Atlas and the economic development profession are “atwitter” about Social Media.  Here, we are really interested to shape how social media is changing the profession, and to further that aim, we have partnered with the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) and Marty Vanags, President and CEO of the Economic Development Council of the Bloomington - Normal area.

Join us on Thursday March 18, 2010 at 2:30 EST as we co-present “Leveraging Social Media for Low-Cost, Targeted Marketing.” Ben Wright, Atlas’ CEO, and Marty will cover the theory and practice of developing successful social media campaigns, from the expert and practitioner’s point of view.

Click here for more information, and to register!

The webinar will cover the following topics:

• How best to get started in social media?
• How to set goals for your social media initiatives?
• What efforts you can replace by being active in social media?
• How can you be engaging, but avoid controversy?
• How best to make the most of the time you spend on social media?
• What staff support do you need?
• What training resources are available?
• What tools to use?  Twitter?  Blogs?  Facebook?  Foursquare?

We hope you can join us!

Visit Atlas’ slidespace for two other presentations on the topic.

A great little read by ProBlogger. Read on for details on the following tips:

1. Content is King
2. Anticipate what people will be searching for
3. Titles, titles, titles
4. Keywords in other parts of your post
5. Link to your own posts
6. Links from outside your blog
7. Plugins
8. Readers beget readers

8 First Step SEO Tips for Bloggers

Interested in learning a little bit about code?

Sometimes clients want to just work with the Content Mangement System, which works a whole lot like Microsoft Word for your website. But sometimes I get requests for a little bit of training on HTML and/or CSS (website coding). Having a knowledge of coding can be helpful even when working with a CMS. So, below is a useful tool if you are interested in learning more.

W3 Schools - learn HTML and CSS

We have long offered our ideas for free and this year is no exception. We are presenting our popular webinar “How Economic Development Marketing is Changing” on June 4 at 12:00 Mountain time. For free.

To access the event via LinkedIn, click here.

The first event, held in April, drew interest from folks on four continents.

If events are not your thing and you want to get straight to it, you can access the presentation beforehand by clicking here.

If unmoderated PowerPoint makes you numb, plan on attending! We’d love to have you!

As an agency, we have long championed new media techniques to drive marketing success. But even we are skeptical of new trends sometimes. Like this social media thing. A year ago I was sure it was a way to waste more time, not a sure path to success.

Now, I know I was wrong.

We recently did an agency promotion using two forms of online media – targeted email and Linked In. Here is a quick rundown of the performance:

These results were achieved using the same offer and the same language, but distributed in wholly different ways.

What does this mean for business to business marketing:

1. The network you have matters.

2. The groups you belong to matter.

3. Even relative to highly trackable, low cost marketing forms, social media can generate astronomically higher returns.

Does anyone else have experience with these kinds of results?