Social Media At Tucson’s American Marketing Association

This week I visited Tucson to give my presentation on social media to the Tucson chapter of the American Marketing Association. The chapter has about one hundred members and a very active board.

Jason Zeider, the Marketing Director for Tucson Federal Credit Union was my host for the trip, Jason is the chapter's VP of programming. This is his first year on the board. In addition to inviting me to speak, Jason was also kind enough to arrange a meal the night before with himself and several other board members; including Diane Struse, the chapter's President Elect, and Marketing Manager at Madden Preprint Media and Lynn Perez-Hewitt, VP of Collegiate Relations and former chapter President and also a Consultant for Hewitt Consulting Enterprises.

I had asked for some local southwestern faire so we went to El Charro Café, a really good Mexican restaurant that is celebrating its 85th Anniversary. El Charro Café states on its website that it is the “The Nation's Oldest Mexican Restaurant in continuous operation by the same family”. I went to the speedway location so I did not see the old restaurant downtown. On the recommendation of my hosts I ordered the Carne Seca - which was delicious, if you are in Tucson I’d definitely visit El Charro Cafe. We talked about social media, marketing, chapter operations and local sports and had a really great evening.

On Thursday I gave my presentation to the chapter, we had about 65-70 people attending, and my presentation was well received. I included a slide on avoiding gaffes in social media, basing a lot of the information on that slide on the work I conducted for an article for the Journal of New Communications Research for the Society of New Communications Research earlier this year. As a Research Fellow with the Society several colleagues and I developed a tips sheet, I mentioned a number of these for avoiding social media gaffes in my talk. To me the big issue about avoiding gaffes is to think about training your employees on how to use social media even if your company does not attempt a social media campaign.

Jason had to rearrange the schedule of the speech because my flight left early in the afternoon, so I needed time to get to the airport. I did not get as much chance to answer questions, as I would have liked. However, if any chapter members have follow up questions they are welcome to post them here or send me an email.