This new one-day practical workshop enables participants to create their own social media marketing plans, and come away with blogs, video, audio, Facebook and Twitter accounts that are created during the session.
Previous groups have created several blogs, a Ning social network, pieces of video, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and linked them together and aggregated them during the practical session.
Duration: Full day practical workshop: 9.30am – 5.00pm.
Venue: This workshop currently runs as an in-house course. Contact us for more information. It will also be available for individual delegates in London later in the year. Delegates will need to bring a wireless-enabled laptop for the practical session.
Tutor: Jon Reed
Aims
The social media revolution offers powerful new tools for online marketing, and businesses have an opportunity to connect with their online communities of interest by using social media. Although the culture, context and content is more important than the technology, the practicalities of getting started with social media marketing can be off-putting. There is a bewildering array of social media tools and sites. How do you know which is right for your project? Where do you start with your social media presence? Which accounts should you set up? And how will you find time for all those updates?
This one-day workshop offers a combination of theory and practice. It provides participants with an overview of social media marketing, enables them to get to grips with the technical aspects of social sites, and has them up and running with their own social media campaigns within the day. Participants will come away with:
- An understanding of the theory and culture of social media marketing
- The ability to use social media strategically to meet marketing objectives – and measure results
- Social Media Marketing Plans for their own projects
- Social media assets and accounts such as Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, video clips and blogs that are created during the day.
No prior experience of social media is required for this workshop. By the end of the session, participants will have the confidence to use social media marketing appropriately and strategically, apply any social media tool to their campaigns and projects, and create and maintain their own social media presence. Projects started during the session can be continued afterwards and run as real-life social media marketing campaigns.
Agenda
Morning
What is social media? How can you use it effectively to engage your audience and meet your marketing objectives, while avoiding common pitfalls? Using case studies and examples of best (and worst!) practice, drawn from publishing and other industries, this session will enable participants to begin to develop their social media marketing strategy by providing a non-technical overview of concepts and approaches to using social media for marketing purposes.
09:30 Welcome and objectives
09:45 Concepts and approaches – social media is a commitment, not a tactic
10:15 Using social media tools – examples, case studies and how to choose your tool
ACTIVITY: critiquing a podcast. We will listen to extracts from a couple of podcasts, and discuss and critique them as a group. The aim of this exercise is to identify good and bad practice in using social media for marketing purposes.
12:30 Managing and measuring social media – managing workload, developing social media marketing plans and measuring your results.
13:00 LUNCH
Afternoon
This is a hands-on session, enabling participants to put into practice what they learned from the morning session. We will identify specific projects that could benefit from social media marketing, and work in small groups of participants to develop marketing plans and create social media assets.
Guidance will be provided through step-by-step worksheets and online demonstrations. This will enable participants to hit the ground running with social media projects that can be started during the day, and continued as live social media campaigns for their own projects after the session.
13:45 Facilitated brainstorming session to develop a list of current projects that could benefit from social media marketing
14:00 Working up a Social Media Marketing Plan (group work)
14:15 Creating Social Media (group work)
ACTIVITY: Creating social media. Participants will work in small groups to create social media assets. The exact nature of these will be guided by the group and the social media appropriate to the projects identified, but may include Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, blogs, audio or video material, or Ning social networks. An important principle will be aggregation – minimising workload by linking multiple social media tools together to generate automatic content and updates.
16:00 Feedback from groups – each group will present their marketing plan and demo the social media they have created
16:45 Wrap-up, agreed action points for the next week, and questions/discussion
17:00 END
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the session participants will:
- Have a broad understanding of what social media is, including the ‘culture’ of social media marketing
- Be equipped to think strategically about social media, develop their own Social Media Marketing Plans and measure their results
- Have the skills and confidence to create a presence on social sites, and use any social media tool appropriately.
Your Learning Package includes:
- one-day workshop
- online access to resources, worksheets and slides
- follow-up support via an online discussion board
- “A-Z of Social Media” – a 7-page jargon-busting glossary of key terms, tools and approaches
- “Social Media Toolkit” – a 10-page compendium of key social media tools to choose from
- “Social Media Marketing Plan” – a template marketing plan to help you apply the principles right away
- “Social Media Forward Planner” – a more detailed planning approach to scheduling tasks and responsibilities for larger campaigns
- “References and Further Reading” – additional resources to follow up
In addition, worksheets with step-by-step instructions and screenshots are provided for the afternoon session, including:
- Twitter step-by-step
- Facebook Pages step-by-step
- Blogging with wordpress.com step-by step
- Aggregating social media step-by-step
- AudioBoo step-by-step
Participants will also receive a Certificate of Attendance that may be used as evidence of training to count towards your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) target.
Follow-up
Participants will have access to a secure area of the Reed Media website, where they will be able to download slides and handouts. Follow-up questions may also be posted on the site discussion board. Follow-up workshops may include practical sessions on more advanced media creation, such as podcasting or video production; or more in-depth training on social networking, Twitter or blogging.
About Jon Reed
Jon Reed is a social media consultant who previously worked in academic publishing for 10 years, including as publishing director for McGraw-Hill. He also has experience from an author’s point of view, since he is marketing his own book with social media: Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing: How to use websites, blogs, social networking and much more is published by FT Prentice Hall in November 2010.
Jon lectures on social media on a number of courses, including at Birkbeck, Brunel, Bath Spa and City Universities. His blog, Publishing Talk, is a key destination site for authors and publishers wanting to learn more about the marketing possibilities of social media. It has over 62,000 followers on Twitter, making it one of the most followed Twitter accounts in the publishing world, and the most influential according to Twitter directory WeFollow.
Publications
“Small and Mighty”, The Deal: The Official Magazine of the London Book Fair, Spring 2009, pp12-14 (available at publishingtalk.eu)
“Time to Talk”, The Deal: The official magazine of the London Book Fair (Spring 2008), pp12-15 (available at publishingtalk.eu)
“Selling Yourself Online”, The Writer’s Handbook 2009
Cost: £300 +VAT per participant.
The following discounts are available:
- 10% earlybird discount – for workshops that are booked at least 6 weeks in advance
- 10% team discount – applies to in-house training, multiple participants from the same company, or associations and trade bodies.
These discounts may be combined.
Places available: This workshop runs in-house with a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20 participants. It will also be available later in the year for individual delegate bookings at the Reed Media offices in London.
Booking: Get in touch using the Contact Form or by emailing jon@reedmedia.eu.
