2012 was the year I became a “marketer” for the Market. I had already created Facebook and Twitter accounts for the market, but neither of my college degrees prepared me for Social Media. As a result, I attended three social media conferences in 2012, one of which inspired me to start this blog. Two conferences had the feel of a social training event. The vibe and atmosphere of the events encouraged networking and sharing of ideas between participants. The other conference was geared more towards retailers and the social media training was nonexistent. Ironic to me because “social” was part of their tittle.
And now for the FTC disclosure: you should know, I have been invited to attend Social Fresh in exchange for my honest opinion.
Having had such good and not so good experiences at these social media conferences I had to find out more about Social Fresh 2013. Social Fresh is a social media conference coming to Tampa on April 18-19, 2013. This social media event will take place at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel located at 4500 W Cypress Street, Tampa. Hotel rates for the event are $139/night with special promotion code SOC.
What makes Social Fresh 2013 the Social Media Conference to attend?
With over 49k followers on Twitter and 23k fans on Facebook, my interest was peaked. What do these people know about social media training? First, let’s look at the history of Social Fresh. Social Fresh was founded by Jason Keath in 2009 as a social media training company. Their website offers free and paid materials all related to social media training. The Social Media Blog was just listed as the #1 Social Media Blog by the Social Media Examiner. Their flagship event is the Social Fresh one day social media conference. Social Media Today listed Social Fresh 2013 as one of the best 12 social media conference to attend in 2013. As a hopeful “soon to be” small business owner, I was glad to see that 14% of their past attendees were business owners/partners and 11% were small business owners. So far so good.
Secondly, we all like choices. Choices are nice when you are trying to decide what to eat a restaurant. However, when you are attending a conference, making choices between speakers is a completely different thing. I always get that feeling in my gut that no matter what I’ve chosen, I’ve picked the wrong one. Luckily for people like me, Social Fresh is a one-track social media conference. No more worrying whether you picked the wrong speaker or not. Win win.
Lastly, the caliber of speakers and the presentation topics surely have great promise. I’m looking forward to hopefully meeting Ted Rubin from Collective Bias (previously with e.l.f. cosmetics and OpenSky). Ted Rubin is the most followed Chief Marketing Officer on Twitter. Clearly, he is doing something right. Other great speakers I’m looking forward to are Adam Kmiec (Campbells), Morgan Johnston (JetBlue) and Kevin Vine (DunkinDonuts).
In addition to having world known speakers, what makes a great conference is the networking opportunities. Social Fresh has scheduled networking receptions both nights of the conference.
For more information check out Social Media:
Website: www.socialfreshconference.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/socialfresh
Twitter: www.twitter.com/socialfresh
