As I mentioned before, the eBAM department recently attended Social Media Mix 2012, a social media conference that took place in downtown Toronto.
Organized by local company Jugnoo, the event featured renowned experts and speakers like Amber Mac, Matt Hixson, Danny Brown, and even a police officer, Tim Burrows, who has been doing a great job of building the Toronto police’s social media presence.
Sgt. Tim Burrows has been doing such a great job on social media, many marketers could take a lesson or two from him.
The last speaker to go on stage was Gary Varneychuk. According to Wikipedia, Gary is “a video blogger, co-owner and director of operations of a wine retail store, and an author and public speaker on the subjects of social media, brand building and e-commerce.”
According to my team, Gary was awesome (as were many of the other speakers). He had a line my team loved — “What’s the ROI of your mother?” This line doesn’t mean to diminish the importance of tracking results and obtaining concrete benefits from social media (something I’m a big believer in).
Rather, it means that some benefits of social media cannot always be measured, such as creating a feeling of goodwill and transparency and helping create powerful word-of-mouth.
That’s why we sell so many of our clients on social media — because it helps provide their communities with a personality and a platform that no traditional means of advertising could hope to emulate.
What are your thoughts on social media? Are you — or your clients — still not sold?
JohnAmardeil.com 
Aug 22, 2012 @ 14:24:00
Hi there John,
Thanks for the recap and featuring our Social Mix event. It was a great day all round, and we were thrilled to attract the calibre of speakers that the event had.
Like you say, ROI of social media is much more than straightforward financials. Yes, they’re definitely key – but to get to that stage, you need to have some kind of rapport, and there’s no better way to build this than with great and honest use of social media.
Thanks again, and we’d love to have you pop by our offices for a look at what’s coming next from Jugnoo.
Cheers!
Danny Brown
VP, Partner Strategy
Jugnoo