I Taught My First "Live" Social Media Class Yesterday!

Yesterday afternoon, I taught my very first social media class in person.  I have taught others about this stuff via webinars and on our weekly radio show "Twitter Tuesday", but this was the first time I have spoken to a group in a classroom setting.

I LOVED IT!

More importantly, the students seemed to really enjoy it, too.  We were at Gracy Title, and my friend Allison Craig, who is a marketing rep for the company, thinks that the other 12 marketing reps will likely want to schedule us to speak for their clients, too.  My friend, Ben Finklea, who is the CEO of Volacci Search Marketing, spoke for an hour about SEO techniques before my segment.  We charged separately for the classes, with a package price if people wanted to attend both of them.

I also got a chance to meet Dorie Dillard, who is someone I have enjoyed reading here on AR and who focuses on northwest Austin and the Canyon Creek area.  It's always fun to connect in person with people for the first time. 

As we discussed during the class, social media can help to leverage our time really well, and it makes it far easier to grow our sphere of influence.  My personal sphere is both way larger and more far-reaching than I could have conceived two years ago.  After all, without the benefit of the internet, how long would it have taken me to develop an sphere of thousands?  Since I have three (almost four!) kids now, I clearly don't get a chance to attend a lot of cocktail parties these days.  Instead, I have a bunch of online tools that make it feel that way!

Yesterday's session focused on blogging basics, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, with a brief reference to Friendfeed.  Since I wasn't sure how long it would take to cover everything and I had a good number of questions, I didn't get a chance to cover every single subtopic, but I thought it went really well.  Several people said that I had helped to demystify Twitter for them, so that was a good feeling.

I'm looking forward to the next one!