Social media strategy and marketing for professional speakers

Professional speakers from the National Speakers Association (NSA) or Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (CAPS) should be familiar with Short Circuit Media. In addition to being a sponsor at NSA Influence ’11 in Anaheim and the upcoming NSA convention in Indianapolis in July 2012,  we have also sponsored the recent The CAPS Conventions in Montreal and Toronto.

However, what’s more important is the work we’ve done for members to improve their marketing efforts online.

Partial Client list of Professional Speakers from NSA and CAPS

  • Kurt Shaver
  • John Von Achen
  • Jim Clemmer
  • Dennis Mahoney
  • Dr. Steven Steinberg
  • Rhonda Scharf
  • Bill Dennis
  • Elaine Froese

Our most recent work with Kurt Shaver – www.thesalesfoundry.com – is indicative of the results we can bring to your business.

Using the latest social media integration tools, SEO and multiple lead capture forms, we have transformed Kurt’s whole business in less than 8 weeks!

If you are about to publish, read this post on promoting a book, using microsites and autoresponders. We believe this is the way every book should be marketed.

CASE STUDY 1: The Sales Foundry

Summary: Kurt Shaver is one of America’s top social selling experts – focusing on LinkedIn. However, his site was a poor representation of his online brand. Having been built over 4 years ago, it was neither optimized for traffic or sales. Starting from scratch, we completely rebuilt his online presence and expanded his social media footprint to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. At the same time we employed a search engine optimization strategy to get his content in front of more people.

Our first step was to rebrand and relaunch Kurt Shaver’s site, The Sales Foundry using WordPress.

We began the process by doing an extensive keyword analysis to create content that would attract traffic from Google.

The first thing visitors now see on the home page is a set of rotating banners that promote all of Kurt’s services. You’ll also note how prominent the signup is for his monthly newsletter along with the icons for each one of Kurt’s social media pages.

Above each piece of content on every page we have icons to help people share individual pages across various social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.

And on Kurt’s blog, we’ve replaced the default WordPress comments with Facebook comments to reduce spam and provide another opportunity for people to bring the conversation into the social sphere.

Staying with the blog for a second, we’ve connected the pipes so that whenever Kurt creates a new blog entry, that content is fed out Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn automatically. We used Feedburner for this.

But if someone is interested they can sign up to receive blog postings via email or install a native Android or Blackberry app.

Social media a a great way to let folks share content. But it’s important to have something worth sharing. Here you will see a quiz that allows folks to do a self assessment for the LinkedIn effectiveness.

Other items a lot of folks seem to miss when building a site, that we’ve included:

  • Proper XML sitemap
  • Privacy statement
  • Feedburner RSS feed
  • Copyright
  • Physical address
  • Videos

CASE STUDY 2: Jim Clemmer

Jim Clemmer is a legend in Canadian professional speaking circles. Clemmer literally wrote the book on quality and leadership back in the early 90s and we were able to take his brand and reinvent his online presence, by integrating the latest social marketing tools with his existing content to increase traffic and get his message out to an international audience.
To do this we:

Additionally, we were able to increase distribution of all Jim’s books (including those that were long out of print) to Canada, United States, UK and EU using Lightning Source’s Print on Demand services. As a result Jim’s books are available through online retailers like Amazon, Chapters and Barnes and Noble – with local pricing and shipping costs.

In addition to my all-in Your Virtual Marketing Director program, I’ve also developed a number of budget-conscious options for professional speakers and consultants who would like to kickstart their social media and internet marketing by implementing changes on existing sites.  This can be as simple as integrating Facebook functionality or implementing a full social media strategy.

Click here to view all of the services available – including custom consultations and development.