With 18 sessions over a three-week period, I’m finding it a challenge to fit them all into my schedule, so if you were hoping that I’d blog about each one, you may be disappointed. I will, however, do my best to let you know what you’ve missed by not signing up, with the help of some of the other participants.

Since my last post, six more sessions have taken place:

Optimizing Your Facebook Fan Page for Profits with Mari Smith

This was fantastic, and I actually did cover this one over on my other blog, Your Organizing Business, because it tied right in with a presentation I made earlier this week.

5 Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success with Jason Falls

Another great session! Jason began by pointing out that to measure your ROI on social media, like anything else, you first need to have specific, measurable goals and objectives, then develop strategies to help you achieve those goals, and make a to-do list based on those strategies. Your goals will depend on the reasons you’re using social media; some of the most common ones are:

• Branding and awareness
• Community building
• Customer service
• Research and development
• Direct sales

He gave excellent examples of businesses who are successfully using social media in each of the above areas, and suggested some free and low cost monitoring tools, including www.socialmention.com and www.trackur.com.

How a Chicago Pizza Franchise Used Social Media to Create Raving Customers (A Case Study) with Ramon De Leon

Knowing that I couldn’t fit all the sessions into my schedule, I decided to skip this one, thinking that the strategies used by a pizza franchise would not be relevant to my business or those of my clients, most of whom also run small home-based businesses. When I read Nelson Wee’s write-up, I realized that I was mistaken, so I’m glad I’ll have the chance to listen to the recording later on.

All three of the above sessions were also covered in Randy Duermyer’s Day 2 Wrapup: Social Media Success Summit 2010 (#SMSS10).

Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn: The Business Social Network with Lewis Howes

It’s hard to say whether which was more valuable: this one or Mari Smith’s session on Facebook. Both were jam-packed with information that I can’t wait to put to use.

Lewis Howes confirmed my suspicion that most of us just aren’t using LinkedIn to its full potential. He said that it may not be the largest social network, but it is the strongest, and that one of its most powerful features is the ability to export your connections to Outlook and other email applications – something I had not realized. He also stressed the importance of optimizing our profiles by using appropriate keywords in our headlines, current and past work experience, summary, and specialties.

Unfortunately, because there were so many people trying to access LinkedIn during the session, we knocked it offline.

How Big Businesses Are Leveraging the Power of Social Media – A Panel Discussion with John Bernier from Best Buy, Marla Erwin from Whole Foods, and Sarah Molinari from Home Depot

I passed on this one, for the same reason that I missed Ramon De Leon’s, but I may listen to the recording at some later date.

3 Reasons You Need a YouTube Marketing Strategy (and Tips to Help You Generate Results) with Greg Jarboe

I’m not a huge fan of online video myself, because I’m a fast reader and I don’t have the patience to sit and watch a video when I could read the information more quickly, but I’m seeing it used more and more, so I was quite eager to learn more about YouTube. For some reason, this particular session was much shorter than the others so it wasn’t very in-depth, but I did learn some important tips about optimizing a video for YouTube search, which is quite different than optimizing for Google.

For those wanting to learn more, Greg recommended YouTube’s Creator’s Corner blog or his own book, YouTube and Video Marketing an Hour a Day.

Randy Duermyer also covered these three sessions in his Day 3 Wrapup: Social Media Success Summit 2010 (#SMSS10).

I’ve learned so much already that it’s hard to believe that we’re less than halfway in! I’ll be back next week with some more highlights.