Training

You’d be amazed how many organizations think that by organizing training, they’ve ticked the box. Getting the real results from marketing and business development (and certainly social media) relies on your being able to actually do it yourself! It’s no good our coming in and leaving you with a nice glossy plan and then running away. For it to work you need to be confident that you’ve got the skills to go it alone.

When you deliver as much training as our associates do, whatever the topic, the success lies in nailing those business needs first. What’s important is that your training actually makes you money, not just costs it. We’ve all experienced trainers that cost a fortune, get you all fired up and then leave you wondering how to actually get started. Like all things at Elephant Creative Solutions, our first priority is plain English and our second is common sense. Whether you’re a director needing a bit of one-to-one coaching, or whether we’re looking at a whole team… the fact is it has to be relevant. How frustrating would it be to feel that you were just getting generic, off-the-shelf training?

So, what’s the best way to do it? For training to be really effective it has to come hand in hand with an action plan and some ‘at the end of the phone’ type support. It’s all too easy to just throw the facts at you… we want to make it really stick! But don’t just take our word for it… feel free to ask us to provide some examples and references…

Some tweets worth looking at…

My regular newsletter pulls together some of my favourite tweets over a few weeks. If you want to learn about ways that you can use social media for professional services, these articles might inspire you! They’re aren’t just nice glossy ideas of what other firms are doing… these are practical resources that should give you [...]

Review for PM Forum: Marketing Accountability by Malcolm McDonald & Peter Mouncey

I have to be honest about this book. I had to read chunks of it several times… and even then, quite a lot fired straight over my head. I have absolutely no doubt that this book will be important in academic circles. Similarly, that it will be ploughed through by the marketers of the future [...]

Part Three – So, what next for my social networking?

How should you get started? The most important thing is that you don’t read all of this series, agree and then decide to think some more about it. Strike now and get going!

Part Two – The Big Five of social networking

There comes a point in any training session (of which I do a lot) when you have to stop talking about reasons why you should do it and worries about why you can’t… and just get on and give people some tips on how to get started.

Part One – Twitbook and Facetube – does having a LinkedIn account mean that I’m doing social networking already?

Social networking can seem like a bit of a wriggling octopus. You know you need to get to grips with it but every time you think you’ve got it nailed, a leg wiggles out and you lose your hold.