I recently was asked to do a presentation at the Association of Small Business Development Centers (ASBDC) Annual Conference in San Diego. My presentation was "Building Your SBDC with Social Media". I based the presentation on what we have done in Columbus to build our local SBDC. It has been quite a journey over the past three years but our social media trial and error strategy has allowed us to build something pretty cool that I hoped could, at minimum, serve as inspiration to other SBDCs that they can do the same thing. As my friend Herb Lawrence, Director of the Arkansas State ASBTDC, says "We should be eating our own dog food and using the on-line tools we recommend to our clients". The presentation followed a history of the evolution of our on-line strategy from the days where we were looking for an effective alternative to expensive direct mail, media advertising and ineffective channel partner strategies to today. As I put the presentation together it became very clear that even without knowing what we were doing we were building a community of people interested in the same thing
we were, entrepreneurship and business development. From this blog to our SBDC Free Advice on-line community we were building content to drive entrepreneurship. It wasn't about pushing workshops and training it was about bringing together like minded people that we could bring our resources to and help them grow businesses in central Ohio and beyond.
I'm always amazed that more SBDCs and economic development entities don't use social media. SBDCs are grant funded and to be honest public funds/grants typically don't provide much money for marketing so social media is perfect. I guess the lack of adoption is because many of these entities, while very good at what they do, are often time crunched and unable to spend the time to figure out how to implement an effective on-line strategy for themselves. The funny thing is that it is not uncommon to find an SBDC consultant at a live networking event discussing business needs with area businesses and quite frankly on-line social media is really the same thing ~ remember when we used to call it social networking?
On a side note if you look at the picture of me at the presentation you will see that it is kind of dark. Five minutes before I was to present there was a massive power outage that affected five million people over two states including 1.5 million people in the San Diego area. Doing a presentation on implementing on-line strategies without a computer, presentation or access to the internet and in the dark was not optimal but we persevered and made it work. Below you will find the presentation that was to be delivered so if you were in the session you can access it here and if you weren't there turn off the lights and pretend you were there.
Now is the time. If you are an SBDC get on-line and meet your clients. You'll find it is easier than you think and far more valuable than you ever imagined.
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