How to learn about social media marketing

The popularity of social networking among friends — and would-be friends — is fast becoming "social media."

Individuals are now concerned about their "personal brand." And, companies are looking for ways to use social media in their marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their Web site.

The area of social media marketing is challenging for most corporate marketing people because it's so different from one-way mass media advertising.

In addition to being two-way marketing (or one-to-one marketing), social media marketing is both very personal and very public. It's personal because it depends on personal relationships and conversations. And, it's very, very public because prospective customers are usually communicating with people from the company in public areas of the Internet.

A lot has been written about using company blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, but It's hard to sift through all of that to develop a complete, consistent, and concise social media marketing strategy.

On February 25th the Gravity Summit at UCLA will give marketers a full day of guidance on social media marketing. Here is what the seminar organizers say:

Gravity Summit is designed to educate and inform the business community on how to use social media to foster customer engagement, provide internal productivity tools, and further online branding for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

The speakers at the Gravity Summit are from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Yahoo, Sony, Sprint, and others:

• David Reis, CEO DEI Worldwide and Founding Member of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association)
• Justin Goldsborough, Social Media Manager, Sprint
• Ann Glenn, Senior Web Producer, Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive
• Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo
• Ricardo Bueno, Blog Director, Real Estate Tomato
• Renée Barrett, Principal of Awareness, Action, Accountability
• Karl Kasca, CEO, Kasca & Associates

The descriptions of each speaker's presentation looks very good:

I'm looking forward to learning from each speaker at the seminar. If you're going to attend, let me know so we can chat face-to-face.