I am extremely flattered to have been invited to speak at this months Public Relations Institute of New Zealand event ‘challenges and oppourtunities of social media‘ alongside some really smart people. In the event invitation we are described as some of New Zealand’s leading social media practitioners (their words, not mine). Wow.
I suspect that the invitation came mostly as a result of my work on twitter for Orcon. I would love to explain that my success engaging with customers via twitter was the result of rigorous planning and a well thought out strategy, but the truth is that it kind of happened by accident.
I set up the account almost a year ago (after doing my own thing on twitter for about a year before that) mostly just to reserve the account in case we did want to do something with it one day. I had been talking to the tech guys about using it as a channel for system status updates.
Then one day I accidentally added Polemic as the result of an account mix up, and the cat was out of the bag.
Since then it has become a really powerful tool for engaging with customers, and a key part of our social media strategy, but it still makes me laugh when I think about its inauspicious beginnings. It is just one part of our strategy, and I think our success with social media has really come from a long term commitment to the conversation with existing and potential customers across the web, from forums to facebook, blogs to Bebo. Ok, I lied. We haven’t really done anything on Bebo.
Anyway, I will be talking more about that at the event, so come along if you want to hear all about it.
So, a big thanks to all these wonderful people for getting involved in the conversation with me on twitter:
