Industry News

When I first launched the CEPSM social media marketing workshop in April, 2008, I really had no idea that it would garner such a positive response. In fact, we quickly stopped going through the logistical hassle of organizing public workshops since there was more than enough demand for private ones (organizations inviting me in). CEPSM was never meant to be solely in the workshop business, but this way all logistical items were taken care of by the client. However, over the last year, CEPSM has been getting numerous requests from individuals in the public and non-profit sectors to once again offer a social media marketing workshop that is open to the public. Well guess what, we listened.

To solve our logistical dilemma , we decided to partner with an organization that has been conducting workshops successfully for decades, The Centre of Excellence for Communications. Yes, I know it’s ironic that we happen to share similar names, however don’t let that confuse you. The CEC’s core business is workshops, whereas CEPSM’s core business is the consulting side (although training is part of our consulting process). I’ll stop confusing you though. The bottom line is this, on November 25-26, 2009 CEPSM/CEC are jointly launching the 2-day Social Media Strategies for the Public Sector workshop. The intent is to offer this workshop in major cities across Canada for the first year and then see how it evolves from there.

Those of you familiar with my 1-day workshop will notice the switch to 2-days. I wanted to change things up a bit and add a hands-on session where each participant can get their hands dirty by actually using all of the tools I introduce during Day 1.  Further still, we will be using a live

Read more: Strategic Social Media Marketing 2-day Workshop Finally Launched!

About a year ago, well before the era of re-tweeting, I wrote a post entitled “Social Media Document Garage Sale” which received quite a bit of attention according to my blog stats at the time. The basic intent of the post was to provide you with download links to various white papers, presentations, reports and studies on social media that I had accumulated to date and that I could freely distribute (without violating any policies or copyrights). Another year has passed, and sure enough  my “3rd party reports” folder has once again piled up. I figure there is no point in keeping this stuff to myself so I’m providing links for you below. It’s also partly because I’m lazy and don’t want to be emailing individual reports to people when responding to questions. I’d rather point people at this blog post from now on.

I realize that the phrase “garage sale” doesn’t really capture the fact that these documents are free (it’s more of a spring cleaning), however I like comparing this to a garage sale so that I don’t have to claim responsibility if something is no good. Hopefully you find some gems, I know there are a few in there.

I have read most of these, however , some of them I merely skimmed through. Rather than providing you with my review, I’ll let you judge on your own and thus only provide you with the title and author. If, for some reason, I have made the mistake of putting something up that I shouldn’t have (e.g. something that was free for a limited time only), then by all means let me know so that I can remove it. Enjoy!

• Using Media Intelligence Tools to Drive Communications Success – CNW Group
• Read more: Social Media Document Garage Sale – Part II

I’m always blown away whenever I step outside of the social media fishbowl/community and step into reality.

Which reality am I referring to?

The one where the vast majority of intelligent people in the workforce have never used, let alone heard of free tools such as Google Docs (assuming it’s not blocked).

What is it?

Google Docs is the ultimate tool for when you need wiki functionality, but don’t necessarily want to open it up to the public and/or you just have a short term initiative in mind.

What makes it great?

People are already used to using it (most don’t know they are)

How is that possible?

It uses the same menus, icons and basic features as Microsoft Office products (Excel, PowerPoint, Word)

What’s the difference?

Any amount of people can work on the exact same document collaboratively in real-time. No more emails and/or documents with tracked changes!

Show me how!

Watch this video to get an idea of what I’m talking about…

So please , do yourself a favour (if you’re not already all over this) and start saving yourself and your organization some valuable time today!