Our tasty training sessions available for everyone

(GBR) Up until today, all our training offerings have always been delivered in-house for our cross-sector range of clients.

We thought it was time to extend the opportunity to all…

We’ve scheduled two of our beginners level social media training courses with the price set at a pilot rate of £250 (to reflect our new foray into this space).

Delegates will get a full day of MediaSnackers magic: a delicious menu of social media platforms, tools and ideas, served through our immersive learning approach (patent pending). We guarantee that not only will this be like no other training course you’ve ever been on, but also you will leave with the confidence and skills to start creating media and exploring the social web to help you do things quicker, cheaper, sexier.

Here’s the course blurb :

New to all this social media stuff (either personally or professionally)?
Need to get to grips with the basics fast?
Don’t want to just focus on one platform/website all day?

This course is quick and easy to understand with lots of hands-on opportunities to leave you feeling confident of being able to tackle many websites, applications and services used today.

We will address many common questions and concerns whilst paying attention to the explanation of social spaces, signing up to new websites, and walking through their use and maximising the most general features.

There will also be inspiring case studies and examples plus time to reflect with opportunities to question us throughout the day.

Here’s a flavour of what will be covered in the course:

- Online collaborative spaces such as Google Docs and Bubbl.us
- Creative blogging techniques through Blogger
- Dynamic image tools using Flickr and Animoto
- Digital storytelling through sites like Slideshare and Issuu
- Other popular platforms including Youtube and Twitter

Spaces are limited to 3 per organisation/company to ensure a diverse learning group—if you would like more than 3, please contact us directly.

Check out what our past clients have to say.

Here’s the details:

[Update: Unfortunately the Birmingham course has now been cancelled and all attendees have been offered a full refund or an alternative course. Apologies to all. Mark]

Each venue has been chosen to reflect our dynamic teaching style, our list of technical requirements plus because they are within walking distance to central railway hubs to ensure accessibility and our green ideals.

We will be scheduling more dates in the new year which will include our Intermediate and Advanced level training—let us know if you would like us to come to your town/venue.

As you can see places are limited so please click on the appropriate date/venue above to book now and avoid disappointment.

If you have any queries or questions please don’t hesitate to contact us directly.

Investing in digital

(WORLD) The MediaSnackers podcast focusses on individuals, organisations or companies who are simply impressing us and which are crying out for more discussion.

Guy Levine is the CEO and owner of Return On Digital, a digital communication agency who focusses on creating “outstanding return on investment”.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

0.00—0.16 intro
0.17—0.53 background on Return On Digital
0.54—2.10 what is the investment and what is the return
2.11—3.21 tangible example
3.22—4.55 digital vs traditional marketing
4.56—7.43 the rise of social endorsements plus open graph / facebook ‘like’ button
7.44—9.21 questioning the ethics
9.22—10.10 future
10.11—10.20 outro

Subscribe directly through iTunes by clicking on this icon (download iTunes for free here).

Not using iTunes? Then just copy / paste this feed and drop it into your aggregating software.

Want to suggest someone or put your virtual hand-up to be interviewed? Then get in touch here.

Devour our other podcasts.

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A snack-sized insight

(WORLD) I first came across this adaptive term back in 2006 at a small gig with the BBC. It was coined by Ashley Highfield, who was the then Director of New Media & Technology for the Beeb (one of the main guys behind the iPlayer) and is cited in this speech he gave back in 2004 (when there was no iPad or iPhone let alone geo-location services or even YouTube and Twitter).

The term and idea has become a staple slide in all my speaking gigs up until today and is described as thus:

Martini media is digital content which can be accessed anytime, anyplace, anywhere (the strapline to the well known alcoholic brand).

We challenge our clients, and anyone who will listen, to apply this concept the next time they are in a meeting discussion any marketing or advertising efforts. It’s such a simple question to ask : how can this be Martini’d? Or put another way, can the content created become digital takeaways so it can be shared?

Check out our mobile vouchers idea : snacksize mobile movies which, when shown at the box office, will give a reduced ticket rate—demonstrating the principle in practice.

Is this something you can use?

MediaSnackers Speaking/Masterclass

For charities and community groups

(GBR) Lottery funding, council funding, government funding, trusts and foundations, business sponsorship, individual donors. And most of these are grants, not ongoing funding. Micro grants of £250. Small grants of £5,000. Medium grants of £30,000. Large grants of £100,000. As you might expect, it’s a truism that the larger organisations get the larger grants. And government support is overwhelmingly channelled into the major charities, agencies and organisations.

And that’s just the start. You must generate your own funding. Offering services, training, membership, consultancy, products and information, advice and signposting. And constantly proving the value of your work. In numbers. In changes. With robust evidence (especially in these difficult funding times for the public sector).

The two paragraphs above apply to the majority of public/community sector organisations, social enterprises, agencies, charities, partnerships and even individuals. It also applies to some council services, especially the non-statutory ones such as sports and arts development.

Funding. Certainly a maze to get through. Either a frustrating, confusing conundrum of multi-modal pleading, or a wealth of opportunities to bring in tons of dosh by asserting your worth?

Probably somewhere between the two.

So what MediaSnackers wants to do here is offer a brief digest of funding signposting and the context of why this could be important to us/you: (more…)

Is your balance off?

(WORLD) We sign up, we use what we need to get the job done and then we leave. Game over, right? Well, yes if you love the main feature of an online service. However the people that build you great tools, think much further ahead to all the possibilities, features and connections that drove them to make that tool in the first place. Which means, there’s a high chance that behind the basic set of features you use, there will be a whole bag of extra features you’ll love too. Take a little time, to dig deeper into your favourite spaces and hunt down the great links and buttons which provide you with more fun, power and value.

A great way to do this is to form a little group of like minded individuals at your workplace or friend circle to brainstorm uses for a new tool in your business. Who knows what you’ll dream up and unleash on the world?

Here are a few of my regularly visited sites with features, that I feel, are not utilised enough. I’ve illustrated what people mainly do and how you could use them, if you took the time to explore:

YouTube

What you do:

• You host your videos
• You embed them into your blog or send the link out to friends
• You search and view and subscribe and enjoy

What you could do:

• Consider your video title as important as keyword terms that people search for
• Create a relevant description that links to all your other social spaces
• Change your homepage layout to insert all your Insight Statistics
• Connect up all your social media accounts
• Create an interactive game using your videos. Check out this example by Free Runners Damien Walters and Tim Shieff. What could you create?

Twitter

What you do:

• Add your friends
• Follow trends
• Chat and laugh
• Tell me stuff

What you could do:

• Find common phrases to inspire you. Don’t just search for single words, try phrases and sentences
• Search for what’s really important for you. Use Twitters hidden advanced search area to really drill into those millions of tweets
• Create lists for everyone and structure them too—New people / Inspiring / Company’s / 2010 / Private
• Explore the business use, with howtos, case studies, tips and more from the Twitter guys themselves

Blogs

What you do:

• Build a website and make it pretty
• Show me some or all of you
• Write a lot and share with your friends
• Sit there alone and know not what to do

What you could do:

• Start with a focus a love or passion. Blogs work best when they have a focus. Find what rocks your world and document it all
• Create a routine and share all the gems you discover. Frequent posts, no matter how small or insignificant builds traffic, establishes a routine in your week and helps develop a tone of voice for your words
• Explore some groups and make new friends. Conversation creates ideas. If you need some, there will be others out there to spark off your brain cells. LinkedIn, Yahoo and Google groups have a whole community ready and waiting. If you don’t find one specific for your ideas, create one!
• Pay attention to commentary before steaming in with opinion

So there you have it, a few ideas and extra features to explore related to the spaces you love. How about you, are you using any hidden feature that you hold close to your chest? C’mon share it here, that way we can all join in the fun. Let us know in the comments below.

Photo by foxbert

The secret to all this stuff—just between you and me obviously!

(WORLD) The following piece of advice is shared often with clients and others who are trying to get their head round all this social media gubbins.

It’s simple, it’s obvious, and can be applied to any platform / situation / strategy / sector.

Here we go:

This pearl provides something to check yourself against as newbies (and us oldies) craft their social media use with an eye on subsequent strategic development.

Here’s the rule applied—in a real room with real people would you:

• talk about yourself constantly—we’ve all met these people and wished they had a mute button. Please don’t do this online. Here’s a nice test: check out Wordle and put the link to your blog/site in there, if it’s all about you then it’s time to shift the focus of your content.

• cover your head with your company/organisation logo and/or introduce yourself just using the company/organisation name—time to step from behind the curtain and become human again. Brands can’t tweet, people have to tweet on behalf of brands. Being people is what it’s all about.

• only talk in press release headlines—boring, boring, boring. If you are going to share this stuff make sure its in context and adds value to the conversation.

• automate your responses without taking into consideration the person you’re talking to, their level of knowledge, why they are interested etc—of course we all have stock answers and similar things we say in certain situations, however, if you said the same thing EVERY time you’re not a person who cares but a robot who nobody cares about.

• wear a dressing gown and expect people to take you seriously—being human does not equate to being unprofessional.

• stand at the back, never engage with others and then call it a crap party—having a blog and not updating it or commenting on others is exactly the same. If you don’t know where to start ask those you know to introduce or recommend others. Seek out those who look and sound interesting. Ask questions. Make statements. Get involved.

Does this make sense?

What other things wouldn’t you do in a big room / using social media?