It's a Mesh: merging web, mobile and traditional marketing

Tomorrow night marks our fourth workshop in the monthly series of free workshops we're doing for 2012 (the first one was in December, 2011), and we're excited to welcome special guest speaker Andy Beal. Not only will this workshop be recorded for online video, but we'll also be live streaming from the Mechdyne cave at Riverstone Energy Center.

Andy Beal, internet marketing consultant, award-winning blogger, professional speaker and coauthor of the critically-acclaimed book Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online will join us via Skype. Andy has appeared on ABC News, CNBC and NPR and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times , Business Week, Inc. Magazine, Forbes and many other publications - and now he'll be appearing in Riverstone Energy Center! He is considered “the Indiana Jones of reputation management.”

It's not easy to sit down and convince somebody who is trying to keep their small business afloat in a tumultuous global economy that they shouldn't always be concerned with the sale first when marketing to the modern consumer. Most people who don't have experience in social media just down-right don't take advice like that seriously. It's true, though.

Everyday, internet users are bombarded with people trying to sell them something, to the point where most of this marketing becomes part of their peripheral world. It's not hard to demonstrate this. Most of you probably have a Facebook. I want you to go use Facebook for 20 minutes (seriously, right now, before you make it past this parenthetical aside and spoil the point) and then come back and tell me 10 Facebook ads that stuck out to you. If you're like the vast majority of everyday browsers, you probably can't because you've developed a bit of an immunity to it. 

I'm so proud of all of the area business people who have been coming out to the free monthly social media workshops!  A number of them have been able to come to all three so far, and every month we also have new participants. A few of Monday night's participants are in the photo at right.

We were fortunate to have Ben Capozzi, Director of the Business of Art & Design Program at Southern Virginia Higher Education Center and Halifax County's King of Twitter, help out with the Twitter workshop this month. You'll be glad to know that Ben plans to help out with future workshops as well.

I know our clients get tired of hearing this, but I can't say it enough: social media is about networking and building relationships, not about broadcasting your own message incessantly.  Nobody cares about you and your product.  They care about how you can help them - whether it's solving a problem or just having fun.

My friend Ben Capozzi is a good example: he followed a link in an email to read a story by an awesome artist whose work he admired, then reached out in the blog comments section saying he enjoyed the story. Then he tweeted the story to his followers. Guess what?  The blogger followed him back after that, and Ben ended up being asked to participate in a project he was doing. You just never know who you might meet through social media, just like you never know who you might meet at a party.

The other night we presented the first workshop in our Social Media Workshops series; in this workshop we presented an overview of social media, illustrated how it has always been used in society but the tools are changing, showed examples of successful campaigns, and talked about how social media should fit in your overall marketing plan.  As a part of the discussion we stressed that you should address negative comments in a way that is communicative rather than defensive and that you should not delete negative comments but should use them in a way to try to turn them into a positive. The very next day several local residents made disparaging remarks about the workshops in comments on a local newspaper's site, calling out our company by name and accusing us of being paid to present the workshops as a political payback for supporting a new local meals tax.

6pm Tuesday, December 6 will mark the kickoff date for a free series of workshops to be delivered by Glerin. The first workshop will be an overview of the major social media outlets, explaining what each is, how they differ from each other, what they're used for, and how they can be used together in a coordinated way.

Topics covered will include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and more, plus using blogging and newsletters in coordination with social media.

You've probably heard people talking about Google's new project, Google+, and wondered what it is; basically, it's just Google's latest shot at making a big impact in the social networking arena.  The company's goal is to make social neworking more like real life; according to their blog "Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it."

Many of the online services you probably already use are owned by Google - Picasa, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Earth - and plans are for all of their services to integrate with Google+ so you don't have to login to different accounts to share information.

If you have a business Facebook page you may be wondering what the impressions and feedback stats are that you see under each post; you can use these stats to help gauge the effectiveness of your posts and how interesting they are to your followers.  Exactly what do the terms "impressions" and "feedback" mean?