Marcelo Calbucci

    Yesterday Matt Hulett and Dean Jutilla from mPire (the makers of WidgetBucks) put together a nice all-afternoon event for a few entrepreneurs in Seattle. It was just 15 people, which included me, Andy Liu (founder of BuddyTV), Ben Elowitz (founder of Wetpaint), Chris Pirillo (you know Chris), Brier Dudley (Seattle Times), Michelle Goldberg (Ignition) and more.

    Neil Patel, Chris Pirillo, Brier Dudley, Blake Cahill (Visible Technologies), Jim Kukral were the speakers.

    There is so much going on right now, that even for a guy like me that read about 150 blogs per day, is hard to understand the impact of each new Social Media site.

    The summary from a 30,000 foot view is this:

• StumbleUpon traffic is better than digg
• Digg traffic helps with link building campaigns
• TechCrunch matters? A few think it doesn't anymore, a few think it still does. The question is: it matters to what purpose?
• YouTube video drive opportunities!

    There was a demo of Visible Technologies, but not only the demo didn't go so well (the screen was too small), but Visible is offering services to Fortune 500, so it really doesn't apply to start up. The same thing I felt from Neil Patel's advice. When asked about startups using Social Media well, he told a story about GM. GM?

    A lot of the advices given are not going to work for us, or the other companies present there. Companies that have between 3 and 30 employees are not really at a position to allocate a full time person dedicated to understand and make better use of Social Media (although this is what Neil suggested). And we can't also afford big production budgets to get a ticket in the viral video lottery. Wetpaint did a few viral videos... Not so successful at the end.

    I like more Chris Pirillo's advice on YouTube video. Just get a camera and record it. It sounds way more down to earth advice, versus creating a master-plan on how to create a viral video.

    Anyway, at the end of the day, each startup needs to understand their own priorities, limitations and budget, so, there really isn't one size fits all on Social Media.   

    And just a final note, I think it's very smart of mPire to bring influencial bloggers and entrepreneurs building on Social Media together. Why? Because that's the market they are going after with WidgetBucks.