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.”

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.

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.