Recently, I attended Confoo, a 3 days Web Techno conference in Montreal. The schedule was great, the speakers were amazing and the organization was superb! Only one glitch in the overall picture: the Wifi sucked… But hey, it’s exactly what geeks need to be able to fully focus on the person speaking in front of you!

I attended great talks including “HTML 5: where are we so far” (http://confoo.ca/en/2010/session/html5-where-are-we-now) by Mark Pilgrim from Google, “PHP 5.3 == Awesome!” by Ilia Alshanetsky, “I’m going to tell you what MySQL is bad at” by Morgan Tocker and “Can Twitter Make Money” by Jon Hansen.

I could probably write multiple blog posts on each of the great talks I’ve seen, but hey, life is short, so let’s talk about what made me think the most: That Twitter and money thing.

At first, I thought it was a talk discussing what Twitter could do to actually become a profitable business. As popular as it is, Twitter is still not profitable, and it doesn’t even generate revenues! That amazed me from the very beginning: how come a great product with a huge users base can go and miss the point that you actually need to make money in order to survive.

I was wrong, because that was not actually the topic of the talk. It was even more interesting. The focus was more: how can Twitter and social media actually generate income for your business. And it’s funny because it’s actually something we’ve been discussing recently here on our blog in “Developing a Following Through Altruism”.

In fact, I do believe money should not be the only objective. Don’t get me wrong: money is essential in order to stay in business, but it is not the reason why we are doing what we do. Money is a consequence of what we do good. A consequence of solving a problem for a client, finding new ways to generate more incomes for a business, implementing something that will help an organization cut down costs, etc…

But being great at what you do or having a great product or having a great service is not enough. You need people to actually buy it from you. Traditionally, organizations have used broadcast media to advertise themselves, and that was (and still is) tremendously expansive. But now, with social media, the actual cost of promoting yourself is nearly non-existent. You can have a blog, or even many blogs, connected with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc… End users can now rapidly spread your message all around the globe!

But, Ok, that’s simple right ? Right, and now nearly everyone is doing it. Because everyone CAN do it. But that’s not enough. It’s not enough to simply set up a blog and promote it with social media. Many companies are doing this to simply promote their products, advertise their stuff. They are simply transposing what they where doing with broadcast media into social media. They are talking to the audience, not with the audience. And doing so, they are completely missing the whole point of social media. Social media is about talking with the audience.

This is exactly where the income generation comes in. Because social media allows us to talk with an audience, it allows us to engage people, create new connections and build relationships. Simply do a search on search.twitter.com with the keywords related to your product and service and boom! You can start talking with interesting prospects. Not to sell something, but simply to help them, engage them. For example, if you are building WordPress sites, search for “wordpress” and engage with people you can help. Start building relationships and an audience will be created that, sooner or later, will have a need for something you are offering.