Online Marketing Blog

[Editor's Note: This guest post coverage of a recent Marketingsherpa webinar comes from TopRank's SEO Designer Thomas McMahon and Account Coordinator Kristen Hebert.]

Are companies engaging in social media? Are they monitoring their brand? What’s a social media press release? These were a few of the topics covered in Marketingsherpa’s recent “Engaging Bloggers, Journalists and Customers” webinar featuring Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications and Marketingsherpa’s Sergio Balegno discussing new ways journalists are using social media.

MarketingSherpa surveyed 1800 people from both small and large, B2B and B2C companies. In their findings, three out of four companies surveyed feel that social media is changing the way companies communicate. Details of this research can be found in the new Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and Best Practices report.

Day one of the DMA / TopRankMarketing.com Social Media Smarts workshop kicked off covering a tremendous amount of information including defining social media, practical examples & case studies and blogging soup to nuts. Creating, marketing and measuring blog results was covered in 3 different modules.

Social media and making sense out of the social web is a hot topic and I applaud the organizations that sent people to New York this week for our workshop.

During the first day I asked attendees what their learning objectives were which I thought were consistent with most people entering the social media space:

• Build a social media strategy for our organization
• Learn what social media tools to pay attention to and which to ignore for a specific industry