One of the hottest conferences going on right now is Dreamforce 2012. More than 30,000 people converge on Moscone Center in San Francisco, which just thinking about scares the heck out of me, and I’m an extrovert! There are networking parties and all kinds of other cool things going on. But, I’m not there to partake in the experience.
Enter Twitter.
The vast majority of business folks and salespeople that I meet don’t have a firm grasp on how to use Twitter to their advantage. It is certainly easy to understand. After all, there are over 200 million tweets transpiring every day. How do you make sense of it all? How do you organize yourself? What real benefit does Twitter have for me anyway?
Intelligence is priceless.
Ok, so I’m not at Dreamforce (the plan is to attend next year), but I certainly have been paying attention to the comments on Twitter. How am I keeping up? By following the hashtag #DF12. In my Hootsuite dashboard, I save the stream and now I can easily stay updated on what is being said and shared during the conference.
Though you could argue that I’m missing a lot from not being at the keynotes and presentations…think Tony Robbins and Richard Branson…the truth is I’m learning a lot from reading the content that people are sharing.
Before conference organizers freak out thinking I’m suggesting you don’t have to attend conferences because you get the same deal from your office. Not saying that at all! All of us should consider attending a couple of conferences each year that help us to grow, develop and expand our business network.
But when you can’t attend…
It is nice to know that you can still benefit from learning and content being shared by those who are attending.
To help you see what’s going on at Dreamforce, I curated this paper to keep you up to date on the buzz happening right now! I also wanted you to have an example of how you can curate content and share cool papers like these with your clients and prospects. This is exactly what I do to stay visible but more importantly, bring something unique to the table that other salespeople are not.
Ask yourself…
How can I leverage the power of Twitter to bring industry conference information back to my clients and prospects?
The answer…do these 5 things.
- Pick a conference
- Locate their hashtag and any other terms being used like the name of the conference.
- Follow the tag in Twitter or in a dashboard tool like Hootsuite.
- Use www.paper.li to easily curate content based on the hashtag or conference name or people at the event. Customize your settings to send morning and evening, which keeps the most current information available to them.
- As part of your follow up with prospects and clients, send them the link to your paper with a brief snippet of 1 or 2 things they will want to read about. No selling by the way. Purely service.
In sales, differentiation matters! Are you different?