It’s safe to say there are lots of smart marketers in the ag industry who are trying to figure out how social networking fits into their plans.  The big turnout and great questions at our NAMA session prove that.  I had a great time being on the panel with Dave Coustan and Kyle Flaherty (and with moderator Chuck Zimmerman) — and I especially enjoyed the interaction with people who weren’t even in the room, but were participating via Twitter.  I promised a detailed recap, but this won’t be a comprehensive summary.  Feel free to add a comment if there’s another issue you want to mention.  (AgNewsCenter also posted a summary of the Tweets during the session.)

As I said in my opening summary, social media is about figuring out what information people want to receive from you, and how they want to receive it. And only after you answer those questions can you determine how using those tools can improve your business. Here are a few of the highlights as we addressed those issues:

Measurement & ROI
Among the 30 respondents who returned a pre-session survey, the overwhelming concern was tracking results and measuring ROI.   All four of us agree that the first step is to measure the right thing. Don’t go into a campaign expecting huge numbers, when you really want to reach 200 people (dealers, or industry influencers, or some other relatively small group).

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Copyblogger has a good post today about using content to find customers.  Bottom line: don’t think you can just write a blog and have customers flock to your website.  You need to do some marketing along with the content.  A couple of highlights…

• “Contrary to popular belief, you do want marketing messages in your birthday cake content. But they have to be palatable, subtle messages.”
• “…create an audience of buyers, not just fans. You begin to call on your copywriting bag of tricks, adding more persuasive elements to your writing.”

The point here is that your content is about establishing trust, demonstrating authority, and helping the people you most want to engage.  But at some point, you have to let people know that you have something to sell them.  If you’ve done your job right on the content side, some of them will be eager to buy it.

Sonia Simone at Copyblogger writes about how providing good content to people can improve your business, and she’s come up with three essentials of breakthrough content marketing. In summary:

• Make sure everything you give your audience solves one of their problems or entertains them.
• Present your content in a way that’s personable and show’s your trustworthy.
• Don’t try to sell, sell, sell all the time.

Sonia goes into more detail on her post, and it’s worth a read.

I just got back from Atlanta, where I was part of a panel on social media and agricultural marketing, at the annual NAMA conference.  It turned into a great live example of the power of online networking, using Twitter to involve people both inside and outside the room. 

But we talked about lots more than Twitter, and I’ll be recapping some of those things here over the next day or two.  A few points of preview:

• Ag marketers, like all marketers, are looking for better measurement. And the good news is that measurement is built into a lot of social media tools.
• ROI is the #1 concern — and there’s positive news on that front, too. I want to cover that in more depth in my recap.
• And moderator Chuck Zimmerman, along with fellow panelists Dave Coustan, and Kyle Flaherty are really smart guys who know a lot about social networking and how it fits into an overall marketing plan.  They contributed good answers to questions from the audience in the room and on Twitter, and I’ll be highlighting some of those answers, too.

In the meantime, check out this Twitter search result for some of the things we discussed during the session, along with some responses from me and the others.

Services like Friendfeed make it easy to pull together information from a lot of different sources. So if you’re looking for a way to become an authority in your field, find the 5-10 top sources in that field, and pull their feeds into one location — on your own website. You’ll earn the goodwill of those other sources by linking to their content. And you’ll gradually become the 1-stop shop for anyone looking for information in your field.
The widget above is an aggregation of news from Missouri sources, including the Twitter feeds of some individual reporters who are covering the legislature. In an hour, you can create exactly the same thing for yourself, whether you write about child advocacy, health care, or sports.