An enjoyable afternoon with Maine’s women State Farm agents

I had the pleasure yesterday of speaking to a group of women State Farm agents from around the state of Maine. We met at their offices in South Portland. 

I talked about Conversational Marketing which refers to the way today’s consumers want us to communicate with them. Social media provides us with a method of carrying on an open and online dialogue about our businesses or our lives in general. That’s the way the world is going. No longer do consumers want us to talk ‘at’ them, they want us to talk ‘with’ them in an equal, two-way dialogue.

I then talked about press releases which are the traditional tool of communicating with the media. We discussed how it’s important to establish a relationship with the local media so you know how they want to receive their releases. Most media people like to get releases sent by e-mail, however sometimes it works best to actually walk into the local newspaper offices and hand deliver a release. Every journalist is different so it’s really important to find out each person’s preferences and work with them as individuals. We didn’t talk about deadlines, but I wanted to point out to this group that if a reporter is on deadline with another story, they won’t have time to chat with you and you’ll need to quickly take care of business. However if you meet a journalist at a social event or a community event, you can take the time to get to know him or her personally.

Then we got into talking about social media. We showed a couple of pages on LinkedIn and I talked about how powerful it is in buiding your network of contacts. You know the expression “well connected”?  It’s always a good thing to be well connected, particularly if you are selling a service like insurance. LinkedIn helps you to connect with others in a powerful way.

Finally we talked about blogging. I showed them my blog. Some of them asked how a blog could help you with your business and they wondered who would read a blog?  I explained that it’s an online ‘journal’ of thoughts and activities. It provides me with a forum to share what I’m learning about my profession. I try to make it interesting by providing a description of the places I go and things I do. Also I tie in the people I meet along the way by linking to them from the blog. One person I met yesterday is Elisa Doucette who works for State Farm in Scarborough as an Agency Field Service Trainee. Sheis totally clued in to the ins and outs of social media.  I tried to provide a link to Elisa’s LinkedIn page but the URL is ridiculously long, so you’ll have to go to LinkedIn and search for her name.  

Another thing we talked about is being sure you present yourself professionally online, even if you have a personal MySpace or FaceBook page. If you are a professional, and you show yourself drunk at a party on the dance floor on your personal page, people are going to see that and make a judgement about you. That’s not to say we cannot show ourselves as humans with full and rich lives, but some people fail to use good judgement in the online space.

I’m going to post a link to my PowerPoint from yesterday as soon as I can get a hold of Julie, my web designer, so check back soon!

Thanks to the Maine women of State Farm for including me in your program yesterday! I especially wanted to thank Susan Terhune, the State Farm agent from Farmington, Maine, who invited me to speak.