Oh yeah, im a complete nerd.  On Thursday, June 4, 2009 i got in the car with evo Snowboard Buyer Gorio Bustamante, Team Manager Chris Shalbot and friend Chris Dickerson and headed to PDX for a GroupY Panel Discussion on Social Web & Social Media, titled “Who Killed Social Media”.  Being from the area, i was excited to head to my stomping grounds, maybe make a pitstop at the Salomon/Bonfire offices and if we’re lucky run into Mae and George from US Outdoor.  In the end we managed to pull it all off… it was a nice Thursday.

We stopped by Cals Pharmacy and then made our way over to Bonfire’s Portland Office and hung out with Amy, Rian and Java. We talked shop a bit, looked at some new product, Java showed us some footage from their team trip to Japan, good times… thanks for letting us derail you from progress for a few minutes!  Did i mention that their offices are right next to one of Franz Bread’s factories… they really pump delicious “enriched white bread” smell into the air deliberately….after leaving Bonfire i really needed food in my mouth.

So we dined w/ George and Mae at a Thai restaurant in the Hawthorne district…it was okay, not quite like Fremont’s generous selection of thai restaurants however.  After din we were schooled by an interesting group of panelist. To further perpetuate my nerdiness i have included some links below and a few of the major takeaways that stuck out to me. Some of them are captain obvious but are good reminders, others might spark some new thoughts, enjoy:

Main takeaways:

• We can begin to think of investing in and engaging within the social web arena as an “insurance policy” and as “reputation management” – People are going to be out there (on the web) talking us, our services, the products that we carry…this all effects our search results
• SEO and SEM are changing drastically sooner than most people think (kind of tied in to above thought)
• We need to get better at “engaging” rather than just shouting AT our customers through our social web tools.
  
• authenticity is still key, and frequency and consistency is a must
• There is a way to utilize these tools such as twitter as a sales tool, but if you are going to do that, call it out.  Ex. evo_deals could be a twitter account
• “You MUST have an opinion and a voice. If you are going to even attempt to blog, you must stand for something”

Links:

• Review/Summary (Blog post) 
• Panel Discussion Webcast

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