It’s happening at 1:15 pm on Friday, May 7 at the Life Sciences building on the UBC main campus. Here’s a description of the panel:

A plethora of self-appointed social media consultants have emerged in the past two years. It would seem as though knowing how to set up a Twitter account or creating a Facebook page has become this decade’s snake oil. Despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that social media is an ever-evolving field, there is still a dearth of best practices on what and how to teach about social media. Even more frightening, interesting and challenging, there is a whole field that has just barely recently begun to be explored: teaching with social media. In this panel, we will share our experiences in the educational field, both teaching about social media and teaching with social media.

We will share our concerns, questions and worries about social media as a field to be educated in and as a platform/tool to educate in other fields. We will ask the tough questions that need to be asked, and hope that through this exploration, we will be able to further both social media as a field of study and as a technological tool for educational purposes.

The panel will include:

• Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega (otherwise known as Hummingbird604)
• Dr. Glen Lowry, writer, educator, and editor
• Tris Hussey (MscM.S.) a long-time technologist, blogger, and writer
• Andre Malan, a Computer Science student at the University of British Columbia specializing in human-computer interaction

Tell your friends! Tell your mom! I’m sure it will be an informative and entertaining panel that will fill you with love of all things social media-ish.

This was in response to Vancouver Sun Managing Editor Kirk LaPointe’s remark that bloggers, Tweeps and Facebookers seemed to be missing niche opportunities. He pointed to the lack of resources “traditional” media outlets were throwing at the Vancouver Paralympic games, seeming to suggest that bloggers ought to fill the vacuum. A participant from the audience suggested another example, where coverage of the Olympics protests petered out significantly after the first day.

With all due respect to LaPointe and the lady from the audience, I think their critique misses the point. It’s true that some social media creators, a very slim minority, do develop entirely original investigative pieces that are on par with reporting by paid journalists. But the vast majority of social media content developers prefer to piggy-back on the efforts of traditional media, focusing on offering alternative opinion rather than alternative raw data. Individually and collectively, social media makers largely don’t have the resources to do anything else.

Sure, we create all kinds of original content, from photos and videos to really thought-provoking essay-type blog posts. But as a rule, we don’t pick our themes from whatever the newsmakers have deemed unworthy of their attention — at least, not if we want people to actually see what we’re creating.

Why didn’t more bloggers cover the rest of the Olympics protests? I suspect it was because most realized that the real story was the hundreds of thousands of happy patriots gathered in our public spaces and an outpouring of positive feeling — not a few hundred increasingly fractured and inarticulate protesters accompanied by masked thugs intent on useless violence.

Why aren’t more bloggers covering the Paralympic Games (NOTE: the lack of coverage is only relative to the Olympic Games that preceded it. Bloggers, like regular media, are covering these Games)? The stories of courage and overcoming adversity are there to be recorded in spades, perhaps even more than with our Olympic athletes. In their absence, sponsors, reporters, bloggers and the general public have once more indicated something a little bit ugly about our society. Perhaps that is the real story here.

The bottom line is that when traditional media does its job well of investigating and providing the raw stories, social media makers can then do their job of being the gateways to that content through hyperlinks and also providing alternative opinions. There are benefits going both ways.

It’s happening at 7 pm on Thursday, March 18 at the BOB Coworking Space in Vancouver’s Gastown District, 163 E. Pender Street.

Register for the event at http://smcyvrolympiclessons.eventbrite.com

See more information about this event below.

VANCOUVER OLYMPICS DEMONSTRATE BOTH GOOD AND BAD IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Local leaders in traditional and social media gather to discuss impact of social media on the 2010 Winter Olympic Games

VANCOUVER, BC – In the afterglow of the 2010 Vancouver Games, top BC media leaders will come together on March 18, 2010 to discuss the positive and negative impacts of both social and traditional media on the Games. The panel discussion will be held from 7-9pm at the BOB Coworking Space in Vancouver’s Gastown District, 163 E. Pender Street.

For more information about Social Media Club Vancouver, please contact Guacira Naves at g@onlinestrategy.ca, or visit http://smcyvr.com.

* Content is king. Keep your articles and descriptions relevant and interesting. Cool flash graphics and streaming video are no substitute for bad text.

* Be authentic. If you’re going to use social networking platforms to reach a wider audience, you’re going to have to actually be social. Have real conversations.

Panel organizer Liz Gaige of Market Navigators also had some excellent points about ensuring you have clear goals about your marketing campaign. Given the nature of the seminar, it made sense for us to talk about social networking and SEO, though Liz was quite correct to point out that more traditional marketing methods such as print advertising placements, direct mail marketing and other tactics also still have a place in any marketing toolkit.

One topic I also pursued was the ease of syndication of content. I’m a big believer in the ability of social networks to extend the reach of messaging. Blog posts become RSS-fed tweets, which become Facebook fan-page status updates, LinkedIn updates, and more. With a few quick emails or phone-conversations, or just by filling a form, you can make arrangements to get your content streamed to high-profile websites and media sites. Sure, Google will downgrade duplicate content, so you’ll need to tweak your headlines and your lead paragraphs a bit to prevent that from happening.

Finally, I also stressed the importance of building links back to your site and making sure those links go back to the right page. Remember, your social networks are just hooks to bring eyeballs back to your anchor website where you can change minds, evangelize and most likely, try to sell stuff. When you run campaigns, you may want to link back to custom-designed landing pages rather than a home page or other section. This makes it easier to track metrics in Google Analytics (or whatever else you’re using to track hits).

I’m looking forward to presenting alongside these very talented women again sometime. If you were present at the event or have any other questions (or comments) about driving traffic to your online store, go ahead and leave a comment. Cheers.

Hope to see you there! Event synopsis and details below:

It isn’t enough to just launch your online store. Customers need to be able to find you in order to buy, buy, buy. Learn how to drive traffic to your site at November’s Ask the Experts Panel discussion. Industry experts will be on hand to answer all your questions at this fun, casual, interactive session. Get use-it-today information on attracting ready-to-purchase customers using traditional marketing, online options, and social media.

To register, go to Market Navigators’ Driving Traffic to Your Online Store