Welcome, I am Kristi Perron with Georgia Printco and I will be your Social Media Safari tour guide. Over the course of this year I aim to help you lay the foundation in a connected and profitable social networking endeavor. There is a sea of business that is virtually at your disposal, so allow me to give you the tools and resources necessary to reel them in.

Social media is a low-cost/no-cost avenue for a business to generate networking connections and marketing relations with customers, the local community, and potential customers.  You have probably already either heard about the social media hype or have begun to dabble in its vast presence with a twitter, facebook, or linkedin account, but what really are you doing and why are you doing it?  Well, the overall goal is to take this networking connection and create value in your online presence that will generate community with those networks that will ultimately result in increased business.  To produce this result it is necessary to take an active role in your online community to facilitate the relationships you already have as well as the relationships you wish to gain. Today’s consumer, specifically, 55.6 million adults, which is about 1/3rd of the entire US population use social networks regularly at least once monthly, are the same customers that walk into your business and it is those 55.6 million people that are utilizing the web to find answers to their daily purchase needs. Two-thirds of people in the US looking for local services turn to the internet over other services such as the phone book. It is critical that your business is properly represented with an online medium or you may end up risking a vital connection with your customers.

Over the next few months Georgia Printco and I will be going over the tools you will need to connect with those 55.6 million online customers using online social networking as well as tips on how to enhance the online connections you have already established. These tutorials will include basic connective information for networking sites such as twitter, facebook, and linkedin as well as how to build other interactive web-based solutions such as blogs and website enhancements.  I will be your online tour guide, so feel free to ask questions, just don’t feed the animals