I really enjoyed speaking at the National Housing Federation #fedcomms event yesterday, in our session there were two 15 min talks, one from me and then Jamie & Michelle from Freebridge community housing followed by a panel discussion.

Here are my slides from the event, the rest are on housing.org.uk

The discussion was especially interesting, some good questions and I carried on some of the conversations through lunch.

I feel we covered the brief well, with only 15 mins the goal was to encourage people to start thinking about some of the issues and not to try and comprehensively cover all legislation etc

+ sorry to those that had to stand at the back!

Inspired by my favourite bit of course feedback from my training session on Wed:

Excellent seminar this morning on Social Media by Luke @socialtech I’d recommend his straight forward nongeek approach (@poolefamilylaw)

…I thought I’d share with you all one of my secret special training methods…

Any time I use a “buzzy word” (yuk), technical term without explanation or unnecessary acronym… I invite my clients/audience/hecklers to point it out. I keep a score, then donate £1 to charity for each one.

On Wednesday I raised £1, this make me happy.

That makes £8 in the last few months, which I’m donating to the relief effort in Pakistan + a bit more I’ll chuck in myself.

At first it was quite hard but as time’s gone on I think this simple thing has made a big difference to my workshops.

Sssshhh don’t tell anyone, ok?

Its always good to hear of examples of how businesses use LinkedIn for real (and tangible) benefit.

Take this example:

One of the other members asked a question about what people thought was the best product in a certain field. 4 out of the 5 responses recomended my clients product. From a PR point of view that is great, but it also enabled me to identify the person asking the question, the company they work for and their office location.

How valuable can that be?

excerpt from weetpr

Now that’s good to hear. I bang on about using Q+A on LinkedIn to generate interest, promote yourself as a centre of authority and to get leads in my seminars.

…I can’t take direct credit for this particular lead, but the blogger had attended my seminar in November…

Which leads me nicely to mention my next seminar on Social Media Marketing (exploiting social networking to the benefit of your business) as one of three speakers at the Original Business Thinking Event on 29th Jan.

So if you’d like to learn more about how you can use social networking in your business, follow the link above or drop me an email.