Business North West 2009: Harnessing the Social Media Beast

Over the last few weeks, Tweeters, Bloggers, Facebook and Myspace users have ridden their impossibly tall horses into battle with Jan Moir and Trafigura / Carter-Ruck, and on both occasions have achieved a sort of victory.

In both cases the public outcry, largely facilitated by Twitter and other forms of Social Media, resulted in something of an about-turn in policy for Trafigura / Carter-Ruck and a removal of surrounding advertising and a change of headline for Jan Moir's Stephen Gately piece.

We couldn't ask for a better example of the power of Social Media to influence vast numbers of people and to effect real change.

Business North West 2009

It's this power that more and more businesses are hoping to harness as a method of promoting products, providing real-time customer feedback and pushing related businesses and offers. However, it's an extremely thin tightrope to walk - Social Media is intended as a means of socialising; if your business starts using it to promote itself and push advertising on unwilling recipients, you could be in for a backlash akin to the one experienced by Habitat earlier this year.

At this year's Business North West conference, we are hoping to demonstrate how Social Media can be used for your business via an experiment which hopes to take the conference online, creating a medium for conference-goers to upload live comments, images and videos relating to the speakers, exhibitions and events.

The following accounts are those which have been set up, whether by I-COM or another individual or business involved in the event, specifically for Business North West:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Facebook
• FriendFeed
• Blogsome
• Xanga
• SlideShare
• Tumblr
• LiveJournal
• Wordpress Blog
• WetPaint
• Blogspot
• Scribd

We’ll be inviting attendees and their colleagues back in the office to contribute using extra PCs installed at the I-COM booth, iPhones, Netbooks, Blackberries and Laptops.

Growth through Innovation

The Business North West conference is now in its third year yet has already established itself as the North West’s most important business networking event. It is this kind of innovation that will see it continue to grow, and will also serve to demonstrate the huge potential of Social Media as a positive force for your business.

Business North West 2009 takes place at Manchester Central on the 28th and 29th of October. For more information, visit our events page or the official Business North West website.