The second series of Digital Media Dinner was held last month and focused on how businesses both large and small could strengthen their company’s presence across various social networks, review sites,  in addition to collective buying sites such as Groupon.  The event was hosted by local social media consultant, Melodie Tao (also known as Marketing Melodie) and featured Danny Wurst, Community Manager at Yelp, Kate Grofton, Account Manager at Groupon, and Lee Mills the VP of Marketing at MojoPages as panelists.

To kickoff the event, Melodie Tao presented a high level overview of popular online review sites, location based services, and provided the audience with tips and tricks on how to create and maintain their own Facebook business page. Then opened the floor to the audience to ask her and the panelists a few questions. What I found most interesting was the difference of a Facebook Profile versus a Facebook Page.

According to Facebook’s terms of service, “Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook.”

This means, should a business create a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page, Facebook has the authority to delete that profile and as a result, the business would lose their list of friends. So if you’re business has a profile instead of a page – act now and set up your Facebook page. Once you make that change you’ll have access then to view analytics on your Facebook page and take advantage of Facebook’s Like buttons and widgets.

Another key take away that I came home with were Yelp Events. Apparently I have been living under a rock and am not as Yelp savvy like my dear friend Jonathan H. because when Melodie Tao asked who heard about the event on Yelp – almost everyone raised their hands! Yelp Events? Huh? What is that?

Yelp Events features local events that Yelpers can RSVP to and a comment board that the community can participate in. My excuse for not being aware of this feature is because I generally look for events on Facebook and only go on Yelp to read and write reviews. However, since the event, I’ve taken a stab at adding a few San Diego Ad Club and Ad 2 San Diego events to the calendar and it was pretty easy.

Overall, I enjoyed Digital Media Dinner and look forward to the next series. For those of you that were unable to attend, you can view Melodie Tao’s presentation below or on SlideShare.