At HostingCon 2010, I joined (Curtis) R. Curtis, Nick Longo and Matt Balleck on a panel to discuss how hosters and entrepreneurs can optimize social media for branding, traffic and sales. When you start talking “social media,” you’re almost guaranteed a great turnout, and this session was no exception. The standing room-only crowd asked some great questions of the panel, and despite my blog audience-selected attire, many flagged me down to keep the conversation going.

The session allotted each presenter a few minutes to share some best practices from their experience with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube before the floor was opened to questions. Nick Longo led off with an excellent rundown of Rackspace’s high-level Twitter strategy. He discussed how the company approaches social media and the paramount importance of engaging employees and personal networks to connect with people to share a value-rich message. His personal strategy when it comes to posting on Twitter is to load the channel with value for his audience … even when that value isn’t directly related to his company. By focusing on his audience’s interests and injecting business content only where relevant, he’s built a fantastic following.

vidiSEO‘s Matt Ballek, stepped up to the microphone next and brought the thunder by sharing some much-appreciated tips about how businesses can optimize their YouTube videos. If pictures are worth a thousand words, his “YouTube Video SEO – How to Optimize Your YouTube Video” interactive presentation is probably worth a few million, so I’d highly recommend you check it out to learn about the four pillars of optimizing your videos.

Following those future Hall of Famers, the pressure was on when I stepped up to the podium. Luckily, my presentation didn’t turn out to be a “Casey at the Bat” situation. I shared some of our social media successes with the crowd by explaining how and why #showmemyserver, the #500Club and The Planet Server Challenge worked as well as they did. If you’ve been around the neighborhood here for a while, you’re well versed with those campaigns, and if you’re unfamiliar, scroll down to the last paragraph to learn how you can earn the chance watch a video of my presentation. In the meantime, take a look at the slides we covered:

(Curtis) R. Curtis batted cleanup on the panel by sharing a few tips and tricks for businesses on Facebook. He touched on the fact that “personal” nature of the medium makes it tough to sell to users, but that shouldn’t dissuade businesses and entrepreneurs from building qualitative connections with customers by allowing them to connect and interact with the company and each other.

Given my presentation’s focus on user engagement, it seems only fitting that this blog have an opportunity for you to earn a bonus by becoming a part of the conversation. Leave a comment below with a few “words of wisdom” you’ve gleaned from your experience with social media, and I’ll email you a link to a video of my presentation. Along with my brilliant speech delivery, you’ll get a peek at “the hipster look.”

What else could you want?

-Kevin