Digital Insights has just finished up delivering three Diploma courses in Online Marketing, Sales and Digital Strategy with Dublin Business School, Griffith College Dublin, and IBAT College Dublin. These have been a great success with many large and medium sized business partners and individuals participating on the courses. They will be all run again in October 2010 so if interested please register at the various colleges. These courses have been certified by the Institute of Commercial Management (ICM) and by the Dublin Business School.

They cover in practical terms how to create an online and digital strategy that is aligned with measurable business objectives with clearly stated goals. They demonstrate to participants how to plan and research your target audiences and understand where they coalesce online and how best to create online tactical solutions that engage with them.

The courses cover how to create inbound marketing programmes based on producing compelling valuable content for your buyers, for both a B2B and B2C environment. We look at how to create awareness and demand through your content and how best to leverage social channels as a means of connecting with your prospectives and customers. As part of the course we differentiate for participants between the differnt forms of media that are used online today – and we break these down into Owned Media, Paid Media and Earned Media, and how to create your media profile based on these segmentations.

We demonstrate to participants how to design and implement paid search campaigns, search engine optimisation programmes, keyword analysis, competitor analysis, blogging strategies, podcasts, videocasts, webinars, screencasts and, relate all of these to particular buyer cycles and sales funnel activities that can help augment site conversions. We go through how businesses can leverage social media to share content, develop community and make their content more “findable”, improve customer service, acquire new customers and retain existing ones. We also show participants how to create measurement frameworks for businesses to track ROI Key Performance Indicators. We go through using the google analytics interface and how to tie this in with site conversion tracking.

These are intense 12 week courses with the aim to provide participants with a clearly defined set of practical digital skills which can be leveraged immediately at client-side marketing teams, digital and integrated agencies, and drive strategy and tactical solutions for enterprise eCommerce businesses, B2B and B2C businesses, communications and public relations organisations, owner managed businesses, and web marketing organisations.

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Just got buzz switched on – my initial thoughts having played around with it for 5 mins are that it looks quite interesting. I was a big fan of FriendFeed, and its a bit like that in terms of the flow. Obviously there’s a huge potential for attempting to process vast amounts of information flow – but you just got to filter out the irrelevant stuff (which can be tricky and time consuming). I think it’s interesting to have it integrated with your email account – I think most people have their email open all the time – I do. So there’s no real friction flitting in and out of buzz. I know some people have been giving out about the fact that Google have just blasted this out,  there’s no explicit opt-in, you get it whether you like it or not. Similar to what facebook have done regarding UI changes. But this does not pollute the gmail experience directly – yes, its automatically turned on within the application itself, but you still have to opt to click the Buzz link. Its interesting, once you have all your profiles set up in Google Profile its straightforward to have all those profiles aggregated.

Obviously a huge part of this is that Google now gets to see your entire social graph and digital footprint (if you add in all your profiles), which in turn will mean they can start rolling out more focused social search as well as targetting more and more ads at you.

I haven’t read too much of what others have said – be interesting to see what people think of it after using it for a while. When you think about FriendFeed, the user-base for that was tiny – max 2-3 million I think. But gmail had 176 million unique users in December 2009 so that really is rolling out real-time web to a massive audience – much bigger than Twitter which is plateau-ing at the moment allegedly.

Thats my tuppenceworth anyway

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The areas that I see that businesses need the most help and support in the online and digital sphere are around automated marketing solutions, content marketing, leadgen and lead nurturing programmes, and integrated CRM with digital, online and social channels. Coupled with, of course a strong emphasis on the need for serious digital strategy and planning, a comprehensive period of listening to the market, customers, competitors and ultimately the rolling out of tactical solutions that incoroporate all the points that I made at the start. This is a fascinating area for anyone with an interest in technology, marketing, sales, communications, organisational change etc…but yet what is amazing is that there is so much focus on the tools for the tools sake, and solutions that have not evolved over the past 7 years. I really cannot understand this.

Well in fact, I suppose I can. A lot of those who claim to be experts in all things Digital – seem to be very monothematic in terms of their skills and language that they use. They are particularly good at reducing the entire business world down to terms such as SEO, SEM, Email Campaigns, Twitter, Facebook without standing back and thinking what from a business perspective does a senior marketer, sales, communications or product management resource need and want to solve and why. There seems to be a total disconnect in the vocabularies and insights that the typical digital and online practitioner has in regards to addressing real business problems and understanding how businesses operate.

I think 2010 is going to be an interesting year for online practitioners. The business community is looking for far more integration of technologies rather than narrow focused skillsets and solutions. There’s a lot of room for improvement across the board for everyone operating in this area and those outfits who still have not migrated beyond PPC, SEM, SEO, Email Marketing solutions need to move the needle intellectually and digitally soon or risk being caught out in a very serious way.

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Attached is a short presentation where I cover at a high-level how and why organisations should align their online marketing strategies with business objectives and then deploy informed tactical online solutions. Have a look through and come back to me with any feedback.

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I’ve attached a presentation that I give on explaining social media (in its broadest sense) – i.e. social networks, digital content, listening tools, reputation management, content marketing etc… along with case studies of businesses using social media to both good and bad effect. Also covers  how social media platforms have become enablers for the mass spread of ideas and memes.  Have a read through and get back with any comments etc…

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social media, social networking, social software, socialmedia Case study, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, social media, Social network