had the pleasure of moderating two great panels at Part II of Atlanta Tribune's 8th Annual Moving Your Business Forward conference that recently took place. The first panel featured three presentations on tools you can use to help you build an effective online presence, featuring:

 • Todd Bethel, digital media specialist, Kingdom Media Group

• Jeffrey “JB” Brathwaite, CEO, 2TheNextLevel.com

• Shashi Bellamkonda, director of Social Media, 

   Network Solutions?

The second panel built on the information presented by the three experts above to discuss best practices for building and maintaining a positive, successful reputation online. This panel included:?

• James Andrews, CEO, Everywhere LLC

• David Bullock, president, White-Bullock Group

• Adrienne Graham, CEO and founder, Empower ME!

 Here are just a few of the informational nuggets that were shared with the attendees.

 Brathwaite, an expert on blogging platforms, discussed how blogging is a great way to automatically feed your content to popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. He also mentioned how more and more people are reading blog content on their mobile devices. With that in mind, Brathwaite suggested you make your blog attractive to read on mobile devices. For those who are using Wordpress as their blog platform, try using the free WPTouch (http://www.wptouch.com) plug-in to help with this.

 Bellamkonda, also known as the “Social Media Swami,” reviewed a variety of sites he has used to help him build an extremely effective presence all over the Web. He uses services like BackType (http://backtype.com), Amplify (http://amplify.com) and Posterous (http://posterous.com) to help publish and promote his content. Bellamkonda also pointed out tools like TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com), HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com) and Seesmic (http://seesmic.com) to help keep track of Twitter conversations. Another new tool he mentioned was Hy.ly (http://hy.ly)  which helps extend Twitter into a customer service tool.

Bethel, a professional videographer, talked about the impact video can have in capturing people’s attention and building a captivating online presence. He pointed to a few eye-opening stats to back up his case, including a study that showed that adding video to e-mails increased click-through rates by 96 percent. Bethel also explained how online retailer OnlineShoes.com found shoppers that viewed a video on the site were 45 percent more likely to buy than those that did not. He provided a list of best practices and also a few resources to learn more about video — including Animoto (http://animoto.com) and Pixability (http://pixability.com).

 During the online reputation management session, Andrews discussed the importance of taking conflicts that start online, offline — or at least moving them to more private forms of online communications. It doesn’t help your online reputation to be seen bickering with people in plain sight.

 Bullock also mentioned the importance of taking online interactions offline, to solidify relationships. Graham illustrated how she puts this into practice by making sure she sets aside time each week to talk to at least five people who follow her on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. She would rather have deeper connections with a few hundred people, than to have thousands of faceless followers out there with whom she has no relationship. Believing the whole idea of social networking being to build and grow deeper relationships, she said it doesn’t make sense not to reach and maximize those relationships … and potential business opportunities.

 These are just a few of the great insights and knowledge imparted by a great group of talented people. And the fact that it was all free to attendees should make you start planning to be at the next Moving Your Business Forward event in October  

 AT