I’ve been a Twitterer since 13 Jan 2009 17:44, says my profile, although I’ve really only been active for the past month or so. As I close off this month I thought I’d take a moment (borrowed from my bookkeeping time) to reflect on how social media has helped me this month.

First, I think the participation in my Business Leaders Summit tomorrow would be about half of what it is going to be if I hadn’t spread the word via Twitter and Facebook. I’ve got a nice lineup, blending entrepreneurs and agencies, and just recently heard from the publisher of Victoria’s SNAP Magazine who’d like to come to participate and cover the event.

Traffic to this site was actually higher in February according to Google Analytics, but I think that may be due to my slower posting here this month (due to high volumes of work being done), and partially due to getting a Feedburner feed that works (or not, since there seems to be only 2 subscribers to the RSS feed… gotta work on that). I need to sort out a way to combine my Feedburner stats with actual site traffic to give me a clear idea of how many people are reading, and how often.

The BIG win, however: Just this morning I came in to the office to find a voice mail from a new prospect who saw my ad on Facebook, clicked through to my website, then followed up with a phone call to me. That’s the FIRST time I’ve actually had a directly attributable response from an advertisement. Then again, I have only placed maybe three paid ads in my entire 6 years of being in this business, as I much prefer the public relations approach to getting attention… media coverage and writing columns. But still… Facebook Ads for the win!

While keeping up with the Twittering and Facebooking, I’m going to try to add another web-based business tool to my repertoire this month. I’ve long needed a proper CRM system to track opportunities connected to contacts, so I’m shopping around for a web-based CRM system. So far I’ve tried BatchBook which is very nifty as a contact management tool, but lacks the opportunity-management functionality I need. I’ve looked at SugarCRM (because I love things open-source) but it frustrates me that they haven’t got a free single-user web-based account. The Community Edition seems to need me to download it and install it on my OWN webserver, but I want it to be hosted for me, because who has time to manage their own damn PHP servers these days?

Okay… I’ve probably bored y’all silly and you’re asking “Where’s the next graphic facilitation?”. It’s coming. Patience, grasshopper.