July 9th, 2009, 2 Comments »
As I mentioned back in March, we’ve been running a series of all-day social media marketing ‘bootcamps’ in Victoria and Vancouver. Attendance has been good, thus far, and we’re running our fifth one in Vancouver on July 23 (there’s a few spots left for that session).
We’ve taking the rest of the summer off, but, come September, we’re going to take our bootcamps on the road. We’ve scheduled events in Kamloops, Kelowna, Calgary and Edmonton in the second and third weeks of September. The details and registration links are below:
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Kamloops
Campus Activity Centre
Thompson River University
Thursday, September 3
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
Kelowna
Delta Grand Okanagan Resort
Friday, September 4
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
Calgary
University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW
Tuesday, September 8
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
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Edmonton
The Mettera Hotel
Wednesday, September 9
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
Vancouver
BCIT Downtown Campus
555 Seymour Street
Wednesday, September 16
9:30am - 4:30pm
Register Now!
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In promoting these events, we’re looking to connect with local marketing and communications groups. We usually offer a discount to their members or a free spot for a staff member in exchange for an email announcement or mention in their newsletter. If you’re such a person, or know such a person, drop me a line.
Because I’m a big nerd, I made a Google map showing the bootcamp locations. Google actually chose the route, so I welcome alternative suggestions. We’re also going to spend a weekend somewhere between Kelowna and Calgary, so I’m up for recommendations there, too.
View Social Media Marketing Bootcamp, Roadtrip Edition in a larger map
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March 30th, 2009, 5 Comments »
Over the past year or so, we’ve been running a lot of one-day training sessions on all this social media marketing stuff. Combine that with the fact that our social media marketing course at UBC was full and had a sizable wait list, and we’re seeing a lot of demand for this kind of training. Seeing as we already have the curriculum prepared, we thought we’d run a couple of day-long workshops in Victoria and Vancouver. Here’s the blurb:
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. We're running one-day workshops to teach communicators and marketers, as well as small business owners, how to:
- Bring more visitors to your website
- Increase your company’s visibility online
- Approach bloggers and other online influencers about your products and services
- Get your website social media ready
- Craft a potent social media pitch
- Incorporate online channels like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter into your marketing programs
- Avoid campaign killers and online faux pas
Building on the sold-out course we taught for UBC Continuing Education this winter, we discuss the dos and don'ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette.
Students will leave with:
- A copy of our social media marketing ebook, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook
- Templates for creating a social media marketing plan
- Templates for creating an influencer database
All of the details are on the website, but there will be sessions in Victoria on April 30 and Vancouver on May 28.
Attend on the Cheap(er)
The workshop is $299, all in after taxes and fees. There’s a way you can get a discount, though, and another way that you can attend for free:
- You can save $50 off that price by blogging about the workshop on your own established (meaning not brand new) site. Don’t have a blog? Ask a friend or a local blogger if you can write a guest post for their site.
- We’re giving away one seat for free for each event. All you have to do is tweet a link to the page on Capulet’s site (here’s a shortened one: http://capulet.com/smm) and include the hash tag #smmvic or #smmvan, depending on the session you want to attend. So, a sample tweet might look like:
OMG, I really want to attend this event: http://capulet.com/smm. It looks awesomesauce! #smmvan
Or, you know, something along those lines. We’ll randomly choose a winner for each event about two weeks before they occur.
5 Comments »
February 10th, 2009, 2 Comments »
Lately I’ve been enjoying The Next Stage, a Vancouver blog about the business and marketing of theatre. The other day Simon, the blogger behind The Next Stage, linked to a diverting interview with Jim McCarthy, CEO of Goldstar, which I gather is an American discount ticket seller.
I’m always interested in the business of local, live entertainment, and the interview covers plenty of ground. My favourite bit is McCarthy’s view of advertising:
I’ve literally heard people say they were about to send out 5000 postcards for their show and so they were going to wait to see what happened after those hit before they figured out the rest of their marketing plan. Well, let’s do the math on that: 5000 postcards get delivered, but maybe 20% get read. That’s 1000 postcards. If 10% of the people who read it are interested, that’s 100 postcards, and if 10% of those people actually remember how to buy the tickets and actually go through with a purchase, that’s 10 customers buying a couple tickets each.
The simple fact is that most traditional advertising is overwhelmingly ineffective now. Even “traditional” web advertising has dropped to levels of responsiveness (or unresponsiveness) that we would have been startled by back in ‘98 or ‘99. If you’re counting on some kind of media buy to solve your marketing problems, you’re going to have a hard time hitting your goals, so you have to do something else.
When I give talks, I do my best to disavow any social media marketing zealotry. I emphasize that, at best, this new webby stuff is just another tool in one’s marketing toolbox.
I am a zealot, however, about measuring. I tell whoever will listen that they need to precisely measure every marketing activity they undertake. If they do that, then they’ve got the answer to the frequently-asked question “how should I spend my time?” is simple. If, for example, their billboards and bus shelter ads prove to be a better spend than time spent on Facebook and Twitter, then get thee away from thy computer.
2 Comments »
January 11th, 2009, No Comments »
I’ve been meaning to mention that Julie and I are teaching a couple of social media courses for UBC Continuing Ed. They’re each three-hour sessions over three Mondays, for a total of nine class hours. Here are the course descriptions:
Introduction to Social Media
This introductory course provides an overview of social media: its history, theories and the principles behind online communication. Through hands-on demonstration of a variety of social media tools including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, wikis and social bookmarking, you discover how these tools are shaping modern communication and how to incorporate them into everyday business and personal communications. Topics also include upcoming trends as well as predictions for what’s next in social media.
Social Media for Marketing
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. In this course, you learn how to incorporate social media tools like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, social bookmarking and web monitoring tools into your overall marketing strategies and tactics. We discuss the dos and don’ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette. Students are asked to develop ideas for a social media marketing campaign of their own.
Friends Susie and Rochelle are also teaching courses in the program.
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May 12th, 2008, 4 Comments »
As some readers may know, there was another foofaraw last week in the world of online PR. Gina Trapani, editor of the super-popular LifeHacker, posted a black list of PR spammers. Like Chris Anderson before her, she was tired of being inundated with press releases and spammy PR email. Unlike Mr. Anderson, she’s blocking entire domains instead of individual email addresses. Blogger Matt Haughey added his two cents along similar lines.
And, as you’d expect, there was much fretting and gnashing of teeth from the PR blogosphere. I commented on a couple of sites. I was a bit bemused by the sense of entitlement from some of my peers.
In particular, they were very critical of the black list as a tactic for dealing with PR spam. I’m not. It’s imperfect, but I’m sure it’s turned down the tap on Ms. Trapani’s and Mr. Haughey’s deluge of marketing email. From the only perspective that matters–theirs–it’s a workable strategy.
An Uneasy Collaboration
There’s always been an uneasy collaboration between journalists and PR people. The rise of the web has stirred up that alliance, and the power has shifted away from the marketers. Here’s the truth: bloggers don’t need marketers. If you start with that humble assumption, you’re better off.
We’re busy revising a book on this topic, so I’ll spare you the (frankly, quite obvious) song and dance about joining the conversation, listening first and all the usual bollocks.
Instead, I’ll tell you what works when I get pitched. I’m in the somewhat unusual position of being both a–all gay jokes aside–pitcher and catcher in this relationship. I’d been blogging for years before I sent or received my first pitch. Fortunately, I don’t suffer a flood of inquiries. On the average day, I might get five. But it’s enough that I’ve stopped replying to them all. And, as you might imagine, I’m pretty sympathetic to marketers.
How to Pitch Me
I’m going to skip all the obvious advice, and focus on when strangers have successfully convinced me to write about their product or service:
- Demonstrate that you’ve read my blog. And by ‘read’ I don’t mean that it showed up in search results and you emailed me. If you’re monitoring mentions of competitors’ brands and found my site, that’s cool. Just recognize that I’ve written about your competitors, and explain why you’re different.
- Figure out what I write about. It’s not rocket science. Last year somebody pitched me a biography of a 17th century Portuguese nun. That’s not something I’m in the habit of writing about.
- Geography matters. If your project is Vancouver or BC-based, I’m likelier to write about it.
- If your project is a good cause, or has a social change angle, I’m likelier to write about it.
- If you include references to photos or video that I can embed and link to (shamefully, this almost never happens), I’m likelier to write about your project.
- Make me feel special. If I recall correctly, Bill from Workspace (where I currently sit, writing this post) invited me for a preview tour of his coworking office.
- In terms of ‘breaking a story’, I almost never care about exclusivity. I think I’m an exception in this regard.
- If it’s something you created (as opposed to being a PR flack), I’m likelier to write about it. Last month Ellen Bernfeld, the singing voice of “Pizzazz” from the 80’s cartoon “Jem and the Holograms”, pitched me on her YouTube video. I didn’t write about it–I’m not backing Senator Clinton–but it was cool to, you know, get pitched by a cartoon villainess (and the video’s creator).
4 Comments »
April 9th, 2008, 7 Comments »
As regular readers will recall, last winter we wrote and self-published a 100-page ebook on social media marketing. In terms of our goals for the project, it’s been a success.
Thanks to Kris, we kind of accidentally met a literary agent who liked the ebook and wanted to shop it around. We wrote a (mercifully short) book proposal and the agent went to work.
Two weeks later, we had interest from No Starch Press, a San Francisco publisher with the slogan, “the finest in geek entertainment”. They have American distribution through O’Reilly Media, one of the giants of tech publishing.
We’ve since signed a contract, and have until the early fall to basically double the length of our ebook manuscript. It’s going to be a busy summer, but it’ll be cool to have a real dead-tree edition to wave around.
We’re going to change the title of the book, though we haven’t decided on the new title quite yet. We’ll probably blog more regularly on our ebook blog, writing about the process of expanding the book and possibly posting new draft material.
7 Comments »
January 29th, 2008, No Comments »
If you’ll forgive a little cross-promotion, I wanted to point to some recent posts on our social media marketing ebook blog. We’ve been trying to blog regularly there over the past month or two. That won’t last forever, but I wanted to build up a bit of an audience and some fodder for the search engines:
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December 11th, 2007, 3 Comments »
I’ll stop pimping ebook-related stuff soon, I promise. However, I did want to point to our first substantive blog post from the ebook blog. It’s an excerpt from the book, and discusses ways in which you can make your site more friendly for social media creators:
Ensure that social media creators can link to any and every page on your website. This goes double for websites with online product catalogs. Make it easy for bloggers to write, “I really love this!” and send visitors to your website. Too many sites rely on Flash or arcane organization to display their products. As a result, the URL in the address bar doesn’t reference the particular product you’re viewing.
Both these companies make great products, so we’re reluctant to pick on them, but Matt & Nat and Crumpler both have disappointing websites in this regard. Bloggers are left writing, “click ‘Products’, then scroll to the fourth bag from the right, then pick the blue one…”
I’m totally cheating by calling it “12 Ways”, but hey, the Internet loves a list. If you like the post, please consider Digging, Del.iciu.using (oy) or Stumbling it.
3 Comments »
November 26th, 2007, No Comments »
Over the weekend Keith McArthur from Veritas (that’s a ballsy name for a PR agency, eh?) pitched me on the results of their new social media survey. Given that we’re finishing up a book on the subject (it’s back from the editor on Wednesday), it piqued my interest. The results will be available on Tuesday here, but he’s giving some bloggers a sneak peak.
Here are a couple of interesting results. They asked 2,265 Canadians the following question:
Which of the following best describes your current use of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace?
For the 1,295 who have used social media, the results look like:
18% - I added my profile to one of these sites but I haven’t been back since.
9% - I used to be active on these sites, but not anymore.
30% - I added my profile to one of these sites, and I occasionally check it.
26% - I often visit sites like Facebook or MySpace.
17% - I am constantly visiting sites such as Facebook or MySpace.
I’d say that’s pretty reflective of my non-geeky friends.
The other result that popped out at me was a question they asked “444 people who identified themselves as senior managers or marketing executives” (is that a sufficiently large sample group?). After a series of other questions, they asked:
Which, if any, of the following will you cut back on in order to increase your social media budget?
The top three answers were direct mail marketing, print advertising and radio advertising. That can’t be great news for the newspapers and radio stations of the world.
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