Seminar on social media, marketing and campaigns

I am the Marketing & Networks Manager of Agro-Know since June 2014; mostly due to my involvement in the social media in general but mostly blogging and tweeting. I am self-taught for both, I (hope that I) am good at it because I really like it and I always try to find ways to perform even better in using social media effectively. I often find myself downloading related e-books and watching presentations on optimizing the use and effectiveness of social media.

In this context, a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a face-to-face, 12-hour seminar on the use of social media (mostly at a corporate level) and marketing, focusing on the use of campaigns for promoting corporate events and activities in general. The seminar took place on two days (20 & 22/10/2014, 6 hours each), it was organized by Seminaria.gr and delivered by Arsenis Paschopoulos, e-Commerce & Internet Marketing Expert and Digital Marketing Manager of Just On Line with a long experience in social media and teaching this subject. The seminar took place in a cozy meeting room of Golden Age Hotel (Athens, Greece), pretty close to a metro station, making it really easily accessible.

A photo posted by Vassilis (@vprot) on Oct 10, 2014 at 8:24am PDT

The seminar was addressed to both novice and advanced users of social media (it was attended by about 15 people) and this was a tricky part, as the trainer needed to make sure that everyone would get the basics of the social media presented (novices) without having a part of the audience getting bored (the more advanced users). Considering myself a more advanced social media user than the average, I have to admit that not only I did not feel bored but I indeed learned things that I was not aware of regarding the social media that I am using. The social media covered by the seminar during the first day were the following:

1. Facebook and Google+ (I also consider them in the same league);
2. YouTube;
3. LinkedIn;
4. Twitter;
5. Pinterest (a pretty bizarre choice at first, but the use cases presented were convincing)

The time available for these was marginally sufficient but we more or less managed to cover everything, including information from creating an account and linking to other social media to using them for corporate purposes.

The second day was devoted to the use of campaigns using the aforementioned social media; Facebook was obviously the most well-covered medium but still alternative options for campaigns using the rest of the social media were presented. I realized that running a campaign using e.g. Facebook is not as expensive as I initially thought and it might be pretty effective, too.

My overall impression was rather positive; I managed to learn some things that I was not aware of, Mr. Paschopoulos helped me address some issues that I had with specific social media, I got to learn a lot of new stuff about the campaigns and got some basic information about SEO and the interpretation of analytics for each tool. He proved to be good at communication and had a deep knowledge of the social media presented.

Apart from the training, I also got to get a high number of slides presented during the seminar (but not limited to it - I got much more than that) as well as a book authored by Mr. Paschopoulos on Social Media Marketing (hardcopy) which contains a lot of useful information and can be used as a reference, documenting more or less what was already presented during the seminar.

My attendance to the seminar was another example of the training opportunities that Agro-Know offers to its team members; these are not limited to internal trainings but also include external opportunities as well.