The Importance of Online Marketing
I had the pleasure of presenting a social media workshop titled ‘The Importance of Online Marketing’ to a group of creatives at Bradford Gallery at the Yorkshire Craft Centre yesterday evening.
Organised by Fabric, the arts development organisation for Bradford as an event for the Creative Bradford programme, it was pretty well attended with at least 30 arts practitioners from artists and animators to photographers attending the 3 hour event. There was even an eco friendly web hosting company!
My slides are now up on Slideshare and are embedded after the jump.
For those who were at the event and were curious about finding out more about the social media sites shown on Slide #39, I’ve included an extra page in the Credits at the end with links to each one.
It was a fascinating few hours with much of the discourse around the actual practicalities of using social media, from deciding how often to blog, whether to Twitter and which were the best social media sites for promoting music or events.
Then there was the frequently asked question about how much time was involved in using social media each day.
I tried to answer each question as best as I could, pointing out that you only get out what you put in with networking online using social media. You have to invest time in each community to get maximum benefit.
I found the ‘Twitter in Plain English’ video by Common Craft useful in explaining what Twitter was.
As you may have noticed from my slides, my case studies and example now focus on interesting social media practitioners from Christian Payne and Stephen Fry to innovative artist and doll maker, Gillian Lee Smith (thanks to CJ Lyon for the tip on Gillian)
Some of my takeaways from the event:
Most of the audience were fully aware of what social media was.
What may have been ‘new’ to them was the implications of a complete switch to ‘digital’. To drive this home, I tried to explain that we are now at the start of a completely unique transition to using the web for content creation and sharing. The notion of uploading HD video in seconds and ‘writing’ on the internet in real-time.
Someone asked a question about the implications of cached web documents and whether it was possible to delete pictures from the web once uploaded to sites like Flickr.
I wonder what the real answer to that is. If you know please share in the comments!
Afterwards, I was told that a pretty common problem for artists blogging for the first time is getting used to image resolution, particularly when using blogging platforms like WordPress for the first time.
My tip: pictures sized up to 300 x 300 pixels look good on 2 column blogs like this one.
I met some incredibly creative people in Bradford yesterday and hope to report back on their work in coming months.
One was Elisabeth Jennings who from her Bradford base has taken photos of the Queen, Sir Stirling Moss and Kenneth Branagh. Others: filmmaker and animator Andy Sykes and mixed media artist Suzie Rhodes who maintains the impressive Liv-Luv-Make blog.
If you were at the event and have any more questions, please fire away in the comments!
If you weren’t but would like to know more, why not sign up to attend the next Social Media Starter Course. It’s less than 2 weeks away and places are going fast.
For some comic relief, I’ll leave you with a charming animation about ‘Special Glue’ by Andy Sykes:
Related posts:
- Jotta, online community for artists and creatives – Social Media for the arts?
- 4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 4
- Your Burning Questions Wanted: Using Twitter for Marketing
- 4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 1
- 5 Questions Businesses Are Too Scared To Ask About Social Media Marketing
