EyeSee

I met Gail Carmichael at one of the Girl Geek Dinners and we had a blast at dinner. She mentioned her involvement in WISE and it brought back fond memories of my involvement in a similar organization when I was a student. Back in the day I was very involved in the various student associations in University and organized numerous events.

So when she asked if I would like to come to the university and talk to the students about social media,  I could not refuse such a great offer. I am pleased to say that we have a date.

It’s Nov. 10th 2009 at Carleton University.

So what do I talk about well there is so much and there is so little time. So here are some thoughts on what I will be addressing that evening.

Social Media beyond the parties – how to use social media effectively for your future careers

Students use social media very effectively to keep in touch with their friends, find out where the next party is and who’s dating who. These are very important components of their lives.

There will come a day when they will no longer be students and be out there climbing the corporate ladder. At that point their personal lives will begin to clash with their professional lives and they will be faced with some difficult challenges regarding their social media usage.

Should their boss be their friend? Would they want their boss to know about who they hang out with, party with and how they dress outside of work? Would they feel pressured into accepting their boss and co-workers as friends?

The decision makers within their organization assume that these students know how to use social media as in their opinion these students grew up with it.  However students know to use social media for their personal lives and not professionally nor from a business context.

I will address these issues and more. Stay tuned for further updates via the WISE site.

So if you are a student or know a student I encourage you to share this with them.

UPDATE

Here are the slides from the presentation.

Last week I spoke at the OCRI Zone5ive event about the must have social media tools to engage customers. At one point one of the slides had these words

“it is social media….. start using the media”

So I always try to walk the walk and not just talk about what others are doing or how to do it. These awesome photos were taken by Victor Turco.

The complete set is on the Virtual EyeSee fan page on facebook.  So the next time you have an event take some photos. If you don’t have a budget for a professional, then take your own.

I presented at the OCRI, Zone5ive event today and I focused on must have social media tools to engage your customers.  As I was preparing for this presentation I needed to figure out a starting point as customer engagement is as vague as being “green”. So I took a look at the websites of companies that typically attended these events to find a starting point.

To explain where I came from I used the analogy of social media being the invitation to the house party and the house being the company website. I went further to stress that if the house either did not exist nor was structurally strong then the party would fail.

So my starting point was reinforcing the house and creating the invitations.

Details are in the following presentation.

My goal was to let the people in the room leave with information that they could use to implement these basic social media tools into their websites and social media marketing mix.

The room was fairly silent with not a lot of questions however I did notice a fair bit of note taking. I guess it’s a very different dynamic from the interactive workshops that I am used to giving.

So if you were at the presentation today and have had time to digest this do you have any further questions? If you do, then drop me a line via this post and we can take it from there. Remember there is not such thing as a stupid question. Also there are other people out there that have the same questions in mind.