Recently, our Social Media manager, Christine Nokta, and myself were invited to give a talk to Petroleum Accountants Society of Houston (PASH) members. It was super fun and I learned a lot from the audience that night. Here’s a quick recap.

PASH is full of accountants. Accounting isn’t exactly a great niche for social, in my opinion, because the content for that niche isn’t great. It’s not easy coming up with funny, interesting, shareable, likable, or viral content for accounting! When we do social media marketing for lawyers, we run into similar issues depending on the practice area.

But everyone is on Facebook right? I was actually really surprised at how few people raised their hands when we asked who used Facebook!!! I mean, even my grandparents are on Facebook at 87 years old! They share posts, like posts, leave comments, etc! But in a room of about 40 to 50 people, about 5 or 6 raised their hands. Maybe there were others that were just too shy. The other thing to consider is that both my grandparents are retired and have a lot of free time on their hands whereas the people in this room probably stay pretty busy.

Christine and I had shown up a little early and set up a Twitter Live Stream so people could interact with us. Christine and I both posted using a hashtag we were using to track the activity. We started the meeting briefly explaining how to interact with us using twitter on you phone. That was when I realized the feed was going to basically be useless to this group. When I asked who had twitter installed on their phone. Maybe one person raised their hand, two if you count me. It makes perfect sense really when you consider how few had Facebook!

After our presentation we opened the floor to questions. There was a great point brought up about being somewhere, like a presentation, but not really “being there” because you are using your mobile device to post statuses. My response was something like, if you are live streaming an event and are tracking a hashtag that you tell members to use when posting, you will get visual feedback that your audience is listening to you through the live stream. My other response is, the people who don’t regularly use mobile devices and social apps are the same ones who think you can’t do both, update a status and listen to a speaker. It’s actually really easy.

In a similar vein, some members felt it was disrespectful to the speaker to be looking at a phone and not the speaker. I agree with this, but if you are on your phone promoting the speaker and the event, you are actually doing them a favor. If you are playing games or purposefully killing time on your phone, then you are absolutely being disrespectful.

Most of the other questions and comments centered around what various members’ teenagers were into. There are also seemed to be a shared belief that hackers are all over social media sites and many members didn’t feel safe using them.

A big thank you to Len Clark and Charlene Lutkenhaus for inviting use and being such great hosts.