live on Jimmy Fallon.

The Utah media community has been fantastic.  Utah TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines have given FICTIONIST incredible coverage. We feel the support of the community and we know they want to champion a local band.  But supporters don’t know what to do or how to do it.

Can social media be the solution? Now that mainstream media has created broad awareness, is there a way to use social media to convert the positive awareness to online votes?

Share your ideas in the comments and let’s get this band on it’s way!

Click here to vote for Fictionist!

Here are a few links:

1. Share the music and vote page: http://www.fictionist.com/rollingstone
2. Fan-generated content contest: http://www.fictionist.com/contest
3. Recent video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XmUhiEjPl0

Join us on Thursday, March 31st from 6-8pm in the Salt Lake Board of Realtor’s auditorium to learn about location-based tools like Yelp and social coupon tools like Living Social.

Our Guest speakers are Jeffrey Steadman (Community Manager) from Yelp and Margaux Lodge (Marketing Consultant for the SLC area) from Living Social. They will share information on how businesses can use these tools to improve their bottom line, including:

• How can your business see results from user reviews?
• How can you solicit those reviews without really asking?
• Why would I want a bunch of penny-pinchers for new customers?
• How to create local promotions that drive profit?

Who should attend? Anyone actively working in social media, marketing professionals, business owners and anyone who wants answers to the questions above!

Food, an amazing Fajita bar, will be provided by Lily’s Catering – LilysCatering.com

It is that time of year again when we look back to look forward…and this year we are in for a seriously deep conversation on Social Media Trends and the year ahead.

Come discuss the many predictions for the social web in 2011 in a lunch & learn at the offices of HyperX Media. Share what you think will work. Learn what others are going to work with and what will fall by the wayside.  Together we will look at the key issues and insights that have arisen over the past year and prognosticate on the direction Social Media is headed in the upcoming year. Our conversation will cover consumer issues, marketing, social applications, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, mobile and more. Come prepared with your top issues and questions and get insights from our panel of leading voices in social media and other participating Social Media Club members and guests.

Gourmet Hot Dogs will be provided by Da HotDog King. I had one for the first time a few days ago… You are going to love these! And yes, there will be veggie dogs.

Speakers will include Tami “Ruby Snap, formerly Dough Girl” Cromar, talking about how she has successfully grown her business and gained national attention via social media platforms, Matt Wilcox, VP of Corporate Marketing and Communications at Zions Bank, discussing the challenges of social media within a regulated industry. Others will be announced in the upcoming days.

Food will be included in the ticket price by The Pig Rig and will include BBQ brisket and turkey sammies with water/soda. A cash bar will also be available.

We hope you can make it!

To register, click here.

Rick Galan knows LinkedIn

We all know we should be using LinkedIn, right? We know that it’s a powerful business tool and something that we should be using regularly, but if you’re like most of us you use it infrequently and never feel like you’re getting everything out of it that you could. That is why the SMCSLC is happy to bring you Mr. Rick Galan. He knows LinkedIn inside and out, and will be giving us a presentation covering the myriad facets of this amazing business tool. He will be covering the how’s, why’s, shortcuts and what’s’ new with LinkedIn.

The event will be held at the Grand America and the cost for this event is just $10. Your $10 gets you the Grand America lunch buffet (usually $17) and the presentation by Rick. Seating is limited and the $10 price is only good for a limited time. The day before the event the price jumps to a still very modest $20. So tell your boss you’re taking a long lunch and get signed up today. You can bring your boss too!

Grand America's Lunch Buffet

Grand America's Garden Cafe

Grand America's Garden Cafe Patio

Presentation Abstract:

You have a Facebook page and Twitter account. Maybe you’re even using YouTube, Foursquare, Groupon or other social media outlets. But how many of those visitors are you converting in to customers? Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is how you turn more visitors into customers without increasing your marketing spend. Josh Summerhays and Robert Brady will lay out the basics of CRO and then show you how to apply those principles to your social media efforts to improve your bottom line.

Further DEETS:

WHO:  SMCSLC and SMCUV members and would-be members

WHAT:  July Meeting:  Conversion Rate Optimization

WHEN:  Thursday, July 29, 6 p.m.

WHERE:  Salsa Leedos, 9155 South Redwood Road, West Jordan in the UT.  There will be a “Make Yer Own” taco setup for the very low price of $7.50.

WHY:  Because we could all use some help and some new ideas for turning some of these crazy social platforms into more solid business and networking leads.

Questions?  Contact Brian Seethaler, 2010 SMCSLC Programming Director, via Twitter (@seethaler) or Facebook (facebook.com/seethaler).

The Good

The first thing about the iPhone 4 that struck me was the heft of the unit. The new model weighs just two grams more (137 grams) when compared to the previous generation iPhone 3GS (135 grams) but the new iPhone has a more solid feel.  With a flat glass front and back and a stainless steel band circling the outside of the phone—the iPhone 4′s assorted antennas—there is a satisfying denseness to it.

The display is where the iPhone 4 really stands out.  The ‘retina’ display is truly beautiful. With a resolution of 960×640 pixels in a display measuring 3.5 inches diagonally the iPhone 4 display comes in at 326 ppi. (For a great technical and physiological discussion of whether the iPhone 4 is truly a ‘retina’ display go here)  Text on the iPhone is incredibly crisp and uncluttered.

The page scrolling is smooth and the phone is very responsive. The updated iPhone operating system—renamed iOS 4—has been updated with new features that really leverage the new hardware.

FaceTime is a new feature that allows you to have a two-way video call with another person using the new forward-facing camera. The caveat being that the other person also has to have an iPhone 4 and that you both have to be on a WiFi network. I’ve yet to try this feature as I hate talking on the regular non-video phone and I have no friends.

The iPhone 4 also will record video at 720p HD using either the front or rear-facing 5-megapixel camera. Apple offers a mobile iMovie app ($4.99) giving you the ability to edit your video on the phone. You can make cuts, add clips, add transitions and even add your own soundtrack from your iPhone’s music library. You still have the ability to export your clips and edit them on a PC or Mac so the iMovie app is not a necessity.

The iMovie timeline view

Bowing to pressure from customers and industry pundits Apple has finally added multitasking to the iOS. Honestly, this is one of those features that, as an owner of every generation of iPhone, I wonder how I lived without. Pressing the home button twice brings up a taskbar-like tray of running apps, allowing you to scroll through a list of running apps and gives you the ability switch to or kill another app. It’s really handy to be able to switch from Angry Birds to YouTube for hint videos without having to start either app from scratch.

iOS 4's Multitasking bar

The Bad

Apple touted the move of the iPhone’s antennas to the outside of the phone case as a bold move, intended to improve reception, a welcome thought for many users suffering under the anemic AT&T network. This move of the antenna however, has highlighted a problem plaguing some users. Holding the phone as you normally would, with the left hand covering a significant portion of the antenna, can cause the phone’s signal to degrade, even to the point of dropping calls. I have yet to see this on my iPhone, regardless of how I hold it. Your mileage on this may vary and is easily remedied with the use of a case to isolate the phone from your evil, signal-killing hands.

Conclusion

I drank the Apple kool-aid long ago so I feel pretty biased. I love this phone, as I loved its brothers before it. My advice, if you’re looking for a smart phone, is to find someone with every model of phone you’re thinking of buying and evaluate them yourself. And then just go buy the iPhone.

It really is a great drunk dial/tweet/Facebook your friends at 4 A.M. smart phone.

The result of a failed 1972 East-German experiment in eugenics, Ryan Shaw dreamed of a career as a professional skate-boarder. Unfortunately, on Easter Sunday of 1988 in downtown SLC those dreams were torn asunder, much like the ligaments in his ankle. He now does programming for Rio Tinto, makes fun of people, and sometimes cries at television shows. You probably should NOT follow him on Twitter.