Social Media Seminars with discounts for SDForum members

Here are a couple seminars in Social Media, with special pricing for SDForum members:

http://snipr.com/xevg7


Kevin Heney was a speaker at the March MarketingSIG meeting and gave an informative talk on branding. You can read a summary of his presentation here.
I know Steve Farnsworth and can recommend his expertise.


Description (copied from the event web page):

Social Media and Branding Workshops

The same organization that brought the Silicon Valley Brand Forums to you for over a decade is now offering workshops in branding and social media. These intensive half-day sessions will teach you the skills and knowledge to advance your organization’s mission and your career.

Creating Preference for Your Products and Services

This half-day workshop gives attendees an understanding of the value of brand management and the steps involved in creating a brand strategy.

Attendees of this class will learn:

    * What a brand is and why it’s important

    * How to plan a brand strategy

    * Common mistakes in brand management

    * New opportunities and challenges in branding

Date: Tuesday June 22, 2010  ‑ Time: 8:30 am to 12:00

Location: Redwood Shores, Redwood City, CA

Cost: $119

Instructor: Kevin Heney, Executive Director, Silicon Valley Brand Forum

Using Social Media Strategically to Grow Your Business

This half-day workshop walks you through the steps in building a social media roadmap that gives you an action plan to succeed in your social media marketing efforts. By showing a clear process, the low cost and free resources, and how to make sense out of the social media landscape. You will be able to implement a strategy that creates awareness of your brand, shortens the sales cycle, and grows your brand as a preferred choice on your prospect’s short list.

Attendees of this class will learn how to:

    * Set realistic and achievable goals

    * Developed a social media strategy that helps sales people close more business

    * Collect marketing intelligence on the competition

    * Implement social media without adding headcount

    * Choose which tactics are most effective, and where to start

    * Build a loyal following of prospects and customers who will rave about your company

Date: Tuesday June 22, 2010  ‑ Time: 1:00 pm to 4:30

Location: Redwood Shores, Redwood City, CA

Cost: $119

Instructor: Steve Farnsworth, Chief Digital Strategist, Jolt Social Media

Digital initiatives can create RABID customers

By Mark Helfen

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Communities of common interests have been around as long as humans. Maybe longer.

But the ever wider distribution of the web, supporting networks and social networking software have changed the dynamics, allowing the creation of digital communities that can have a large effect on the success of your business or organization. These "digital initiatives" (in the terminology of our speaker) can:

• Improve, or damage, your relationships with your customers.
• Improve positive images or your company, or strengthen negative images.
• Improve customer service and satisfaction.
• Give your customers a voice, which can supply innovative ideas that you might never have thought of. 
• Help create a population of not just customers, but committed, even "rabid" fans.

At Monday's (6/14/2010) SDForum Marketing SIG meeting, Dylan Thomas, Digital Director at Rassak Experience, discussed strategies for developing your community initiative plans, but spent most of his talk describing digital initiative successes and failures.

Don't outspend. Outthink! Power up your marketing programs with the power of communities

By Mark Helfen

Community initiatives can enhance your marketing communication program, make a small company look big, and help gain momentum for startups, all without big time or money commitments.

Even better, their impact can be measured, and they can even make money for your company.

Or so says Dylan Thomas. Thomas holds the title of Digital Director at Rassak Experience, a digital brand building and communications group. (My favorite quote from their web site - Don't outspend. Outthink!)

He will be speaking at next Monday's SDForum Marketing SIG (6/14) on the topic: Using Community Initiatives to Build Your Brand and Drive Business Results.

The current hot buzzword of social media is subset of community initiatives, which Thomas views with a "broad brush."  He includes Facebook, Twitter, email marketing, and proprietary community web sites in his overall idea of a digital community.