Last weekend at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre, over 1,000 entrepreneurs and business owners gathered to hear a veritable who’s who of inspirational speakers, business leaders and marketing wizards at the annual SociaLIGHT conference.
The conference has promised high profile speakers from year one and boy has it delivered.
The alumni include Sir Richard Branson, Tony Hsieh and Robin Sharma. And as of this past weekend, they can add Seth Godin to that list.
We’ve distilled everything we heard down to 5 key takeaways for crafting your media message and getting it out there:
- Erin Bury led a rapid fire talk on the importance of building a personal brand. As a founder or CEO, your presence across social media is intricately tied up with your business. Her closing slide sums up how to do social media the right way – “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face”.
- Dan Lok strode out onto the stage, resplendent in a gleaming red suit. Definitely a man who understands how to craft his public image! He dropped knowledge bombs at a rate of approximately one a minute. Our key takeaway for fashioning your communications strategy? Promotion over creation. Meaning you can tweak and refine and finesse for months or years, but if no one knows about you no one is buying.
- If there’s a man after our own hearts, it’s Jairek Robbins. One of the sayings around our office is Clarity Through Action and his call to arms was to start getting seriously serious about having an action bias. A comms campaign can and should be an iterative process. Define a goal, create the strategy to reach that goal, define the tactics you’ll use, rinse-repeat.
- Bruce Poon-Tip has created a company with “PR-ability” built into it. G Adventures is now the world’s largest adventure travel company on the planet and not only do they have thousands of happy clients, their revolutionary approach to travel is changing policy on a global scale. Your PR take-away? Doing good is good for business.
- Seth Godin. He’s a marketing master and should be required reading. Listening to Seth speak we were reminded once more about the power of stories to convey complex messages and engage your audience. How does that impact your PR plans? Think beyond the obvious. “Business launches a thing” is not a story. Challenge yourself to think about the problem your product or service solves or how it’s part of a larger trend.
Did you attend the conference? Tell us on Twitter what your key takeaways where.
