#SwimBiz Conference 2015: Takeaways

#SwimBiz conference at the Olympic Training Center in ColoradoBack in the day when I was a Director for an international association or two, I got to travel quite a bit on my employer’s dime. It was always the right amount of travel – enough to feel comfortable zipping through airport security, and not so much that I forgot my home address. I left that job and that lifestyle four years ago. When you’re self-employed, the idea of work travel suddenly becomes much more costly and much less glamorous. Zipping around the beltway to meet with clients or metroing into the city for a business meeting doesn’t have quite the panache as twice-yearly conferences in Las Vegas.

My dry streak ended last month, however, when I got the opportunity to travel to Colorado Springs for the first annual #SwimBiz conference, a marketing and social media conference hosted by USA Swimming. You know that when a conference incorporates a hashtag into its name, it’s serious about social media (and yes, we did watch this video).

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Practicing What You Preach: Social Media Outreach

This afternoon I had a conference call with a client, and I was advising her on social media marketing. We were discussing how and when to create Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages. Of course my advice has remained consistent: if you’re not there, you’re missing out on potential clients! Seems silly, then, that I was lacking a few basic social media pages too.

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2012 London Olympics, and how big events can help even the smallest organization

I spent much of the past two weeks working on a new website design for Tsunami Swimming. I originally designed their first website back in 2003 using frames, re-designed it in 2005 with some help from Dreamweaver, and finally launched a powerful, SEO-ready and social networking-savvy Joomla! site last weekend.

While I worked on the Tsunami website, I kept one eye on the 2012 London Olympics. Not only am I a huge fan of the Summer games, but as a life-long swimmer I couldn’t turn away from action in the pool! Of course, that helped immensely when it came time to write good content for Tsunami’s site. Being able to experience something as awesome as the Olympics this year is a tremendous help when it comes to writing compelling copy. Tsunami needed their audience to get excited about the sport, and what better way than to share stories of success by Team USA?

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