It is an opportunity for attendees to get inside the head of visionaries who are generating original and effective ideas for fun & profit and to be inspired in entirely new ways, viewing their own world with a fresh perspective as a result.

Description

Social media apps and platforms have changed the way we market and sell products, reach out to customers, promote events, interact with our friends, talk about things we like (or hate), discover new merchants and services and do almost all types of business. Navigating this fast-changing landscape is crucial to our understanding of Social Media Marketing. In this class, we’ll cover the top tips and techniques, show you how to research your best options, give you guidance to develop a plan, and hear from several renowned guest speakers.

Synopsis

This three-day course will cover:

• An overview of the current state of the social web
• The strategic value of each of the major social platforms
• An introduction to the fundamentals of social media marketing, including strategies and tactics
• The value of the audit and how it informs strategy
• Case studies
• Trends to watch
• Privacy and safety considerations
• How to craft a successful cross media campaign
• The shift from soapbox to conversational marketing and how that effects strategy

Course format

This class engages students through a combination of lecture, discussions, and case studies. In addition to class activities, students will be given readings and a Social Media Project to complete over the course of the three-week duration. Laptops are required for this course. Course materials are available online only

Cross Platform Social Media Campaign (PITCH)

Your assignment will be to plan and PITCH a social media campaign that includes several channels, networks or platforms. You will have to research and provide competitive analysis of other brands (or people) in your category, provide a rationale for why you have selected specific platforms and indicate how they will work together synergistically, provide some samples (or suggestions) of the type of content you’ll be creating, and indicate a simple methodology for measurement. This plan may include traditional marketing elements as well.

Students will work on this throughout the course and some students (as many as time permits) will be asked to do short, Ignite-style presentations on the final day of the course . All students are expected to turn in a plan (PowerPoint, Keynote or MS Word) that includes information about the above-mentioned features in order to pass the class. This plan may be crafted for a business, nonprofit, startup or a person (“brand you” style campaign if you want to establish thought leadership or look for a job).

Hartman’s career and life have been a mix of the technical and the creative.  Inspired by Howard Rheingold and Jaron Lanier,  he had a stint as a Virtual Reality consultant in the early 90’s  that gave him an insight into the evolution of our interface with technology.  He was also fortunate to be in on the ground floor of the internet working with Intel beta testing some of the first web servers and building out one of the first corporate intranets.

While operating a Y2K consulting firm, he was made an offer he could not refuse and went on to become the Sr. Network Engineer for a multi-national corporation with thirty subsidiaries.  Modernizing their systems and building out the entire corporate Active Directory Forest from scratch his team achieved success under ridiculous timelines.  Working with the Department of Defense, FAA and various other governmental organizations assuring federally mandated compliance of systems and software he became well versed in “red tape”.  After a five-year stint he decided to evolve in a new direction.

Hartman moved on to work as a software engineer and architect for the Digital Universe (“The Digital Universe aims to be the definitive repository of human knowledge online.”),  eventually becoming the Technology Evangelist for the Digital Universe Foundation.  He worked with NASA,  Environmental Literacy Council, Earth 911, Cosmos Studios, The Jane Goodall Institute, Lawrence Lessig, Dr. Robert W. Corell, Larry Sanger (co-founder Wikipedia), the afore mentioned Howard Rheingold as well as many other organizations and truly amazing people.

Hartman has served on a number of boards in the past and is currently on the board of the Portland Creative Conference, Portland Social Media Club and an Advisor to the SoMe Awards.  He is married with a six-year-old and enjoys spending as much time as he can in the sand or snow.

We also see the Internet changing the way that media is being watched. Short format and user generated content is growing in views into the realm of tradition TV. The numbers that a successful “web” video garner are in the millions throwing a curve ball at traditional models and the idea that the internet is for small audiences.

These initial changes are starting to push the habits, especially among the younger demographic, into new patterns that make the next phase of evolution of media a more interactive experience. This new consumption pattern moves beyond the traditional linear viewing experience and into non-linear viewing. Think of video consumption more like the way we consume blogs or other multi-threaded mediums like forums. Services are cropping up that allow a viewer to move from video to text from photo to video and back again.

An approach to media consumption I am calling N.I.M.B.L.E.- navigating interactive media beyond linear experiences. This is a choose your own adventure styled pattern of media consumption. It can extend our traditional thirty minute spot into a three hundred minute odyssey that starts with the IMDB listings of the entire cast and end with the community created wiki about the show.