Social Media: The Good, The Bad and the Clueless

Search Engine Marketing Training

May 9, 2007

Spaces Limited

8:00am–12:00pm

Social media marketing is one of the most talked about online marketing tactics of 2007. “Just get your site on Digg” is a common refrain among popular Internet bloggers. But does social media really work? Does it build positive buzz and name recognition for your company? Does it result in quality in-bound links? Does it produce sales? Or, does it simply cause your server to crash under a short-lived traffic spike while you try to pick up the pieces?

Join Jennifer Laycock and Matt Bailey as they dig into the often confusing world of social media and consumer generated media web sites. Find out how to choose the social media marketing tactic that best suits your business and learn how to track the results of your campaigns to learn more than just how much traffic you’ve snagged.

This workshop is for marketers and business owners that want to learn more about how social media marketing works and whether or not it’s a good idea for their business.

After attending this half-day workshop, you will have a solid base level understanding of concepts that are vital to social media marketing including:

• Why social media is one of the most talked about marketing opportunities today
• What types of sites fall into the social media marketing category
• How to interact with users of social media sites
• How to creatively market through social media sites
• How to find the social media site that best fits your audience
• Segmenting your visitors so that you can analyze your social media campaigns
• Tracking the conversion rates and engagement rates of your campaigns

In this workshop, you will gain a better understanding of the concepts, ideas and implementations that are required to launch a social media campaign. You’ll learn why the Internet has created a unique environment that draws together like-minded people and how they use new technology to share ideas and information. You also learn how you can harness that environment to promote your own products and services.

The workshop will give real life examples of the successful and unsuccessful social media campaigns as well are sharing insight on how to safely wade into the social media waters. This workshop will also focus on how you can make use of consumer generated media environments like photo and video sharing sites, blog marketing, discussion forums and more to both monitor and expand your company’s online persona.

Consumer generated media (the heart of social media) is the fastest growing form of media online today. It’s only a matter of time until someone online talks about your business. This course will not only help prepare you in the ways to respond to the conversation, it will help you learn how to shape that conversation to your advantage.
So, during this workshop, you will learn:

• How the growth of consumer generated media on the Internet has created the idea environment for rapid word of mouth marketing.
• What defines a good social media marketing campaign
• How (and where) to plant the seeds of a social media campaign so that it begins to spread on it’s own
• What sites reach what types of Internet users
• How to identify the ideal target audience for your campaign
• How to take advantage of blogs and other forms of consumer generated media to generate positive buzz about your company

Jennifer Laycock is the Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide, an online publication aimed at educating Small Business owners about search engine marketing, viral marketing and online reputation management. Jennifer also operates as an independent online marketing consultant specializing in organic search marketing and viral marketing. Her clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings, Highlights for Children and Option-Line, a national crisis-pregnancy hotline. She is also the author of the popular e-books “The Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing” and “Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and Thirty Days.”

Known for her down–to–earth style of teaching and a special focus on educating small business owners, Jennifer focuses on inspiring companies with new ideas without leaving their heads spinning with techno-talk.

Jennifer is a requested speaker and has served as both a panelist and a moderator at Incisive Media’s popular Search Engine Strategies conferences, the eComXpo virtual trade show, Microsoft’s Small Business Summit and several local search marketing training seminars. In 2005, Jennifer delivered the keynote presentation at the MIVA Small Business Conference. She has also been interviewed and quoted by a variety of publications including The Financial Times, USA Today, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Entrepreneur magazine.

Matt Bailey is the president and founder of SiteLogic, a web marketing consulting firm. SiteLogic specializes in consulting and educating clients in analytics, usability, accessibility and effective web site marketing using search engines, viral techniques, and blogs.

Matt has been in the search marketing industry since 1996. As early as then, he was evaluating websites based on brand protection and ROI. Matt started speaking in the late 1990's at Bed and Breakfast seminars, teaching website marketing and search engine optimization.

For more than six years, Matt worked in development agencies, which enabled him to gain a complete view of the website process, starting from the hosting and architecture. Using this knowledge with his background in marketing, he brings a unique sense of perspective to the entire web marketing process.

A sought after speaker around the world, Matt is a regular speaker at the Search Engine Strategies Conferences, DMA (Direct Marketing Association) Conferences, and the American Advertising Federation. He is known for his fun, conversational style of presenting technical topics in an understandable and clear method.