After a long break I’ll be giving a course on social media marketing for businesses on Sept. 23 and 30. The course had filled up already, but we’ve moved the venue to a bigger room so we have 5 spaces left for anyone interested. The course will take place in the Sandisk offices in the Kfar Saba Hi-Tech park. Each session will be four hours, and we will get hands-on at every stage with tools and techniques for optimizing your social media activity.
For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com.
Agenda
Sept. 23: What exactly is social media, and how do I use it effectively?
Part 1: What is social media marketing? (1 hour)
- What makes something social? What is Web 2.0? We’ll look at the most important elements of social media today: RSS, Video, Widgets, Tagging, and more to get everyone on the same page.
- The importance of social media in your marketing activity
- Case studies: companies and organizations that have successfully and unsuccessfully used social media
Part 2: Planning effective strategies for social media activity (3 hours)
- Elements of an effective social media strategy
- Setting goals
- Important considerations before starting
- Research your space
- Implementation
- Monitoring & engaging – how, what
- DO NOT neglect the other “boring” stuff: SEO, email, advertising, etc.
Sept. 30: Practical techniques for implementing your social media strategy
Part 1: Overview of important social networks – what they are, how to best use them for marketing (3 hours)
- How to use twitter for marketing: setting up profiles that work for business, building up community, promoting your profile, what and how to write, monitoring, measuring, the best tools, etc.
- Using facebook for business: profiles, Pages, applications, events, etc.: critical differences between each of them, how to choose the right ones for your purposes, setting up a facebook presence that works for marketing and promotion.
- YouTube and other video sites: why video is the next generation of web marketing, what to keep in mind when working with video, ideal length and content, how to promote your video to achieve your marketing goals
- Blogs – “old fashioned” but crucial: blogs are the hubs of an effective social media presence. What to keep in mind, how to set it up, how to integrate it with your other social media activity, ideal frequency for updates, what to write, how to write, how to promote.
Part 2: Personal branding (1 hour)
- What is personal branding?
- Why everyone should work on their online personal brand today
- How to create a successful personal brand with social media
Summing up: Where to go from here (0.5 hours)
- Key points to keep in mind when branching out into social media
- Putting it all together
- Working with (skeptical) upper management
About the speaker – me, Miriam Schwab
Miriam is the Friendly CEO of illuminea, and has been speaking and teaching about social media and blogging for business for over two years.
illuminea is a marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses and organizations use the social web effectively as an integrated part of their marketing mix. illuminea has extensive expertise in designing, developing and strategizing business blogs, and using these blogs as the hub for launching successful social media marketing activities. Part of illuminea’s day-to-day activities involve keeping up with the latest developments in the social web so that we are always able to offer our clients the best solutions for their needs.
Among illuminea’s clients are some of Israel’s leading companies and personalities, including Comverse, Commtouch, Natan Sharansky, and more. Click here to view testimonials from illuminea’s clients.
Here is a list of the conferences and events that Miriam has spoken at:
Wordcamp 2007 – moderator http://english.wordcamp-israel.info/ and the schedule
WordCamp 2008
Elephant
Techshoret 2007
Affilicon 2008
Affilicon 2009
Marchshoret, Nov. 2, 2008. Presentation is here
Partnership 2000, Nov. 12, 2008
Pradler Institute
SSVN, hosted by IBM on July 8, 2009. Read reviews. Presentation.
ISOC Israel:How to create a personal brand by using online tools- MP3 of lecture; presentation; article on The Com (Hebrew).
MEET Alumni Conference, August 4-5, 2009 Istanbul Turkey: “Blogging Secrets: Tips for marketing your business online.”
For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com. Hope to see you there!
This past Wednesday, July 8 I was privileged to be the “keynote speaker” (I find that term kind of amusing, thus the quotation marks) at IBM for the latest SSVN (The Startups & Societal Ventures Network) event.
The challenge of talking to a large group about social media is trying to make sure that the information is not too overwhelming for the newbies, but at the same time is not too boring for the seasoned users. The feedback from the audience was pretty enthusiastic, so I hope I managed to reach that happy medium.
The talk covers recent landmark events on twitter, such as Dell reaching $3m in sales via twitter, the success of the Iran Election protesters who used twitter to bring their cause to the world, and some other events. We looked at strategies, tips and tools for creating an effective online presence.
Without further ado, here’s the presentation:
Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about a certain topic around the internet? Well, it’s not as hard as you think. Monitoring tools are the primary way to track buzz about a given topic online. For someone conducting an online social media marketing campaign this is especially true. To properly promote something, you have to continuously follow what people are saying about it. Monitoring tools can be broken into two primary categories:
- Background Tracking
- Conversation Tracking
One of the best social media monitoring tools is Google Alerts. With Google Alerts, you can receive weekly, daily, or even “as it happens” alerts whenever your search term is mentioned on the web.
Don’t be afraid to enter multiple phrases that mention your brand; this can only yield more and diverse results. In addition to delivering relevant links to articles, blogs, video, etc., Google Alerts is also a great spring board for learning more about where your brand is being spoken about.
Probably the best feature of this service is that you don’t have to keep checking for the most recent mentions on search engines. Having the alerts delivered directly into your inbox allows you to keep tabs on where you might want to comment on a blog post or follow the development of a news story.
The major drawback about Google Alerts is that it doesn’t cover social media sites, such as facebook. To become a part of the “conversation,” you must use monitoring tools that focus on discussions, media (such as video, audio, photos, etc.), and just about anything else. If you are conducting a social media campaign, you absolutely must know if people are already talking about your brand. Sites like Twitter, Digg, and YouTube are the some of the many featured sites on Addict-o-matic, which is the site to find “the latest buzz on any topic.”
Addictomatic screenshot via flickr from Maestro Alberto's photostream
Other sites such as Daylife and Silobreaker are also great for processing recent quotes, graphs, trends, and lists of recent articles or blogs that mentions your topic.
Long gone are the days of missing what someone said about you behind your back. Utilizing effective monitoring tools will help you to truly be part of the conversation in every corner of the web.
More and more studies are showing that internet users do not engage with conventional online ads. Users have developed a type of blindness to the flashing, blinking, google-type ads that clutter pages, and no matter how invasive and annoying the ads are, we have learnt to ignore them.
So marketers are desperately searching for new ways to advertise to customers, one of which is the strategy of authenticity. This is when marketers create a video, or some other marketing piece, that looks real but has actually been carefully staged.
In most cases, the marketer lets the user in on the secret by telling them that the ad is fake, either directly or with hints. However, one marketer recently was so successful that he duped the entire internet into believing that his piece was real, to the embarrassment of almost everybody involved.
13 year olds steals Dad’s credit card to buy hookers – NOT!
A popular story ran on May 9, 2008 on money.co.uk about a 13 year old boy who stole his Dad’s credit card and ordered two hookers with it, only to be convicted of fraud and given a three year community order. This story was so popular, it reached the front page of Digg. It was also covered in other leading social media sites, as well as several online publications, resulting in 6,000 links to the article.
Well, it turns out the story was a fake. The writer, Lyndon Antcliff, says that he tried to make it as ludicrous as possible so its fakeness would be obvious. The story is indeed ludicrous; here are some excerpts:
- The credit card company involved said it was regular practice to send extra credit cards out as long as all security questions are answered.
- The escort girls who were released without charge, told the arresting officers something was up when the kids said they would rather play Xbox than get down to business.
- Police said they were alerted to the motel by a concerned delivery clerk…delivering supplies of Dr Pepper, Fritos and Oreos…
- Ralph had reportedly told police that his father wouldn’t mind, as it was his birthday last week and he had forgot to get him a present. The father, a lawyer, said he had been too busy, but would take him on a surprise trip to Disneyland instead. [my bold]
The goal of the story was to get attention from social media sites, generate backlinks and increase rankings on search engines for keyword phrases like “Credit Card,” and draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Now that we know it was fake, you can’t help but wonder how people bought the story. But anyone who follows the top stories on digg can tell you that this story is actually mild compared to some of the other true stuff posted there.
lonelygirl15 – the fake/real video blogger
This episode is similar to that of lonelygirl15, a series of video blogs by a 16 year old girl named Bree, that became extremely popular on YouTube. Bree even had a MySpace page:
At first, the videos covered normal, everyday subject matter, as the title character dealt with typical teenage angst (and the ridicule she received from her deformed cheekbones), but quickly morphed into a bizarre narrative that portrayed her dealings with secret occult practices within her family and included the mysterious disappearance of her parents after she refused to attend a “secret” ceremony prescribed by the leaders of the family’s cult. (from Wikipedia)
Fans began to wonder if Bree was real in August 2006, pointing to small inconsistencies within the videos as evidence that the story might not be genuine. Eventually it was revealed that the whole thing was staged.
Lying in advertising is not allowed – you cannot claim your product will do something that it cannot. The same should go for online reality advertising – ethical guidelines should be developed for “reality” marketing that ensure that users are informed that what they are viewing is not real.
But of course, what is real anymore? If France 2 TV can stage the al-Dura shooting and get away with it, then who’s to say what’s real and what’s not?
Here’s another example of “reality” marketing:
About a month ago I spoke at the Techshoret Conference for technical writers. Techshoret is an active mailing list for technical writers in Israel, but it includes many members from overseas as well. The people on the list are very supportive and helpful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the best email groups in the world for technical writers.
Techshoret holds an annual conference in Jerusalem, and I was invited to speak on the topic of Blogging and Social Media as Marketing Tools for Hi-Tech Companies since they decided to add some non-technical writing lectures to the mix.
My lecture covered case studies of businesses and their successes and failures in the blogosphere, and how the world of marketing is changing to the point where blogs and social media are a necessary part of today’s marketing strategy.
I promised the participants that I would upload my presentation, and here it is (finally)!
Hollywood on a Shoestring Budget
I am also including the great presentation given by Benjy Caplan who works at ECI Telecom. Benjy spoke about how to create great videos without being a professional videographer. His presentation was interesting because he explained how his company uses video as part of their user manuals. I think this is brilliant, because so many Israeli companies have overseas customers who don’t really speak English, and the best way to communicate in that situation is visually. In addition, his company saves the costs of sending technicians overseas to help clients by sending them help videos instead.
Benjy gave us one real example of how his company used a video to help clients in India install one of their products. The clients sent ECI a picture of their installation, which was a jumble of wires. Instead of sending technicians over to fix things up, Benjy produced an Oscar-worthy video with step-by-step visual instructions of where to put which wire.
With so many Israeli companies exporting overseas, I think many should learn from Benjy’s example and save themselves a lot of time and money by adding videos to their customer support services.
Enjoy!
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