Hands-On Prep

If you’re reading this to prepare for one of my upcoming hands-on trainings, thanks for signing up!

Believe it or not, I have been conducting social media trainings since 2003 (pre-Facebook).  I created this new workshop to help professionals advance their social media communication skills through live demos and hands on exercises.

Whether it’s a PC or a Mac, you will need to bring a laptop computer to participate in the exercises.  I conduct the demos running FireFox on a MacBook Pro. But Internet Explorer on PC is fine too.

Two days may seem like a long time, but as far as I know, this is the only workshop that dares to cover this breadth of content in such a short period of time. It’s a lot of information, so please make sure you read this page carefully, and come well rested.  Breakfast and lunch is provided at the training venue.

We start promptly at 9am, so get there a little earlier to boot up and get online.

I put together this page to help you get the most out of the training.  Please read it carefully, and do your best to cover these bases before you arrive.

1. Get a verified Gmail account.  Verification isn’t always necessary, and there’s no way to predict which accounts need to be verified. If you can send and receive email already, verification probably won’t be necessary.  But if you are asked to verify your account during the workshop, you’ll need to have a mobile phone handy to authenticate by sending a SMS text message to your phone with a security code. More info

2. Sign up for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, fill out as much of your profile information as you can, and make sure you have the user name and password to these accounts. You will need accounts on these services to follow along with the exercises.

3. If you have other social media accounts, make sure you know your passwords. We have a full agenda and I don’t want you to fall behind because of a forgotten password. If you’ve already set up accounts on any of the following services, please bring your login info:

Blogger, Google Analytics, Feedburner, Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, FriendFeed, AdWords, Google Reader, Delicious, Diigo, TubeMogul, HootSuite, DivShare, LibSyn and Qik.

If you don’t have accounts on any of these services, or if you don’t access to your company account, no problem. You will not need accounts on these services to complete most of the exercises.

4. Get the latest version of the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser. They’re free but downloading them takes a few minutes and sometimes requires a system restart.  As I mentioned earlier, I will do my demos in Firefox on a MacBook Pro but a Internet Explorer on a PC is fine too. Unless you’re an advanced user and can support yourself, please do not use Safari or Chrome for this workshop.

5. If you’d like to participate in the audio and video editing and meta tagging exercises, please download and install Audacity and iTunes on your laptop. Both applications can be downloaded and installed for free.  If you do not have administrative privileges to install software on your computer, please get permission first. The video editing demo will be conducted on iMovie for Mac. PC users cal follow along with Microsoft MovieMaker. Unless it’s intentionally been removed, iMovie or Microsoft Moviemaker should be on your computer already. Both come free on computers that ship with an operating system installed.

6. Know how to use your browser. Know how to cut, paste, select, drag and drop. And most importantly, know how to use browser tabs. We will not have time to cover how to use a browser.

7. If your company has a Facebook Page, see if it’s possible for you to be added as an administrator.  I won’t ask you to publish to the Page at the workshop, but having access to the dashboard will allow you to follow along with the Facebook Page Demos without having to set up a new Page.

8. Join at least one Linkedin Group in advance.  Many Linkedin Groups require the manager’s approval before you get in. If you’re already in, you’ll be able to follow along during the Linkedin Groups demo.

My goal for this workshop is to go beyond hype to give you practical, hands on skills you need to harness the power of social media to achieve measurable results.

I’m looking forward to meeting you!

Sincerely,

Eric Schwartzman
http://www.ericschwartzman.com