I’m headed back there next week to lead a pre-conference workshop titled 17 social media tools for PR professionals. The workshop is based on the popular Ragan PR Daily 75-minute webinar I’ve presented a handful of times now.

After reviewing my slides for Monday afternoon, I’m excited to announce we’ll not only review 17 social media tools, we’ll take a good hard look at 70 different tools! And who knows, I may even add more before Monday!

Looking back at the Social Media for Communicators conference in 2009, and knowing what’s on the program for next week at UNLV, it seems like a lot more than two years has gone by.

Perhaps that’s a result of technological advance in communication tools. Now just a couple of years feels like five or 10 years used to.

So if you’re in the Las Vegas area, or can be, on Monday, and have a vested interest in utilizing social media tools for business communication, I invite you to join me in my three-hour, social media tool-packed workshop.

You don’t even have to register for the entire 3-day conference to participate in my pre-conference workshop. You can just sign-up for my workshop.

Register on Ragan.com. I hope to see you there!

Details (date/time/place/cost) are all available on Events.PeteCodella.com.

A webinar presentation for Ragan Communications’ PR Daily.

Later this month I’m leading the popular social media tools for public relations professionals webinar again for Ragan Communications.

Last year I presented this webinar twice and it was billed as 17 social media tools. We decided that since I was including way more than 17 anyway, we may as well bill it as 35 social media tools.

But I’m not limited to just 35 either! I can include more depending on just how fast I can talk in 75 minutes.

We all know there are so many tools that the challenge has become finding the right one and learning how to best use it. That’s where this webinar comes in.

I’ll walk you through at least 35 social media tools to help you harness the power of social media as part of your public relations work, and I’ll explain how the social platforms can improve your career, expand your reach and simplify your life.

At only $99 for the webinar it’s really a killer deal.

In the webinar you’ll learn how to:

• Monitor what’s being said on Twitter using RSS and third-party applications
• Automate Twitter status updates and the people you follow
• Manage your agency, your client or your company’s online communication and marketing
• Set-up an RSS reader to stay current on what’s being said about you, industry news and trends
• Optimize your Facebook fan page for business
• Differentiate between groups and pages on Facebook
• Understand how your sites stack up in amount of traffic and search engine optimization
• Generate and read a Google Analytics report
• Search blogs for comments and commentary then subscribe to the RSS for that search so you only have to do it once
• Grade your website and attend to actionable items to boost your traffic and sales
• Set-up a Lifestream to aggregate your content from multiple platforms to just one site
• Update all your social media sites from one location
• And more!

Details

35 social media tools for PR professionals

Date: January 25, 2011

Time: 1 to 2:15 p.m. Mountain time

Place: This is a webinar that can be accessed online from any Internet enabled location

Cost: $99 for the webinar; $129 for the webinar and a CD recording

RSVP: visit PRDaily.com to register

Hashtag: #prdaily

Moderator: @msebastian (Michael Sebastian, editor of PR Daily)

This is another in Pete Codella’s webinar series for

Is your company’s blog in desperate need for an extreme makeover?

WordPress has so much to offer and is built on an open platform, encouraging continual development of new and improved plugins. With a small budget, you can accomplish just about anything with a WordPress driven site.

Join us to learn best practices for getting started or how to fine-tune existing blogging efforts.

You’ll find out how your blog can lead to conversations with your consumers or client base, allow direct links and comments on published articles and provide links to related social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

You’ll learn how to:

• Use the right strategy to name the blog—using a subdomain or a separate URL
• Install WordPress software using WordPress.com or WordPress.org
• Customize your blog’s settings and create various user profiles
• Find the best plugins for your blog’s needs
• Create your keyword publishing guide through search optimization strategies for blogging
• Design a publishing calendar to keep your blog relevant, interesting and useful
• Establish and publish a blog comment moderation policy
• Know how and when to participate as publisher and commenter
• Sprinkle social media content throughout the blog
• Use Google Analytics to measure blog traffic and activity

Plus! You’ll see examples from Fortune 500 companies using WordPress for blogging and content management

Details

WordPress blogging for business

Date: October 21, 2010

Time: noon to 1:15 p.m. Pacific

Place: This is a webinar that can be accessed online from any Internet enabled location

Cost: $99 for the webinar; $129 for the webinar and a CD recording

RSVP: visit Ragan.com to register

Hashtag: #prdaily

Moderator: @msebastian (Michael Sebastian, editor of PR Daily)

You know the story. You’re sitting in that social media seminar as the instructor hops from one incredible new media platform to another. You want to know more, but you don’t want to raise your hand and ask, “Hey, how can I use that in my job?” or maybe, “How can that help my career?”

Sound familiar? If so, this PR Daily webinar will help answer those questions—and so many more!

Pete Codella will walk you through 17 social media sites and show you the secrets for harnessing these tools. He will explain how these incredible social platforms can improve your career and simplify your life. When this webinar is over, you’ll be the one in the social media seminars with the answers.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Monitor what’s being said on Twitter using RSS and third-party applications
• Automate Twitter status updates and the people you follow
• Manage your agency, your client or your company’s online communication and marketing
• Set-up an RSS reader to stay current on what’s being said about you, industry news and trends
• Optimize your Facebook fan page for business; 10 tools you’ve simply got to use
• Differentiate between personal, business, fan and group pages on Facebook
• Understand how your sites stack up when it comes to traffic and search engine optimization
• Generate and read a Google Analytics report
• Search blogs for comments and commentary then subscribe to the RSS for that search so you only have to do it once
• Grade your web site and attend to actionable items to boost your traffic and sales
• Set-up a Lifestream to aggregate your content from multiple platforms to just one site
• Manage FriendFeed to aggregate content, engage online networks, join groups and search for content
• Update all your social media sites from one location
• And more!

Details

17 social media tools to help communicators save time and money

Date: August 26, 2010

Time: noon to 1:15 p.m. Pacific

Place: This is a webinar that can be accessed online from any Internet enabled location

Cost: $99 for the webinar; $129 for the webinar and a CD recording

RSVP: visit Ragan.com to register

Hashtag: #prdaily

Moderator: @msebastian (Michael Sebastian, editor of PR Daily)

And just so you know, I was fortunate enough to work on the conference programming with Ragan and Cisco. I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

Strategy versus tools

Let me explain why I believe social media strategy and tools go hand-in-hand.

There’s great value in understanding the myriad of social media tools. My pre-conference workshop, 17 social media tools to help communicators save time and money, was focused on highlighting more than 30 different tools.

Communicators need a personal familiarity with the tools before they can apply them to business.

However, existence of the tools alone will not guarantee success in implementation.

There must be an objective — a specific, measurable outcome — in order to know if social media tools are useful.

Building furniture

For example, I’m a woodworker. I have built a handful of bedroom sets for family and friends. Possessing woodworking tools and purchasing supplies does not mean I’ll automatically end up with a bedroom set.

Having the tools and a knowledge of how to use them is only an indication that I could create bedroom furniture if I wanted.

Using plans and diagrams I can apply my woodworking tools and skill set to the project of creating a bedroom set.

Using social media is like using woodworking tools

Social media works similarly. You must have the tools and an understanding of how to employ them. You must also use the tools within an established framework, according to an existing plan, to produce the desired outcome.

I heard some presenters and Social Media Summit attendees suggest there’s no such thing as a social media strategy, that all social media entails is a set of tools.

I heard others harp on setting clear communication objectives before focusing on social media tools.

I believe in our day of integrated marketing communications both a strategy and solid social media toolkit are necessary. They work together to create successful communication campaigns.

What do you think?

Jeremiah Owyang has a great blog post about Companies that Measure Social Media, Influence, and Brand.

Rather than re-create it, I’m publishing this article to link you to his ongoing list of companies engaged in listening and measuring influence. I highly recommend checking it out.

Visit his site, Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang, to read his post and check out the online measurement companies.

A New Social Media Conference

And while I’m on the subject of Jeremiah Owyang, I’m pleased to announce he’ll be one of the keynote speakers at a Ragan Communications conference I have helped plan. I’ll also be part of the program.

It’s the Social Media Summit, presented by Ragan Communications at Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose, Calif., from June 9-11, 2010.

It promises to be one of the best social media conferences of the year.

Guy Kawasaki is also one of the keynote speakers.

You can follow updates about the conference by searching for: #ragancisco

Here’s a link to the conference site on Ragan.com.

Details

Date: December 15, 2009

Time: 2 to 3:15 p.m. (Central)

Place: This is a webinar that can be accessed online from any Internet enabled location

Cost: $99 for the webinar; $120 for the webinar and a CD recording

RSVP: visit Ragan.com to register

Hashtag: #ragan17

17 social media tools to help communicators save time and money

Description

You know the story. You’re sitting in that social media seminar as the instructor hops from one incredible new media platform to another. You want to know more, but you don’t want to raise your hand and ask, “Hey, how can I use that in my job?” or maybe, “How can that help my career?”

Sound familiar? If so, this PR Daily webinar will help answer those questions—and so many more!

Pete Codella will walk you through 17 social media sites and show you the secrets for harnessing these tools. He will explain how these incredible social platforms can improve your career and simplify your life. When this webinar is over, you’ll be the one in the social media seminars with the answers.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Monitor what’s being said on Twitter using RSS and third-party applications
• Automate Twitter status updates and the people you follow
• Manage your agency, your client or your company’s online communication and marketing
• Set-up an RSS reader to stay current on what’s being said about you, industry news and trends
• Optimize your Facebook fan page for business; 10 tools you’ve simply got to use
• Differentiate between personal, business, fan and group pages on Facebook
• Understand how your sites stack up when it comes to traffic and search engine optimization
• Generate and read a Google Analytics report
• Search blogs for comments and commentary then subscribe to the RSS for that search so you only have to do it once
• Grade your Web site and attend to actionable items to boost your traffic and sales
• Set-up a Lifestream to aggregate your content from multiple platforms to just one site
• Manage FriendFeed to aggregate content, engage online networks, join groups and search for content
• Update all your social media sites from one location

. . . and more!

Slides

I’m happy to share the PowerPoint presentation slides from the presentation (1.9mb pdf).

These slides were updated for the January 28, 2010 re-broadcast of this Ragan PR Daily webinar.