Gary Campbell and I shot this a video on the morning of the webinar, to use it before the event, and also as the content for the channel we created during the session.
Obviously there was a lot we would have liked to fix –lighting, for instance– but this was itself a demo of how to produce a video with a short deadline, with minimal editing.
If you are new to the webinar series –and I know some of you will be based on the requests from companies — here is a preview of what we will be talking about in the webinar on LinkedIn tomorrow. I say tomorrow, because it will be the night of August 16th for me in the US, even though it will be the morning of the 17th in Sri Lanka!
LinkedIn is a ‘gated community’ and is much smaller than, say, Facebook. But it is also a super professional network that lets you build networks within the network. You develop solid connections and have richer conversations within this ‘closed’ (which is also a ‘private’) environment.
Here is my short take on LinkedIn: I think of LinkedIn as a knowledge–sharing portal, rather than a friend hang-out. It lets you ‘communicate to the niches’ rather than waste your resources on mass communication tactics.
Here is my co-presenter, Derrick Mains on the subject.
Some of you may recall that I featured Derrick in a guest spot during a previous webinar. Steve England will also join us as usual, with his amazing ideas on how mobile devices are powering social networks.
Here’s the format of the webinar:
After the break:
I’ve been conducting a series of webinars on social media, and we reached the halfway mark last week. The series was called Passport To Digital Citizenship.
The topics have been:
In this webinar we talked about fans and friends –especially the difference between ‘lower case’ friends and ‘upper case friends.’ How do you engage your network? How do you turn on your hub? And most importantly, how do you get ready for an increasingly mobile user?
If you attended the 3rd webinar, here are two handouts. you may find useful.
I had one participant suggestion –to create a discussion group on Facebook.
Fragmented or integrated?
It’s easy to pick the latter, because it sounds like the right thing to do. Depending on what you are trying to achieve it’s not that easy though. Here are two scenarios:
Scenario A: You are launching a new service that is relevant to 30 percent of your audience. You’ve got the usual suspects –um, channels — in place with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, a blog and two Twitter accounts. Do you make spread your content across all of these?
Scenario B: You a teaching a class, and most of the attendees use Facebook rather than email, but you also have a series of video updates. Do you stick with Facebook, or add a blog to the program which will feed Facebook embed YouTube videos?
I don’t want to say I know the best answer. (It may take a bit of digging deeper into the usage patterns of the audience etc.) But I often lean heavily on closing the gap between communication channels. It takes some planning ahead, but you only have to connect the dots once, and thereafter, it’s easy to pick and chose the channels you like to integrate.
I pointed this out toward the end of the webinar I was conducting last Monday. To demonstrate it…
I can’t stress enough how easy it is to connect the dots between your communication channels using digital media, if you plan ahead to do so.
I pointed this out toward the end of the webinar on Monday (it was Sunday night here in Arizona) as Steve England, Gary Campbell and I were presenting at the second webinar on social media.
While Steve was presenting I took this photo of one of our screens (the one bringing in a Skype video feed from the venue in Colombo). Here’s what I did:
Notice the attendees who had logged in –visible on the bottom left of this photo. Also, on the right is Tweetdeck, through which we were monitoring the hash tag #USELK2010 that we were using for the event.
Cross-posting this from the webinar blog.
Ah, that is the question, isn’t it? Especially for many people still wondering if there is any value in jamming conversations into 140 characters of less. I tend to tell people that just as sending post cards, or having non-stop IM chats with six different people throughout the day have different value for different people, so too Twitter.
But — huge BUT here — it’s time to consider Twitter as less of a marketing device, and more as a listening tube.
In the second of a 6-part webinar series I am conducting (check previous one) this one will be appropriately called To Tweet Or Not To Tweet.
Here is my co-presenter, Gary Campbell on the subject.
Quick note of thanks to all the attendees at the webinar on blogging, yesterday. (Sunday night here, although it was still the 21st in Sri Lanka.)
Dan Wool Steve England, and I enjoyed being able to share our ideas, and answer your questions.
The application, DimDim, did cause us a hiccup for the audio at the second location, but we know exactly what the problem is and how to fix it in the next sessions.
Since this was a session on blogging 101, I created a basic blog for the attendees, on the fly. I will be using it to update content for the next few sessions on the other key elements on social media.
Really happy to announce a series of Web conferences that I will be starting next week for the U.S Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
This follows a digital video conference I conducted last year for the U.S.E, in association with the US State Department.
These six workshops –Webinars– are designed to be more interactive; the majority of participants will be at one location in Colombo. They were selected based on their application and response to a survey on the state of social media in Sri Lanka.
We are covering the usual suspects: Blogs, social networking, micro-blogging, video sharing and social search. The attendees are from diverse backgrounds: advertising, corporate communications, government, web-based businesses, management, universities, media and non-profits.
Presenters: To make these sessions more focused and relevant I have brought on board some top practitioners to co-present with me. They are:
Dan Wool, a corporate communications and PR consultant for APS, a large electric utility in Arizona. Dan co-founded one of the world’s top blogs on public relations, marketing and social media.
Steve England, Chief Technology Office of MobileSoft, an advocate of on-demand digital printing who advises large tech companies and international advertising agencies on interactive marketing.
Gary Campbell, a communications manager at Arizona State University, a former print journalist turned digital, who has led numerous university training sessions in social media.
I will also bring in a few ‘surprise’ guests who will pop-in with some real-world examples of how they are using a particular strategy in their communication!
I received one of those dreaded pitches this week from a PR firm in London.
It had the trademarks of having being picked from a list of bloggers and freelance writers: It started Press Release….
But this one was different. It didn’t have “no-reply’ or some garbled name as its sender. It also had a headline that made me want to open it and read. It was about the PR firm’s client, BBC World News.
You might wonder how relevant is that? I could have signed up for all manner of things on the World Service. But the topic was a series of shows Hard Talk On The Road –on Sri Lanka. It may sound dead simple, making sure the subject was in line with the reader. But let me frame it this way. I get so many of these PR pitches that it sometimes makes me wonder where we have taken this form of communication.
This is an industry (PR and Marcom) where everyone is screaming Web 2.0, every consultant, conference presenter and digital marketing agency is throwing out terms such as ‘Social Media Release” and RSS in every slide deck, and every book that has been published on the subject since Cluetrain Manifesto advises that ‘markets are conversations.’ In other words, stop spamming and start talking.
But all my colleagues at ValleyPRBlog, for instance, say the same thing. We are getting drowned in ridiculous PR Spam. We only complain off and on, and that, too when someone really ticks us off, or someone like Chris Anderson issues a fatwa, and everyone nods their heads and says ‘serves them right.’
But in the past 10 days I got two pitches that were spot on! Two! As such, rather than outing the bad ones, I like to hold up the good agencies and the great PR folk who do one simple task -take time to understand their audience.
As a writer I give every pitch a chance. If you take the time to filter, we will take time to read!
Evo Terra was firing rounds of ‘measurement’.
Jason Baer was his usual self –provocative, helpful, and making some terrific observations of where we are heading.
As with last year’s Social Media for Business Conference, (see post here) now better known as SMAZ, this year’s conference had some outstanding panels.
The event kicked off with Sitewire president, Greg Chapman making statement that was more of less repeated at every session: “I am not a social media expert.”
Followed by a “however…”
So in the company of these non-experts, I learned some amazing things, and confirmed a lot of the approaches I’ve been taking. Here are the ones that I liked:
SMAZ also turns out to be a great way to connect with the people we only meet virtually here in the Phoenix area (I met many of our readers from ValleyPRBlog), whether no matter where we are on the analog-to-digital scale.
And lest we forget the person behind the curtain who makes this happen, I want to tip my hat to Fred VonGraf.
Hoipolloireport 