Facebook Marketing Seminar!

Okay, granted, I did a post called Forget Facebook! Hang Twitter!, but I’m also open minded. Sooo…I just registered for a one-day Fred Pryor Seminars/CareerTrack seminar called Facebook Marketing (express enrollment at http://events.careertrack.com/261065). The cost is $199. I’ve attended a CareerTrack seminar or two in the past and liked them, so am giving this a shot. On the site is a listing of dates and locations (there are December dates for Denver, Aurora, Englewood, and Boulder, Colorado). I’m doing the Nov 30^th one in Colorado Springs (anyone gonna join me?). I’m actually kinda excited about this, since I’m restarting my writing, as it were, and hope to learn a lot. Here’s a sampling of what the seminar is to cover:

• How to develop a FB marketing plan
• What we need to know about social media before beginning this marketing plan
• How to create FB Page for our work
• FB tools, apps, etc.
• Ways FB can establish stronger awareness for our work
• How to ID and connect with target markets
• How to set up groups, promos, and events to drive traffic to our websites
• Damage control–dealing with negative info posted about us/our work
• And (this is particularly of interest to me, give my previous post) how to measure and evaluate FB’s marketing impact and effectiveness. Yeah, really want to see this one.

Among other things, In my original Facebook post I railed against the “forced march” nature of publishers dogmatically kicking authors over to Facebook and Twitter without so much as a kiss (or guidelines), as a perceived “cure all” to make or break a book’s success. About agreeing with Andrei Codrescu about social media’s insane micro blogging killing author mystery. Sure, FBing’s a fun thing to do for many of the 500 million users, but I wasn’t sure it was for me (I’ve seriously been considering killing my named-account and just created a book-account, the use of which I am still trying to figger out, so all this proves quite the synchronicity!). What I’ve used Facebook and Twitter for, 99.99% of the time, was promoting my writing. So, when I got this brochure in the mail (snail mail–heard of it? And, yes–there’s even a Wiki link for it!), okay, yes, this is exactly how I want to use social media! And–guess what?–there are even people out there who wanna show me exactly how to do this–or my money back.

Ooooh <hands rubbing maniacally together>, I like that kinda talk!

I’ll be posting post-seminar, but hope to see some familiar faces and names at the seminar.

Stay tuned!