Reflection on Toby Srebnik's Speech

Today Toby Srebnik, Director of Social Media from O'Connell & Goldberg PR gave us a speech as a guest speaker on the topic of Social media evolution and audience engagement.

In the world of socialnomics, social media really matters to brands. Social media sites can showcase an entity's personality, drive traffic to the entity's locations and web presence, build trust-based relations, create buzz, establish a dialogue and following with fans, communicate values, and mitigate negative public relations, etc.

Amongst the various social media sites like Twitter, FB, Linkedin, and Foursquare, Srebnik specified in Twitter use for business. He offered some tips on Twitter for business:
(1) Telling the story in your bio: be clear upfront of who you are; (2) interaction: a two-way conversation enables business growth; (3) personality: it is important to make sure the customers receive  fastest and effective response and convey a consistant corporate voice, but cleverness and fun to some extent helps; (4) ask questions of your followers to initiate conversation; (5) retweeting helpful tips: this serves as a way of reminding and emphasize.

The company which runs its brand on Twitter should remember that Twitter must be a conversation, and the person who tweets should have something valuable to contribute. Like anything, over time Twitter becomes second nature, not a burden or one additional thing to do. This is when Twitter as a marketing or PR tool is incorporated into the strategic communication plan of a company.

While Twitter is all about branding and brand reinforcement, FB is more of a storefront (store hours, address, photo gallaries, customer interaction) which is indispensable in social media branding as well. To achieve a well-rounded social media strategy, Linkedin and Blog are another two important social media tools to reach targeted audience.

In order to see what people are saying about your entity before or after you launch your
social media presence, there are multiple websites to use as measurement.  Several of these sites
are FREE including on sites: socialmention.com and www.toolreach.com.

I really agree with one of his line in the speech: Entities that give followers a true sense of community
succeed with social media. In building up a community, companies need to do something that will stand out, and also, implement different social media tactics according to different social media sites or tools.

Prezi - Trend for Ideas Sharing

I got to know a recently emerging presentation tool, Prezi, which has become increasingly popular. Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for exploring and sharing ideas, distinguished by its Zooming User Interface.

Users input their ideas - editing words, inserting images and Youtube videos on Prezi canvas. For a more organized information display, users can frame and group the information according to topics. Then, Prezi allows users to construct a prescribed navigation path. Zooming User Interface enables users to zoom in and out of their presentation media. For showing or editing the presentation, users are able to present directly on "Your Prezi" with full screen to the audience. To invite other viewers to check or edit the presentation, users can generate a link sent to the people whom they want to share the prezi with, anyone who has the link can view the work but only those who has Prezi account can edit the presentation.

Prezi was first developed by a Hungarian architect Adam Somlai-Fischer as an architectural visualization tool. This tool makes ideas sharing more interesting, intuitive and visual.It serves as an innovative tool in for business and conference, education, information and data visualization, diagram processing, mind-mapping in the realm of cognitive sciences, resumes and portfolios, individual expressions of creativity like E-cards, etc. Aside from online designing and presenting, Prezi offers off-line desktop application for Pro users to create and save their presentations on their own Windows, Mac or Linux systems. If co-editing and showing in real time to people that are geographically separated, Prezi has a Meeting feature to allow up to ten people to participate in editing or showing prezi simultaneously. Prezi Viewer for iPad is an app developed for the iPad prezis viewers.

Different from Powerpoint, Prezi is a non-linear navigation, has a map layout instead of slide stack layout, is web-based rather than computer-based. But Prezi has limited printing options. Another criticism for Prezi is that it induces nausea. The company has acknowledged this potential side effect and offers video tutorials for wiser use of layout to avoid this excessive visual stimulation. Since the interesting formats Prezi brings for a presentation, the content and logic in presenting might be distracted. Therefore, it is important to know your goal first, handle the tool well to let it help you to accomplish your goals.

With its various attracting features, Prezi is definitely becoming a trend for presentation and idea sharing.Like Slideshare, Prezi is going to be another dominating social publishing site which will be utilized by more social media users and practitioners.