Evo Terra was firing rounds of ‘measurement’.

Jason Baer was his usual self –provocative, helpful, and making some terrific observations of where we are heading.

As with last year’s Social Media for Business Conference, (see post here) now better known as SMAZ, this year’s conference had some outstanding panels.

The event kicked off with Sitewire president, Greg Chapman making  statement that was more of less repeated at every session: “I am not a social media expert.”

Followed by a “however…”

So in the company of these non-experts, I learned some amazing things, and confirmed a lot of the approaches I’ve been taking. Here are the ones that I liked:

• Don’t treat Facebook like the Yellow Pages.
• Listen first, tweet, post later. Use Social Media as a listening post.
• Be cognizant of the ‘channel agnostic customer.’
• Google handles hyphens better than underscores, so be watchful when you write headlines, tags.
• “Social media is free” is a huge misconception. There’s a human resource cost attached to it. Social media is not a strategy – it is what you embed into your Comms strategy, marketing strategy, PR strategy.
• Google’s new search engine, Caffeine, will knock your socks off. Even if you’re in flip-flops 🙂
• Content isn’t king. Optimized content is king!
• Start with small things. If your boss or client wants to start tweeting, facebooking, start with small goals before the big-hairy-audacious ones
• There’s a difference between a News Feed and a Life Feed on Facebook.
• Train others freely. Give away secrets. The rising tide lifts all boats.
• Differentiate between Goals and Tactics. people mix these up all the time.
• Just like the way they confuse Strategies and Tactics, I suppose.

SMAZ also turns out to be a great way to connect with the people we only meet virtually here in the Phoenix area (I met many of our readers from ValleyPRBlog), whether no matter where we are on the analog-to-digital scale.

And lest we forget the person behind the curtain who makes this happen, I want to tip my hat to Fred VonGraf.