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How to implement a Social Media Strategy training day.

This is a one day course broken down into 6 modules to help you formulate your personal on-line social media strategy.

The course is aimed at sole traders and SME’s. It is also aimed at those people who wish to "kick start" their businesses in 2010 and augment their existing marketing strategies.

Brief course synopsis:

1. Determine Your Objective.

Before jumping on the social media bandwagon, you need to be very clear about your reasons for doing so! This will determine your entire engagement strategy. For instance, are you hoping to monitor conversations around your area of expertise, humanise your brand, create business exposure, become more responsive to what the market wants, or just learn from others? This in turn will determine how much content you need to create and how much time you need to spend on-line to achieve those objectives.

Are you trying to:

Promote
PR
Learn
Advocate/Build advocacy
Customer relation/s
Customer Service/s
Business awareness/visibility
Collaboration
Conversations (building trust)
Networking and leveraging the networks of other people.
Thought leadership

Each choice, or combination of choices will determine which platforms/sites you use, how you engage on them, and how you integrate them with your other social media activities.
In this first session, we will help you determine your objective, and advise on which sites to use to achieve it.

2. Find Your Niche

One of the aims of social media engagement is for you to become known as the "go to" person for your area of expertise, or your product, or service. We believe that the more niche this is, the better! You need to determine exactly what it is you wish to become known for. This could be very specific to you, or it could be more general. For instance, Linda McCartney Foods is known as @meatfreetweets on Twitter, becoming a source of information for everything to do with vegetarian-ism, not just LMF products. This gives the potential to attract in people who are vegetarian, but not yet customers. It very much depends on you and what you are trying to achieve, but finding your niche in the over-crowded on-line world is paramount to social media success!

In this second session we will help you, through "brain storming", to drill down to exactly what it is you do and what you want to achieve, and determine your niche and unique selling point. You will then write an "elevator" pitch to summarise what you do and what makes you and your business unique.

3. Become your own Evangelist

Unlike a big faceless corporation, you are the "face" of your business, meaning you can provide a much more personal and bespoke service. You can "own" your social media output and be accountable for it. Nobody knows your business better than you, so you can devise compelling and engaging content about your products/services/areas of expertise that will help you stand out from the crowd and be perceived as a "leader". If you wish to be considered an authority at what you do, you need a blog at the very least. This must be consistent and regular and should be scheduled into your daily working routine. There is content everywhere and we will be discussing ways of seeing content in everything you do, including text, video, audio, photos etc. You can also become a "human filter" for information around your area of expertise, and you will be shown where and how to find other people’s content and advocate them. Being your own Evangelist means you share you passion for what you do with others, and give them the opportunity to get to know you, like you, and follow you. Over time, your on-line contribution can also help people learn to trust you and recommend you into their networks. Where there is trust, business happens.

In this third session, we will determine what you are going to evangelise about in your business. We will determine keys words for you to use in your content and personal branding that give a flavour of what you are all about and reinforces your message in a consistent and authentic fashion.

4. Check Your Tech

While most social media uses free web tools, it is important to ensure that you have the technology you need to implement your personal strategy.

You may also need to customise your technology or create bespoke solutions, such as a forum for your customers. But Tech is not only about software but hardware. Also we will be going through a thorough understanding of what "cloud computing" is.

Hardware:

Why the right computer is important.
Which ones.
Why the right "mobile device" is important.
Which ones.

Remember you will be using computers now quite often and quite hard (depending on what you will be doing with them). In the main most of you will be using "cloud computing", this will directly have an effect on which "unit" you choose.

Software:

Not only will this cover general software but also on-line app’s as well. Depending on what you want to has an effect on which app’s or web app’s you use.

5. Listen First

Before diving into social media or specific shared interest communities relevant to your business, it is important to listen first. You can learn a lot from watching others. Neither should you be afraid to ask questions either on or off-line so you can learn more. The basic rules of successful social media engagement are Authenticity, Consistency, and Leadership. If you follow these, you will not go too far wrong. In the early days, you may like to target making some good connections, join some relevant on-line communities to introduce yourself, and start commenting on other people’s blogs and posts to start to build your visibility. You will learn why one way broadcasting will fail and why two way dialogue will succeed. You will also learn why big numbers alone will not achieve success, but why having large numbers of people who choose to listen is the way to leverage this new technology.

In this session, we will show you how to monitor conversations on-line and why listening is as powerful as speaking both on and off-line. There are numerous powerful on-line web applications that allow you to monitor on-line conversations. The alogrithms to date are extremely powerful and are getting even more finely tuned as we speak. An understanding of how to utilise these is fundamental.

6. Taking Your First Steps

You cannot post your 500th blog first, you have to start with Blog No. 1. We will help you understand the importance of having a social media regime that will be a daily programme that must be adhered to religiously to help you achieve your objectives.

We will also look at the importance of a professional photograph, avatar, logo, branded pages etc. You will learn why you need them and how they help you stand out from the crowd.

We will finish the day with some case studies of people who we think show fantastic social media engagement so that you can appreciate the difference between broadcasting and two way engagement. We will look at those people who have a stand out personal brand, who represent the very best social media engagement, and who are great examples to follow.

Only £149.00 inc VAT for the day: This includes lunch, teas and coffee.