A Closet Full of Great Ideas

I ran two great workshops on the basics of social media today at the Plato's Closet Convention in Las Vegas, and I tweeted pics of the groups during the sessions. Here's a shot of one of the groups.

One of the great things about these events is that even though I am teaching a class, I also end up learning a lot. One of the biggest challenges facing small businesses, and franchises like this, is that the level of social media knowledge varies greatly from person to person. And all of these people, no mater their social media savvy, are all busy. So the objective today was to help them understand the social media landscape, rules of the road and the tools at their disposal. No small task.

One of the things I encouraged the group to do, especially the newbies, was to not jump head first into the deep-end of the social media pool. Start slow... get your toes wet. Start to surf the various sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs. See what's being said and done. Get an idea of how it works. Get the lay of the land. Once you've done that, you'll have a better idea of where you want to start in social media.