Had the good fortune this week to attend the Fall Invitational held on behalf of the Ingram Micro VentureTech Network, since I will be handling a project for them over the coming months.

Sat in on a great session about the value of social media for high-tech channel companies and wanted to share a couple of the comments made during the session held by Matt Singley, senior director of social media strategy for M80, a firm that counts the likes of Microsoft as its clients. It is interesting to note that Singley is a former Ingram Micro VAR, so he “gets” the channel.

I’m not going to define social media, because I have already written about it several times in this very blog at these links (“Creating Channel Social Business Networks is Not a Trivial Investment” and “How Tweet It Is, Etc.”) But here are some of the observations I found most interesting:

• Among 100 Top companies, the brands that were MOST engaged with social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn recorded average growth of 18 percent over the past year while those that were LEAST engaged saw sales decline by about 6 percent.
• The clickthrough rate for paid search advertising increases by at least 50 percent for brands that engage in social media activities.
• Think less about B2B and more about B2P. After all, business is about relationships between people.
• It is not enough to listen anymore.
• If you’re going to blog, do it at least one to two times a week. (Ouch, I feel this one!) If you use Facebook, visit at least three to five times; if you’re going to tweet on Twitter, you need to do so at least three times a day.
• Remember ethics: If you are writing something on behalf of your company, so say. You need to disclosure context for your point of view. Another point: The Federal Trade Commission is going to start watching social media for unauthorized disclosures of corporate information come Dec. 1, 2009. So be careful that you’re not breaking any non-disclosure agreements when you write about something.

You can  download Matt’s VTN presentation at this link.

AND I highly recommend following Matt on Twitter (@mattsingley) or visiting his Web site (http://www.mattsingley.com/).