On Wednesday KMP and How-Do hosted a Social Media Marketing seminar at the MDDA in Manchester. There was a great line up of speakers for the seminar, with Mike Antliff from Huzu and Dominic Sparkes from Tempero presenting for us for the first time, alongside KMP’s Chairman – Bill Daring! It was really exciting to have some new speakers with fresh ideas and opinions speaking at the inblackandwhite seminars. We had a great turnout for the event, with attendees from BJL, Blacks Leisure Group, The Co-operative Group, MoneySupermarket.com, and many more! Bill opened the seminar and with a presentation on “PR 2.0 and the Social Media” where he gave an introduction to social media, whilst discussing the case for social media in PR. Bill’s presentation was formed on the basis that the majority of the UK’s population is now online – blogging, chatting, visiting message boards and exchanging news and views, and the introduction of web 2.0 and the implications of social networks have encouraged a change in marketing methods. Bill also talked about how we can track, manage and respond to brand buzz online. Mike was up next, and he delivered a fantastic presentation which covered everything from the evolution of social media, the rise of the web, some of the most influential landmark sites, and highlights of the social media tools and applications contained within. Last but certainly not least was Dominic, whose presentation was titled “Extend Buzz – spend less – managing online communities to drive success“. Dominic discussed the topic of moderation and community management. To conclude the seminar, the 3 speakers then took part in a Q & A session, which gave the attendees the opportunity to ask any remaining questions they had about social media and the issues covered in the presentations. If you have any feedback or comments about the event, then we’d love to hear from you! Just leave us a comment below!

Ok so there’s not long to go now until KMP’s Social Media Marketing seminar (25th Feb) takes place at the MDDA in Manchester. We’ve got some great speakers for this seminar, with Mike Antliff from Huzu and Dominic Sparkes from Tempero presenting for us for the first time, alongside KMP Chairman – Bill Daring! It’’s really exciting to have some new speakers with fresh ideas and opinions speaking at the inblackandwhite seminars. I’ve had a sneak preview of Dominic’s presentation, and all I can tell you is that it promises to be educational, fun and really interesting! Titled, “Extend Buzz – spend less – managing online communities to drive success” (you see it even rhymes!) Dominic is set to discuss the topic of moderation and community management. Mike has also given me a little insight into his presentation, which looks to be jammed pack with social media goodness! Covering everything from the evolution of social media, the rise of the web, some of the most influential landmark sites, and highlights of the social media tools and applications contained within, it really promised to be value for money! Bill is set to discuss “PR 2.0 and the Social Media” where he will be presenting the case for social media in PR. Most of the UK’s population is now online – blogging, chatting, visiting message boards and exchanging news and views, and the introduction of web 2.0 and the implications of social networks have encouraged a change in marketing methods. Bill will discuss how we can track, manage and respond to brand buzz online. So, if you’ve not got your tickets yet, where have you been? Luckily for you there are still a few tickets available, so book now!

OK, so you have set up your "Buzz" monitoring, planned your engagement strategy, launched your Blog, opened your forum, set up your Twitter accounts, seeded your Facebook app, populated your Flickr group, uploaded your videos to Vimeo. Phew that’s good. However, as your role in online marketing requires you’ve got other SEO work to do and a usability study to commission and a new homepage redesign to manage etc etc etc. Hold on where does social media engagement fit in to that working day? The answer is it doesn’t! You need specialists and that is part of making your company "social media ready"

So how much time does managing a social media campaign take? At a high level in engagement you will be split between being proactive and reactive. Following is a simplified example of our experience. It is not comprehensive by any means but gives you a flavour!

The "Reactive" activities i.e. listening and moderating principally could pan out as follows:-

1. Listening and analysing the Buzz around your key topics – 2 hours per day (10 per week)
2. Moderating your forum – 1- 2hrs per day (5 per week). Depending on the number of posts. This amount of time would cover approximately 30-40 incoming posts per day
3. Flickr account management 1 hr per day (5 per week). If you have an application that uploads photos automatically for you to approve and tag or not, you might have to trawl through 50-75 images to ensure they are suitable.

The "Proactive" activities i.e. creating content and engaging with key influencers may be as follows:-

1. Researching and writing Blog posts – 2 hrs a day (10 per week). That should deliver at least one blog post per day and allow time to move your stock of 4or 5 others close to publishing.
2. Blogger outreach – 1 hr per day (5 per week). This is direct contact with your key influencers. Remember more often than not they may not be in the same time zone as you.
3. Commenting – 2hrs per day (10 per week). This is the leg work which may involve you actively in say, 20-30 3rd party forums, blogs or news sites where you are commenting on other peoples posts to improve the sentiment of your brand within your key topics.

That’s a total of roughly 45 hours a week or more than one person full time. The likelihood is that the skills you will need will probably mean more than one person. You can see that the skills required being proactive are different to those required when being reactive.

If that isn’t enough, a final thought to leave you with is that you should also remember that conversations online that require engagement, forum posts that need moderating don’t stop at 5pm when you go home or at the weekend or on Christmas Day. Social media management is a 24/7 job!

On Wednesday we hosted our second social media workshop at the MDDA in Manchester. This was hosted by KMP’s MD – Jon Keefe, alongside one of our Client Service Managers, Gerry Daring. The workshop was a great success, and had attendees from a wide range of companies including Johnsons Cleaners, Business Link NorthWest, The Beatles Story and Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce. As part of the workshop, Jon adressed the popular topic of “How to get your Organisation Social Media Ready,” and a video of this section of the workshop can be seen below. http://www.vimeo.com/3378687

It seems like no one can escape that pesky little Twitter at the moment! When it’s not being talked about by Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross, or even Chris Moyles on Radio 1, then there is always John Cleese! Don’t forget to follow inblackandwhite on twitter for all the latest seminar news! http://www.vimeo.com/3181548