Moving From Traditional to Social Media:
Easy Ways to Integrate SEO, Social
Networks & PR 2.0 Strategies for Success
With Lonnie B Hodge, Des Walsh, Brian Solis, Alvin Chiang, Omniture, Xiaonei and others

April 8th 2009 from 9 AM-5 PM

Bi-Lingual: Chinese and English

MARCH SESSION SOLD OUT

All dates and Times=China (EST +12)

For full details and sign up info go to: PR 2.0

A hands-on workshop to be held in Guangzhou, China and Broadcast Worldwide. It will teach you what you need to know to begin conversations with customers in online marketplace. Hit the ground running with several of the web’s best-known social media practitioners. Special technical skills will not be needed to to learn how adopt and employ social media: blogging, micro-blogging, SEO, social media news releases and social networks. You will begin to master cutting-edge tools essential to brand
and reputation enhancement especially needed in tough financial times. Joining this hand-on- your-shoulder class, led by two world-class coaches, who practice what they preach, will guarantee that you return to your company with real-world skills that will improve your bottom line through market engagement.

Professor Lonnie Hodge and Executive Coach Des Walsh will give you an international perspective no other global teachers can: An authentic, international view learned by experience and practice. Economies are inter-connected and authentic cross-cultural dialogues with existing and potential customers will give you a competitive advantage. Leaders Walsh and Hodge will teach you to build alliances in foreign markets.

Special technical skills are not needed as your learn how to engage customers through social media, while understanding the underlying terms, tools and practical applications for learning to speak to, not at, your customer. You will develop, in class, usable social media PR releases, use social media interfaces, write SEO best practices compliant HTML (if you can use MS Word you can do this!), and optimize visual and written content for releases, ads and websites to increase your bottom line.

Who Should Attend?
• PR And Advertising Staff
• SEO Professionals
• CSR directors
• NGO/NPO leaders
• HR Personnel
• Senior Executives
• Online Marketers
• IT Supervisors and Programmers
• YOU

Listed below are some of the topics that are to be covered at this one-day seminar:
• Social Media: The most powerful global sites where customers and brands interact: Twitter, Xiaonei, Facebook, MySpace, which platforms to engage and who to follow into those spaces.
• Free and inexpensive tools, including Alpha and Beta releases, foroptimizing sites and news releases to reach a larger audience: Powerful services like Pichengine, Involver, Seesmic that are not yet in general distribution…
• Social ROI: Groundbreaking Social Web Measurement tools that teach you the who, what, where, how, and why of visits
• Success and the Art of Listening: Moving from disruption strategies to engagement while overcoming the fear of transparency
• The Future of Blogs, Video Sharing and Social Networks

You’ll receive a free newsroom on Pitchengine.com and a month’s worth of unlimited and archived online social media press releases. You will,before you go return home, have a release indexed on the world wide web–worth the price of a seat. web–worth the price of a seat.Before the day is over you will create a real press release that will appear in major search engine news before the day ends.

Shel Israel, author of “Naked Conversations”, calls on businesses to respect social media spaces; Social Media Pundit Seth Godin labels that approach, Permission Marketing and Hubspot views it as Inbound Marketing. We refer to it simply as Conversational Marketing and it is essential in a world where the power of marketing now relies on two-way communications.

Benefits
Together we will:
• Easily create online news releases with the use of free and inexpensive tools to broaden your internet reach
• Demystify techno-jargon with a Do It Yourself kit for social media marketing and increased search engine rankings. You will easily understand how to use keyword selection, inbound links, anchor text, universal search, photo tags, url selection
• Learn to internationalize messages with intercultural communication strategies in advertising and PR copy
• Master the use of digital conversation tools: Social Network Platforms, Viral Videos, Social Bookmarking Sites, Corporate Blogs, and Professional Networks
• Actionable Analytics: Discover how to use measurement tools that will illustrate the effectiveness of your web marketing and PR efforts and guide future advertising and marketing decisions
• Develop an understanding of how to listen to customers and their feedback and to articulate brand-building messages that establish trust and confidence…

Workshop Leaders

Brian Solis, author of Social Media Manifesto, the Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley.

Alvin Chiang, former VP of NetEase and Alibaba Group , Currently CMO of Oak Pacific Interactive Group that runs the largest Social Network in China, Xiaone.com

Des Walsh, the author LinkedIn for Recruiting and Seven Step Business Blog, business coach and social media strategist.

David Li, application developer of the most popular Facebook applications such as Growing Gifts and Hatching Eggs, has been involved in social media for more than 10 years and has built several social networks sites.

Omniture, a representative from Omniture–a world leading search management, online digital optimization, web analytics provider.

china

I was at Web Wednesday in Hong Kong last week when a veteran expat in China shared with me a new version of a very familiar story.

My friend spoke of traveling to America with a Chinese love interest. It was the first visit abroad for the Chinese half of the couple. Ans after a few days in the land that invented super-sizing the first time tourist said to my friend, “You don’t seem fat at all compared to other Americans.”

One of the things you will get over VERY quickly in China is the need for validation by students, colleagues or friends. The Chinese don’t give one another a break, so don’t expect one for yourself. Sure, they will hand you a compliment, but….

Even with all of the fawning that goes on with a new foreign male or young female teacher there is always an addendum…. Here are but a couple real ones.

–”Your classes are less boring than the last teacher’s…”

–”I will tell you the secret: many students think you are very handsome, including me. But, you have no muscle. Just do some more exercise. Do you love Tennis?”

–”Here is the name of the girl who is in the hospital. It would be nice for you to call her, but don’t say anything. It might upset her.”

–”Maggie, you are very pretty, even with a big bum.”

And even the the most recognizable foreigner in China, DaShan (pictured above), has his moments. Here is a man who was recognized by the government as one of the most influential foreigners of the 90’s in China. On his personal website he has had to settle for a testimonial from the Chinese media in Shenzhen: “…not the least bit inferior to top Chinese performers.”

My students who, when actually speaking, will often do so using the Papal “We”. They recently told me about an earlier teacher (a favorite topic) who was frustrated that he could not elicit responses from the group: “We think he talked too much and didn’t let us speak.” I asked the group if they thought he may have just not understood that the Chinese idiom, “The nail that sticks up gets beaten down,” was still a social mandate (suspended for criticism of teachers, of course) of which he was not aware. I went on to ask whether or not they thought that he might have been confused or even a bit intimidated and subsequently talked more to alleviate his anxiety. They responded that “all of us think” he should have been more knowledgeable about how to teach Chinese students. And then they went on to criticize foreign teachers for not staying around more than a year at a time–the government mandated length of a normal, albeit renewable, teaching contract.

So, now when they ask me how I like teaching here I say, “We like it. It is good preparation for a career as a correctional officer in an American penitentiary.”

The American iconoclastic lawyer Clarence Darrow resigned himself to history’s repetitive nature, but never stopped challenging the powers to which most of us abandon control.

The British Olympic Team at The 1936 Berlin Olympics

Athletes have long been surrogates for our personal, school, community, and national wishes lies and dreams. We foist on them the responsibility of atoning for our own failures as sportsmen, parents and citizens. And visited on some are the the sins of governments who draft them as unwitting soldiers in wars of propaganda and ideology.

Section 51 of the International Olympic Committee charter, “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other area.” That does not stop dozens of groups from calling on he most physically gifted and dedicated among us to end the bloodshed in Africa, restore the Dali Lama to sovereignty, or enforce Chinese intervention in Burma amid a long list of religious, humanitarian and political causes.

Many organizations are calling for a boycott of the XXIX Olympiad in Beijing to further their agendas. Many decry China’s denial of human rights while remaining silent as, paradoxically, some governments, namely New Zealand, Belgium and Great Britain are forbidding their team members to speak their minds before, or during the contest, or face immediate expulsion from the games. It is the western pot calling the tea kettle black.

As a former athlete and coach I might bow to tradtion and refuse to dip the flag for the Olympic reviewing stand, but I could never in good conscience sign any document that demanded surrender of a basic human right.

The web’s most articulate journalist-blogger, Rebecca McKinnon, writes with moving precision about the house arrest of Chinese human rights blogger Hu Jia , his wife Zeng Jinyang and the world’s “youngest political prisoner” their 2-month old daughter Hu Qianci. In the article, Rebecca clearly articulates Beijing’s poorly staged suppression of dissent during the dress rehearsal phase of its first leading role on the world stage. It is exactly this kind of scrutiny of the aging, fumbling power-elite that we might lose by disengagement.

To boycott the Olympics, an arguable failure of policy in Moscow and Los Angeles, moves the spotlight off China, punishes athletes in lieu of policies and leaves the average Chinese citizen, denied full access to information, angered and dazed by a seemingly xenophobic west. To even call for a boycott of the Olympics is to give spin doctors an award- winning script full of perfect, indignant replies to what we can only imagine to be true. Engagement in lieu of boycott will enlighten and inform us all. As the chinese proverb states, 拔苗助长 , you cannot help sprouts to grow by pulling them up.

I am hoping that history repeats only by way of expose made possible by athletic achievements–think Jesse Owens in Berlin– and not because of “free world” demands for the conscription of players into a silent Nazi salute to the abolition of free speech.