Sep 28, 2011
Sign Up for My Newsletter
-
Archive for the ‘training courses’ Category
I conducted a Social Media Training in Chicago yesterday as part of my Hands On Training tour with Social Media Today.
I had senior executives and C suiters from the corporate sector, nonprofits, B2Bs and agency principals attending. Here’s a picture of me with some of the attendees at the end of the session, who all seemed very happy. I’m very excited about his new workshop. I think its definitely got legs.
After 7 years leading Social Media Boot Camps all over the world, I wanted to add this new workshop to my roster to focus more on applied social media communications skills. Once you know what social media is and why it’s important, you need to learn how to actually use it effectively.
Most people know by now that search engine optimization is important, but how do you actually learn how to do it? How do you learn keyword discovery, how to use embed codes, how to add Facebook Like buttons, Tweet buttons, Linkedin Badges, how to launch Facebook pages, use Tweet and Follow buttons and use Linkedin Answers, Signal and Groups? How do you launch a blog? Bloggers know this stuff already. But most people don’t blog.
There’s a whole wide world outside the tech bubble that can really benefit from learning these skills. The problem is, there’s a very real dearth of practical soial media training opportunities. A hotel conference center with anemic Wi-Fi, not enough power strips, banquet chairs and round tables is no way to conduct a computer training course. But unfortunately, these types of conferences are all most people know about, and their only option for learning how to use social media for business.
I’ve been on the conference circuit for years and I’m here to tell you that while you may hear motivational speakers, interesting success stories and provocative, high-level theory about why social media matters and where it’s headed, you’re unlikely to get any practical know-how. The war against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or PowerPoint. What’s required is hands on training. Because at the end of the day, somebody has to actually do the work.
I put together a comprehensive, balanced cirriculum covering all aspects of social media communications, so attendees can get the skills you can put to use immediately. No hotel conference centers. I teach at computer trainng facilities with reliable broadband, proper seating, ergonomic desks and enough power strips to go around. No PowerPoint. No canned demos. All exercises are conducted live. And if you need help securing an internet connection, there’s a certified Microsoft network engineer on-site to resolve your issue.
Attendees bring their computers, logon and get real world experience learning to use social media for business. Or for those government or military personnel with locked down laptops, we provide desktop a computer they can use for the session. I’ve been wanting to teach this class for a long time. And I’m really glad it was received so positively. My US tour wraps with a final session in San Francisco tomorrow and Friday.
But given the positive feedback, I expect to announce dates for additional sessions in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I publish my training calendar here.
Or, if you’re based in Europe, join me for my German-American Social Media Boot Camp in Berlin October 10-11, 2011. In my upcoming social media training in Germany, I will be adapting the cirriculum to feature local case studies and examples.
In fact, as part of my research to prepare, I recorded a Social Media in Germany panel last wel with Thomas Praus (@stylewalker), Oliver Gassner (@oliverg) and Sebastian Vasta (@sebastianvasta) who are all social media specialists in Germany. If you’d like to down that panel as a podcast, here’s a link. Enjoy and hope to see you in Berlin!
Thanks to all who attended, and if you have a moment, please share your experience at the session as a comment to the blog. Would you recommend the session to others?
(PHOTO BY POOJA) Pictured left to right are Sarah Theresa (@sarahtheresa), Reed Evans (@GreenActionGal), Lydia Baehr (@LBPR), Moyra Knight (@moyraknight), moi [seated], Peter Vukosavich of Studio V Design, Annette Howard, Erika Roberts (@JigGarden), Jim Papariella and Sherry Bale.
9 CommentsJul 14, 2011
Are you proficient in the use of social media for business communications?
In some ways, social media’s like a flame. In undiscerning hands, it can be dangerous. Many companies are choosing to vest responsibility for social media at the bottom of the org chart. With digitally illiteracy rampant in the C-suite and board room, we’ll no doubt see more foolish smear campaigns, Twitter gag orders and silly black hat SEO attempts.
What would you do if your Facebook page got brand jacked? What if your boss said she thought social media was a waste of time and money? Could you figure out and open her eyes to the opportunity that social presents for you? And could you track the ROI of your efforts to sustain and grow your budget allocation over time? Because if you can’t, you’re not proficient in social marketing. You may understand the “what” and the “why,” but to make social media work, you also need to know “how” to use it.
We all know everyone’s using social media. And we know how to post a Facebook status update and send a tweet. That’s the “what” and “why”. But developing the practical, applied skills for “how” to use social media communications strategically to support corporate objectives is something else entirely.
If you don’t have these skills, you’re not alone. Most professionals in the workplace today still lack the ability to win buy-in and resources for social marketing initiatives, let alone put a program into place that works without relying on an outside specialist.
The problem is a dearth of hands-on training opportunities. I’m talking about workshops where professionals can actually learn to use social media without getting upsold ever 5 minutes by a consultant. Yes, there are plenty of conferences where social media is covered, but you won’t get a comprehensive overview or participate in any hands-on exercises designed to teach you how to do it yourself. You won’t launch a blog, embed widgets, install Google Analytics and Feedburner or learn how to figure out the phrases your prospective customers are searching when they’re looking for you. You won’t learn the skills you really need.
Instead, you’ll hear mostly unpaid speakers seeking to recoup their travel costs through new business leads. They may throw you bone or two, but they’re going to focus on telling you all the great things they’ve done for their clients, avoid mentioning any of the nasty little mistakes they’ve made, let you ask one question and give you their contact info so you can hire them when you’re ready to get started. And that’s a problem. Because you’ll still be in dark.
In an effort to help change that, I’ve partnered with Social Media Today to bring you a new Hands-On Training workshop. This September, I’ll be in Sydney, Singapore, London, Paris, Toronto, New York, Chicago and San Francisco and if you want real knowledge, please consider joining me.
If know already how many people are using social media and why you should be too, it’s time to learn to execute. And that’s going to require hands-on, practical instruction. No keynotes. No panel sessions. No PowerPoint. Just step-by-step, hands-on exercises. Ask as many questions as you like in a safe environment with other professionals.
For the last five years, I’ve been traveling the world conducting social media trainings for Fortune 100 companies, government agencies and small groups of committed professionals and here’s what they’ve had to say about my workshops.
I don’t teach at hotels. All sessions are held world-class computer training facilities. Bring your laptop, logon and learn to search engine optimize copy, build social media monitoring dashboards, launch blogs, produce and edit audio and video, launch Facebook Pages, master Linkedin and Twitter, build a social engagement dashboard and much, much more.
So if you’re ready to get serious about social media without getting burned, join us for our new Hands-On Training presented by Social Media Today. Space is limited to 30 people per city, and admission is first come, first serve.
Feel free to tweet me your questions. Hope to see you there!
May 31, 2011Are you ready to win the war against digital illiteracy?
The first step is the toughest one. But it’s also the most important.
Provide everyone with clear-cut, easy-to-follow guidelines to help them distinguish between conversations that can happen in public, and conversations that need to be kept private.
Social media has become an integral part of our personal lives. Unless organizations take the time to specify how (not if) employees can use social media at work, they risk forfeiting the chance to:
- Capitalize on social marketing opportunities
- Attract and retain top-notch personnel
- Thwart obsolescence
Here’s why:
On social networks, trends direct our attention. We have more confidence in crowds than individuals. A Yelp restaurant listing with a 3-star average and 300 ratings is more meaningful than one with a 5-star average and just 12 ratings.
For the same reason, organizations realize the true value of social marketing when everyone gets involved. The more people there are discussing a topic, the greater the likelihood others will discover it.
A corporate Twitter feed and Facebook page driven by a PR department are nice to have, but they’ll never be as useful as the conversations of a diverse, engaged community. And the larger the community, the more confidence we have in what they say, and the more likely we are to give it our attention.
Whenever an employee uses social media to get their job done, they leave behind a digital record that can be found and shared indefinitely. If you have no policy, that notion is more than a little scary. But if you’ve thought it through, it becomes a productivity windfall, because marketing becomes the byproduct of using social media to get the job done.
Remember, your employees are using social media already in their personal lives. If you’d like them to use it for business too, they need to know what’s expected. Leadership needs to set clear-cut boundaries, so employees know what is and isn’y acceptable. Companies that fail to take this step, will most likely also fail to mobilize their personnel to make the best use of social media.
It’s critical that the social media policy leadership sets be fair and just. Blocking access to Facebook from the corporate network while expecting employees to respond to email outside of business hours sets uneven standards. In fact, blocking access to social networks is both unfair and futile, because workers should have the right communicate with their friends and family, as long is it doesn’t interfere with the quality of their work.
Social media blackouts are the result of digitally illiteracy. They are enacted by misguided leaders from an age when the restricting information flows was possible and effective. But as Wikileaks, Twitter and Napster have proven, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Or as Esther Dyson said back in 2006, companies that profit from inefficiency will die, and for many types of communications, social media is simply more efficient.
Once the boundaries are in place, and everyone knows what can be public and what should be private, social media becomes a productivity gain, not drain.
Check out how Johns Hopkins and Avery Dennison are using internal social networks, or the workplace productivity gains of Chatter.
In this environment, the organizations that can draw a clear line between public and private have a huge advantage. The road to getting there runs straight through policy, because you can’t draw that line between public and proprietary unless you do the homework to figure that out, and you can’t teach others to respect boundaries if they don’t know where they lie.
Social media without governance is reckless. And rules without training are toothless. Take a look at my Social Media Policy Template to accelerate your policy development efforts or attend my upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011, where we spend a fair amount of time on this subject.
Welcome to the social media world of uncontrollable communications. You’re in it, whether you like it or not.
In my next post, I’ll start getting into what it takes to host an effective social media training.
May 24, 2011
As psyched as readers of this blog may be about the benefits of integrating social media into marketing, PR and organizational communication, we’re still in the dark ages when it comes to appreciating how these channels are redefining information discovery and reputation management.
Despite the wide spread adoption of social media on a global basis, most companies remain clueless about how digital technology is changing the way people communicate and share information.
How else do explain the ineptitude that spurred articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about these events:
- Burson-Marsteller’s email smear campaign against Google for Facebook. Seriously? That’s the best they could do?
- A famous British soccer player’s lawsuit against Twitter to unmask his anonymous critics. You’re kidding, right? Does he think he’s going to gag Twitter?
- Comcast’s threat to cut funding to a nonprofit that criticized its hiring of a former FCC commissioner on Twitter. And they did so via email. Did they think that was maybe a little risky? <sarcasm>
- JC Penny and Overstock.com’s decision to employ black hat SEO tactics, resulting in their websites being manually demoted in the search rankings. Guess that’s what happens when senior management is clueless about organic search.
The cold, hard truth is that these lapses in judgment are so sophomoric, all you can do is chalk it up to digital illiteracy. And by the way, if the errors they made aren’t clear to you, you’re digitally illiterate too. But don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. And chances are, it’s even not your fault.
You’ve probably been to a few social media conferences where you learned just enough to be dangerous. Speakers took the stage and told you how well they did with social media to promote themselves and generate new business. They avoided the gory details. No one’s ever actually sat you down and explained how these channels really work, or how to master them. Why would they? They want you to hire them.
The fight against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or panel sessions. What’s required is practical, applied knowledge. You need to know how to:
- Build a social media monitoring dashboard to find, listen and engage with your existing online community. You may not know it, but you’ve an online community already.
- Use white hat search engine optimization tactics to make it easier for your customers to find you via search. Coming up forst for the name of your company doesn’t count. Google gives you that one for free. It’s about coming up for early-stage, buyer-oriented keywords. Has anyone ever actually showed you how to find them? It’s not that tough.
- Or how to optimize a website or blog for social sharing. Can you install Facebook “Like” button, “Tweet” button and Linkedin “Share” button on your corporate website? And can you optimize your Facebook status updates from maximum engagement so you rank high in the social newsfeed?
Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts to help you stamp out digital illiteracy in the workplace. I’ll lay out specifically what you and your colleagues need to know, and how to teach it to those with only minimal exposure to social channels. And if you want to take a short cut, join me for my Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011.
Or just stay tuned to my blog. I’m going to share my recipe for bringing digital immigrants up to speed and for winning resources and buy-in from disengaged managers and clients.
If you’re a past attendee of one of my trainings, what did you learn? Was it valuable? And how, if at all, has what you learned helped you avoid a major mistep?
May 18, 2011
Company and industry events are a great way spark online community interaction.
Professionals with common interests and goals regularly invest time and money to attend B2B events where they can network with others in their trade.
They’re engaged.
They’re motivated.
And they’re all in the same place, listening to the same speakers and visiting the same exhibitors.
They’re all on the same page.
What better place to launch a digital initiative that extends the excitement and the knowledge shared via social media?
After the carpet’s rolled up, and the staging’s been struck, and the keynote speakers have all gone home, what do you have to show for your efforts but a stack of business cards? But if you could capture and archive what happened online, it could be discovered through search, shared on Facebook and Twitter and pay dividends in perpetuity.
Earlier this week, I conducted a B2B social media workshop for event planners at the Event Marketing Summit in Chicago (#emschi) organized by Dan Hanover. I showed plenty of examples of how B2B marketers can use social media to generate excitement before, during and after business-to-business events like trade shows, conferences and strategic corporate training events.
Here are some of the take-aways from my workshop:
Socialize Your Event Website – Make your hashtags easy to find. Include them in your logo, or in the banner of your event website. Don’t gang all of your sessions up on one page, or one page per day. Put each session at its own permalink, so people can tweet links to specific sessions. Include each speaker’s Twitter ID in their bio and make it clickable. Use Linkedin “Share” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons. Never mind that Facebook isn’t distinctly B2B. People spend time there, and there’s nothing more powerful the a personal recommendations from a friend. Install a Facebook “Like” button as well. And include an “add to calendar” widget that makes it easy to add sessions to your Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar with one click. Make sure the calendar item has all the pertinent info about the session including the Twitter IDs of the presenters and the hastag for the conference or session. For some ideas on event website best practices, check out the Event Bright and Cvent webpage templates.
Offer Social Sync on Your Website – How many times have you registered for a conference and wondered who you might know that’s attending? At SXSW 2011, Janrain built this feature into the SXSW website, so you could cross reference registered attendees list with your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter contacts. This was an awesome feature, because it gave you the chance to schedule more meetings and network smarter.
Promote Your Call for Speakers - If you want to generate excitement before an event, promote your call for speakers harder than the event itself. Email market a call for speakers with a deadline and send two reminders as the date approaches. People are more responsive when there’s something in it for them. Blog your call for speakers as well. And share a link to your blog post on relevant Linkedin Groups and via Twitter.
Post Your Event to Linkedin and Facebook – Go to Linkedin > More > Events and select the “Add an Event” tab on Linkedin Events. Post your event and send out notifications to your Linkedin contacts who might genuinely be interested. You can also advertise your event on Linkedin, and the targeting options are very precise. Post the event to the Events area on your Facebook page. Ask an easy to answer question and rewrite your meta data to encourage engagement in the stream. The more “Likes” and comments you get, the higher the post will rank and the more people who will see it.
Post the Speaker PowerPoint Decks to SlideShare – Set up a channel and post the PowerPoint presentations directly following each session. Velocity here is key, because tyou want the session attendees to retweet the link, and they’ll be more inclined to do so right after the session, then a day of two later. Use your momentum wisely. Tweet out a link to the deck with the conference hashtag and the Twitter ID of the speaker and watch the ReTweets come in.
Register Your Event on Foursquare – Take the time register your event in advance, and ask your sponsors NOT to register the event themselves on Foursquare, so you don’t wind up with multiple registrations for the same event, which confuses attendees. If it’s an annual event, start the name of the event with the year, so people will be able to check in at the next event regardless of the location. If you can get your hashtag into the name that you register on Foursquare, all the better. And ask each speaker before the start of their session to remind everyone to check in on Foursquare.
Podcast Your Sessions - At this point, the cost to record the audio from your sessions and make it available after the fact is pretty much just the cost of labor. Bottle up the knowledge and insights your speakers share on stage and make them available immediately. Draft a search engine optimized transcript, give the final MP3 file name that’s search friendly, upload it your blog, park your RSS feed at iTunes, social media optimize your feed and count the downloads. If you have the dates and location for next year’s event, include a brief, soft-sell announcement at the beginning of each recording to generate excitement for next year’s event. Don’t worry about losing registered attendees because you’re giving away the session recordings for free. People go to events to network and press the flesh. You can’t do that on a podcast.
Offer a Branded Mobile App – DoubleDutch, a San Francisco start-up that recently secured VC-funding, offers a ready to go, skinnable mobile app with all the features you’d want at a B2B event. Users can create profiles, connect with other profiles, use social sync to find Twitter and Facebook friends, share status updates, photos and links to an activity stream, like and comment on items, publish out to Facebook and Twitter, check in on the app and on Foursquare, unlock badges and watch video. Cisco Events is using the app very effectively to sustain the buzz they generate at their corporate events. They’ve even built in QR Code reader right into the app, which can be used for check-ins. Now you can use incentives to drive foot traffic to exhibitors and sessions by offering unique QR codes at different destinations.
Event Marketing B2B Social Media Boot Camp Presentation
View more presentations from Eric Schwartzman.
By the way, I recorded the audio for the workshop which I’ll be releasing at On the Record…Online, so head on over now and subscribe if you want to make sure you don’t miss it.
How do you use social media for B2B events? Share your best tips for applying social to B2B events here as well. And if you attended the session, what you think of it, and how are you applying social media to B2B event marketing?
Categories: #emschi, B2B, blogging, email marketing, location based, mobile, professional development, social media, social networks, training courses