This is a live blog of the September 2011 Manchester Social Media Surgery that took place at MDDA offices, Portland Street, Manchester from 5:30pm-7:30pm.

If you were there and spot any omissions or additions, please shout out in the comments.

The theme for the September 2011 Social Media Surgery is:
‘Combining Twitter with a Business Blog’

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Cross posted from our social commerce industry blog SocialShopkeeper.com:

Jeremy Waite (@jeremywaite on Twitter), Head of Social Media at Phones4U and author of ‘Sex, Brands & Rock’n'Roll‘ shares some invaluable tips on Facebook commerce and fan engagement and its impact on the Phones4u brand.

Coming at a time when UK retail brand social commerce case studies are thin on the ground, the full slide deck, titled “How do you develop a conversation strategy?” and delivered at last month’s Figaro Social Media Marketing Conference is incredibly illuminating.

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Inspired by a recent article by digital analyst and sociologist Brian Solis, I’ve been going through our service offering at Real Fresh TV and realised that I don’t ask our customers, blog readers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers enough!

It boils down to this:

As a business, we exist to demonstrate how social media enables progress on business priorities and objectives.

If I don’t know what your business priorities and objectives are, I can’t help you.

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Two North West retail brands, Bacup-based Wynsors World Of Shoes and Bolton-based Appliances Online are leading the way in social commerce.

Both have recently set up fully transactional shops on Facebook to sell directly to online shoppers and benefit from lower marketing and operational costs, joining retailers like JD Sports, ASOS, Heinz and Autoglass.

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I’m thrilled to announce the publication of our first eBook on social commerce, How To Sell Anything On Facebook.

Want to set up a shop or storefront on Facebook but don’t know how to begin?

Confused about how to start with F-commerce (Facebook commerce)?

Look no further. (more…)

I’ve been monitoring the social commerce industry and have been amazed by recent developments.

The UK’s fastest growing online retailer ASOS, a Top 5 UK online retailer in terms Facebook fans is adding fans on the world’s largest social network at the rate of 280,000 a month!

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As a bit of a veteran of Manchester digital networking events, it gave me great pleasure to attend the official launch of Mobile Monday Manchester yesterday at Dukes 92 in Castlefield.

With the mobile web playing such a big role in our lives, the timing of the event could not be more perfect.  Manchester needs something like Mobile Monday massively and I was very grateful for the invite by organisers (and client) Apadmi.

Mobile Monday (MoMo) events were started in Finland in 2000.

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This post is the second in a series assessing the return on investment (ROI) on a live social media marketing campaign for our client North Star Delicatessen.

We’re running a digital marketing campaign for the Manchester-based family run business which has been operating for eight years to promote its new Supper Club, a collaboration with two other independent businesses that sees local food lovers sitting down with the local butcher and fishmonger once a month to enjoy a gourmet meal made from the region’s finest produce.

The introductory post laid down the methodology we are following in this live case study which sets out how we help businesses achieve sustainable social media ROI.

This post is about the strategy behind the Supper Club marketing campaign. However, before we delve into campaign specifics, here is a reminder of the fundamentals:

Campaign Objective: To increase the conversion rate of leads-to-orders (more…)

As Group owner, I’m thinking of switching the closed Manchester Social Media Surgery Group on LinkedIn to an open Group, meaning all past discussions will be tucked away in a members-only archive and all future discussions will be visible and fully searchable and shareable on the Web.

The Manchester Social Media Surgery Group on the world’s leading social network for professionals has grown organically to eclipse numbers on its Social Media Manchester counterpart and now boasts 90 members compared to Social Media Manchester’s 60.

To be honest, this has taken me by surprise!

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There has been much discussion on social media marketing return on investment (ROI) of late.

Manchester, ever the hotbed of digital debate hosted a fiery contest on the topic at this month’s The Feed event which inspired this hardnosed assessment by Ian Pettigrew over at Kingfisher Coaching.

Ian’s argument, that ROI calculations should be grounded in the realities of the sum total benefits to an organisation chime with a recent report by the New York Times who have assessed the common myths businesses should consider before diving into social media.

With the average social media campaign costing up to $210,000 for bigger US brands, as reported by a May SocialTimes infographic, this debate is not going to go away.

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