I am a little late to the party here but it has been a busy week. Linda Goin, @Appomattox_News, invited me to attend Social Media Seminar 2009 in Appomattox, Virginia — rural Virginia and the historical end of the Civil War — tomorrow from 9-4:30. Check out the information and look out for future events — Linda is doing some amazing things in the space. She’s a force of nature.

Social Media Seminar 2009

Do you want to learn how to use social media such as Twitter, Facebook and more? Do you want to be inspired about connecting with your community as a business leader, educator, politician or resident? If so, then this seminar is up your alley. You will learn how to use relevant social media tools in classes and workshops as well as be inspired by Joe Gerstandt, a nationally-known specialist in diversity and communication in this all-day seminar on Saturday, 7 March 1009 at the Appomattox Community Center in Appomattox, Virginia from 9:00 a.m.* to 4:30 p.m.

Why should you attend this seminar?

• Business owners can learn how to communicate with customers efficiently and build a business quickly, both locally and internationally if needed.
• Educators can learn how to build an efficient network with students as well as with other faculty members in higher education.
• Politicians can learn how to connect with their constituents.
• Religious leaders can learn how to build rapport with their congregations.
• Non-profit organizations organizations can learn how ’cause marketing’ can build donations and gain new volunteers.
• Residents and employees can learn how to stay on top of events and news at work and in the community to become more involved with local activities.

The Social Media Seminar 2009 will include:

• Class time with Jennifer Mills to learn how to use social media tools.
• Hear Joe Gerstandt speak on community collaboration and what the “new Internet” means for Appomattox and surrounding areas. NEW: Watch Joe’s video introduction to folks in the area (this link will take you to the new Social Media River site for social media users along the James River).
• Lunch break.
• Casual workshops, with focuses on educators, business owners, residents who want to be more involved with their community and more.

You Will Meet:

• Joe Gerstandt: Joe will stay with us after his talk to answer your questions. Learn more about Joe.
• Jennifer Mills: Jennifer also will stay with us during the afternoon workshops. Learn more about Jennifer.
• Jason Fowler: Jason is the founder of Wisely Woven {Creative Media} (www.wiselywoven.com). Located in Bedford, Virginia, Jason empowers values-driven business, sustainable innovators, and other social revolutionaries through progressive marketing, illustration, advertising campaigns, identity systems, graphic and Web design and much more. Wisely Woven currently is developing a flagship project called Sustainable Traditions (www.sustainabletraditions.com). A community experiment, blogazine, business network, print publication and yearly festival, Sustainable Traditions explores social justice, sustainability, and intentional living in the context of radical Christian faith.
• Copeland Casati: Copeland founded copeland casati media (www.copelandcasati.com) in 1999. For over a decade, copeland casati media, C3, has been an advertising, Web and social media agency in Richmond, Virginia. Working late, she needed a break from Web projects, so she began her research and development of green building, modern house kits, modern design and sustainability. The results of this latter project is online at Green Modern Kits (www.greenmodernkits.com). Copeland’s expertise is in ethical advertising, marketing, social media, Web site development and much more.
• Linda Goin: Linda earned thirteen Colorado Press Association awards before she entered college full time to finish her degree at age 46. She now has her undergraduate degree in visual communications and a master’s degree in American history. She currently is the author of several regular columns on personal finance and she’s written several eBooks on graphic design. She also publishes Appomattox News and other Web blogs for herself and for her clients.

Basic Information

This event is casual, so please dress comfortably. Bring a notebook, pen, water or other liquid to sip on throughout the day (coffee and tea will be provided), and a laptop geared to wireless connection if you have one. If you don’t have a laptop, don’t worry. We’ll make sure you have plenty of materials to use on your home computer.

Space is limited to 200 participants. Cost for the entire day is $40.00, which includes lunch.

To register, send an email to Linda Goin at “publisher @ appomattoxnews.com” and please let her know which category you are interested in from the following list if you’re sending a check. If you pay by PayPal, that information will be provided by you at the checkout:

• You are an educator (teacher, professor, instructor).
• You are involved in politics or community service.
• You are a religious or nonprofit organizational leader or member.
• You are a business owner.
• You want to become involved in publishing or writing news and stories for the area.
• You are a resident who wants to learn more.

Well, it is about four hours from Arlington, VA, to where my hotel is. To me, social media is the great equalizer, allowing anyone from anywhere to participate in the conversation as both a producer and a consumer. Here’s some more information for you.

BL and I adore eachother so I was very excited to receive an email from her last night with a link to her latest article on Business Week, Using social media to market your business is a good idea. Just don’t plan on getting your whiz-kid nephew to do it for free — check it out and check BL out over on her blog, What’s Next Blog. Oh, and when BL asks “how many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records,” I can proudly state that Abraham Harrison LLC has the expertise, the experience, and the track record to boot!  Anyway, here’s the article:

Debunking Six Social Media Myths

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce, creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

As a rule, a $50,000 to $100,000 budget can cover the creation of a simple multimedia microsite that becomes the center of an online community. Add in some widgets to help distribute the content and form a credible group on Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook and other networking groups to enhance the community aspect of the campaign. Complex functions add to programming and design costs.

A high-yield, highly targeted blog advertising campaign to kick off and support the program will cost an additional $25,000 to $100,000 a month. Advertising through Google’s AdWords, e-mail support, co-registration, and other tools that drive traffic would be additional costs.

2. Anyone can do it. A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:

• 4,273 Internet marketers
• 1,652 social media marketers
• 513 social media consultants
• 272 social media strategists
• 180 social media experts
• 98 social media gurus
• 58 Internet marketing gurus

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing.

Video contests by companies hoping for viral buzz and Google juice are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a humid summer night. But, like their insect counterparts, most video contests suck.

It’s the rare video contest that gets as many as 2,000 entries. Many, like Denny’s (DENM) recent disastrous effort, get fewer than 10 entries. Apparently, 48 Denny’s breakfasts over four years wasn’t a big motivator.

3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sure, sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly.

Social media is great if you’re already a star, but that doesn’t happen overnight. Amid the recent launch of my T-shirt design business, Pawfun.com, I have relied heavily on my 4,000-plus Twitter followers and 120,000 readers of my What’s Next Blog, which I’ve updated as often as five times a day since 2003. Because that network already exists, with not one dollar spent on advertising, we were able to generate more traffic in our first three days than some major companies get after years online.

ZapposChief Executive Tony Hsieh, whose company has millions of customers who are evangelists for the great service that built the brand, quickly became a Twitter star, with more than 32,000 followers. When Dell (DELL), JetBlue Airways (JBLU), the Chicago Bulls, and other love-’em-or-hate-’em brands joined Twitter, they immediately developed huge followings.

Tweets can be used to drive traffic to articles, Web sites, contests, videos, and so on—if people already care about your brand, or if you have a truly original idea that people will want to share with their followers.

One recent example of a Twitter-generated success is Savvy Auntie, a community for aunts, godmothers, and “other women who love kids” that was launched six months ago by Melanie Notkin. She has counted on Twitter to drive traffic, help her find suppliers, products, and even investors. She developed a Twitter following before launching her business, then tapped into it for help when she launched.

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.

5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. A great number of tools can drive traffic, including StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, but nothing works better than word of mouse—one friend telling another, “Hey look at this!”

6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.

The tools are there. The gurus who know how to use and interpret them—not so much.

Ochman, president of Whatsnextonline.com, has been creating new media marketing and online brand strategy since 1995 for companies including IBM, Ford, McGraw-Hill, Budget Car Rental, Stacksandstacks.com, and American Greetings. She tracks online marketing trends and campaigns in What’s Next Blog.

I am super-proud that my Director of Operation, Saul Wainwright, took the initiative to secure the funds from Abraham Harrison to financially help out BarCamp Africa, taking place at the Mountain View, California, Google campus today. Here’s Saul’s report that I found posted over at Marketing Conversation, Abraham & Harrison Sponsors BarCamp Africa:

Tomorrow is the big day – and boy am I excited. Yep, tomorrow is BarcampAfrica hosted by the venerable Google at their Mountain View headquarters and in part sponsored by the ever wonderful Abraham & Harrison.

Africa has a special place in my heart – it is my home – I was raised in South Africa and travel back every year (thanks to the great job at Abraham & Harrison where I get to work from anywhere in world).

My wife, baby and I head to the beautiful coast of Cape Town for the sun, sand and fun!!For those of you who have never heard of Barcamp it is basically a gathering of people that come together around a common topic sharing their thoughts and ideas.

It is known as a “unconference” because the participants really drive the agenda – they create breakout sessions that have been organically created and decided upon – on the day and at the event.

The goal of this particular Barcamp is to help “open up the conversation between Silicon Valley and people and opportunities in Africa.”

To really help solidify and connect this growing network of African focused people and projects. Our goal is to highlight the incredible work that is being done by Africans and how the growing network is helping to facilitate and amplify these efforts.

Abraham & Harrison stepped up and offered a sponsorship which greatly helped in helping BarcamAfrica to move forward. The fit for Abraham & Harrison was obvious – Barcamps are built around social media tools – using blogs, wiki’s, Twitter, Facebook and many other forms of social media to amplify the news and story.

These tools have been and will continue to be used to help promote the conversation on the day and for the weeks and months that follow.

This is something that Abraham & Harrison does well – we help to amplify your existence online to drive conversations and help to create conversations around subjects and topics that are of value to you and your clients.

So – it made sense for Abraham & Harrison to help promote something that uses the very tools and media that we at AH value so much.So – the event is sold out but you can still participate via our blog, Twitter.

I hope you all get a chance to check out the blog and follow along. We plan on hosting more Barcamps in the coming months in the US and on the African continent.