Life at a Conference the Real, Authentic and Sustainable way…

If you follow me on Twitter you know that recently on a moment’s notice I spoke to about 150 people on the topic of social media…what follows are my speaking notes….

1. I am Jim Raffel and most of you know me as a “color guy,” after all, my company ColorMetrix does sell the best color verification and process control solutions on the planet (still had to sneak in a shameless plug – right?).

2. Today, however,  I’d like to share my social media success with you.

3. Did anyone besides me tweet or update their Facebook/LinkedIn status during this morning’s sessions? (Several hands got raised – I should have suggested a hash tag at this moment).

4. I would have blogged about the session right from the audience, but my wife (a/k/a “the grammar police”) now insists on proofreading every post on my blog (Not only do you now know who wears the pants in our family, but you also know this post has been proofread! AND I got quite a laugh at the proofreader’s expense.)

5. I even found our awesome keynote speaker Tom Carroll (Executive VP of HR at RR Donnelley) on LinkedIn and requested to connect with him. (Later in the day conference organizers asked me to create a LinkedIn group for the conference – um, ah, gee you want me to do that? – This falls in the “be careful what you ask for because you might get it” category.)

6. When you enter the world of Twitter (and you will) please speak your 140 characters at a time with a real, authentic and sustainable voice. Don’t say what you think we want to hear, say what’s on you mind, tell us what you ate for breakfast. It’s up to me as your follower (and you as mine) to separate the signal (the tweets that matter to you) from the noise (all the tweets you ignore).

7. Let me close by suggesting that you never try to “catch up” on Twitter. If a tweet you missed several hours ago was that good, someone else will retweet it. It’s one of the aspects of Twitter that is really cool – good content survives and reappears over and over again.

I managed to say all that in two minutes and I did ad lib a little as well. Over the course of the next six hours I was approached and engaged by SIX high level people at companies I do business with (or want to do business with or want additional business with in some cases). This is important….they sought me out and wanted to talk in an engaging way – why? because I talked about my passion with a real, authentic and sustainable voice.

This gets better. ColorMetrix is my job and I did not have to quit my job to follow and speak about my passion. You don’t either. If your passion is fishing, then start blogging about fishing. Start tweeting about fishing. Connect socially on the topic with lots of people. Guess what? You are going to discover that a whole bunch of people you do business with love to fish and even better they love to talk about fishing. Read slowly…this is really important point #2 – people do business with people they like.

So, by writing a real, authentic and sustainable blog about your passion (fishing perhaps) you will be connecting with people in your industry who like to fish. I’m certain in no time your colleagues will be seeking you out during professional social events. Why? because they want to talk about fishing too and they know that you are an expert on the subject. (warning: YOU never get to call yourself an expert – it will go to your head)

Now, please go and start blogging or tweeting about your passion! Then, please come back here and post a comment with links to your blog so I can go read it. (You could email too like several people have but then we don’t all get to come look at your blog).