Perhaps it’s coincidence, or just serendipitous timing, but the write up of our social media seminar is in the Guernsey Press today – reminding me that I was going to blog about it.

Obviously there is a fair bit of good content online already – if you want to know what we talked about – check out our twitter feed from the 8th / 9th October.

I’m a very keen internet citizen, so when the opportunity came up to put together a session for the CIPR group over here and in Jersey, I jumped at the chance. The brief – to bring someone over with the right expertise, who could talk to the two local groups about social media tools.

So I called an old friend, Andy Gibson.

Our session ranged over a lot of topics (full feed is after the jump), the most common example was twitter, something we use here at Orchard Towers to tell people about our company. One thing Andy said that stuck was that to succeed in promoting yourself online, you need to be remarkable – as in, you need to say (or do) things that people will remark on, will pass on to their friends with ‘hey – saw this and thought it was interesting’ to go with it.

In Jersey we, well, Matt at @wearewebreality, coined the term ‘downsourcing’. The basic premise of downsourcing is that you assign a task (in this case updating twitter) to the person with the most time, rather than with the most expertise (people with expertise tend to have more demands on their time!). I’m sure everyone sees the danger there.

Above all, I think we came to the conclusion that anyone can ‘do’ social media, provided they are social – friendly, responsive and polite for example. Even if you are a commercial, or corporate, entity, people will still engage with you if you take this idea to heart and have a conversation with them instead of pushing advertising at them 24/7. If it is clear there is a personality behind the brand, you’ll be surprised at how close you can get to your customers or clients.

More photos and links after the jump…