Super Social Media Training

This is a post about Bright One’s series of training sessions held exclusively for Bright One volunteers and clients. Please get in touch if you are interested in running a training session for Bright One. We’d love to hear from you!

Following last month’s inaugral Bright One training session on ‘Talkability’, a group of Bright One volunteers and clients were given an exclusive training session by Melanie Seasons, Social Media Strategist at Onlinefire, all about ‘Social Media and Online PR’.

During the session, Melanie described why Audience Mapping is important (Understanding who your target audiences are and what they ‘do’ online, as you need to know what platforms are best to engage on and if you already have advocates) and some of the tools you can use to find them. These tools included paid-for services such as Radian6, right down to free tools such as Google Blog Search, Addict-o-matic, IceRocket, and BlogPulse.

She also took the attendees through the basics of Social Media Relations, where organisation engagee with their audiences through Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook), Pro-active outreach (e-mail, newsletter, events) or Online press offices (blogging, video).

The attendees were also left with a few final thoughts to take away with them:

• Starting from scratch can be tough – establishing a social media profile does not happen overnight
• Expect growing pains – you’ll figure out as you monitor where your audiences are online
• Sign up to it all, but don’t expect to be able to do everything – concentrate on what works for you, and build a strategy from there

All in all, it was a fantastic session, so many thanks to Melanie for giving us a superb insight into Social Media!