As you no doubt know, last week I delivered a two-day masterclass on Social Media for the Ark Group, the feedback on which from the attendees was exceptionally flattering.
My UK colleague-in-comms-arms David Ferrabee from Hill & Knowlton emailed me and asked for my thoughts about the whole event, seeing as he is to shortly deliver a similar class for Melcrum.
I duly replied when I had the chance, then wondered if the whole exchange wouldn’t make a good post. David agreed that it would and so I present his questions and my answers.
How did it go?
I had a great time, and I believe that they did too. Anecdotal feedback from the combatants attendees was that they were very happy with both the content and the level it was pitched at.
I see you were going to get people to do podcasts in the session. How did that go?
We created the ‘shoutout’ intro to my FIR report for this week, as well as mixed in fx such as the magpie, beer can and the background music. I think they were genuinely surprised to see how simple editing was (a couple ‘had a go’ themselves), even when using a ‘non-pro’ tool like Audacity. They saw that they don’t need to hire expensive sound folks to mix and master their own podcasts (sorry, sound guys and girls!) but could indeed do it themselves with a bit of practice. So in that regard it was a blinding success – it took the blinders off them!
I am planning to do that…and a video too. Was it possible, or too ambitious?
Running a session on video was just too much for this event – we only had two days to cover everything. They got to set up their own blogs at wordpress.com and blogger, they got to understand how powerful and wide-ranging social media is, they got links to a heap of resources, they got a rapid-immersion in podcasting technology.
If I were to run another course like this, I would still keep out video (time constraints); I firmly believe that it is a significant jump from audio to video (both in terms of time required to create and time required to edit). I did mention that editing can be achieved really simply and easily with Microsoft MovieMaker (free with XP) but I would think that they forgot that unless it was particularly relevant to someone at the time.
I would think that video would form a large chunk of a ‘Advanced’ course, taking in ‘Advanced’ blogging, podcasting and vidcasting. But perhaps that would be either a 3 day course to give fair time to all subjects, or else it would by-pass the basics and assume some level of knowledge.
And what kind of people showed up? How did you have to pitch it?
Interestingly, the promoters pitched it fairly openly, with no presumed knowledge. There were a couple of PR people (one was a researcher – the lucky woman gets to attend conferences and work from home, coming into her office to either update her colleagues or update their clients; nice work!) but mostly the audience was comprised of communicators charged with furthering their organisation’s reach, both from private industry and government departments. We had people fly in from Canberra and Melbourne, not just Sydneyites.
Would I do it again? Absolutely! I had a great time, and because I designed and wrote the course myself, I was able to start and finish each section with a funny video from either YouTube or one emailed to me by friends. I had previously had challenges (and buried deep in here) getting the YouTube videos to play in PowerPoint but I had that all sorted out this time.
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