We love training here at Miramus, and so when the Mediatrust asked me if I'd run the same course I did just over a year ago, I said, "Oh, if you INSIST".

This year's talk has been entirely refreshed. So much has changed in the time since I last spoke to the charities. Obviously, things like "what's big in social media" has been totally rewritten, but also tips around creating strategies have been developed and expanded on. 

After spending the past year working with brands and helping them define their digital and social media marketing strategies, I've come up with some simpler ways to help companies get to grips with being thought leaders.

Holistic digital marketing

It's all about taking a more holistic approach to your brand identity — looking at the whole marketing and PR strategy and building a digital media presence that nurtures and enriches it. 

With that in mind, this year's workshop looks at the following areas:

Why blog?
How and where to blog
Creating a proper media strategy (thinking like an editor)
How to build community and use social media
Finding your voice
Thought leadership and the secrets of good content

If any of that sounds interesting, you're very welcome to join me! Charities and non-charities are welcome and the workshop is designed from the viewpoint of blogging and digital media for business, not simply not-for-profits.

Centre House
Wood Lane, Shepherds Bush
London
W12 7SB

10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Building Blogs with Katie Lee – tickets.

If you want to witness a digital creative's heart breaking tell them you want them to launch a digital campaign that's going to run for six months.

"Your customers have entered an era of interactivity; it's time for your branding campaigns to catch up. Rather than continue to develop your brand in 30-second snippets and hope you can build a website to match, put your interactive presence at the core of a multilayered brand ecosystem. Use interactive owned media as the home of your big idea and your deepest customer engagements; distribute those engagements to a broader audience using social media and mobile media; and use bold online and offline paid media programs to create mass reach".

Nate Elliot, Forrester: The Interactive Brand Ecosystem

 

Future Gazing fun

In case you haven’t read enough prediction pieces for 2012, I’ve just provided my two penn’orth to the Royal Mail’s Mail Media Centre website.

Here is a little snippet:

What’s in store for direct marketers in 2012?

Social media in 2012
Katie Lee, owner, Miramus Media

Customer service goes social
Many companies already realise that social CRM is a low-cost and effective way to engage with customers. Customer service teams specialising in social media will become more popular, especially as companies start to make use of the increasingly sophisticated social media measuring tools to monitor success rates and tweak activity.

Long term strategy replace short term stunts
These higher end technologies are all well and good, but the single biggest change in the new year will be that more brands, having understood the power of social marketing and witnessed the growth in social shopping, will start to build a holistic, sustainable social and digital media strategy rather than relying on one-off stunts.

Read the full article: What’s in store for direct marketers in 2012?

Why your social media strategy needs more thought and less chatter

That was the rather lengthy, title for my Internet Week Classroom talk in November.

Possibly, I got a little carried away when it came to naming it. I won’t deny it.

But really, the premise was pretty simple (honest).

If we spend a little more time thinking, and a little less time tweeting, (or attempting to make virals, or updating the company website, or paying SEO agencies to write drab copy that gets our Page ranking up, or plopping promo links onto Facebook) we can do something sustainable, special and maybe even a little bit sexy with our brand’s online presence.

Better social media strategies are simple

It might shock you to discover how often we’re invited in by companies who have a whole social or digital media campaign about to launch but who can’t really tell us why they’re doing it (hint: the answer is not because everyone else is doing it, or because you need to increase sales, or because the PR agency had a really neat idea for a microsite).

But it’s actually a fairly simple to get the basic elements of your social and digital media marketing right. So I may have made the title complicated, but the contents were entirely straightforward:

Brands can turn their digital media presence from bad to brilliant by asking THREE simple questions.

And what are those questions? Why? Who? and How?

And that’s all there is to it!

Internet Week Europe

Check this out! Dork Adore has been given a lovely new look Dork Adore.