Training is the major trend in search and social media marketing today, and professional training it’s wanted in any form: in-house training for advertisers’ marketing teams or for agencies who want to skill up their resources for the search and social media marketing arena, in-class training at workshops organized by the smartest industry conferences and shows, by agencies or public administrations, including universities and training centers.

Over the last 6 months, and for the forthcoming months of this year, my agenda has been more populated by training and teaching commitments than conferences – that’s besides clients’ projects, of course. Everybody seems to understand that the key to engage on the web in a successful way is to “know what you’re doing“. And everybody in the online marketing industry, both on advertisers’ and agencies’ sides, needs to know exactly what they are doing when engaging with their online audience.

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Global Search Interactive’s latest client, Telepass, put training and the ability of their internet marketing team to master all social channels as a prime goal and delivery of the collaboration with our agency, while a new future corporate client (cannot disclose the brand at this moment) decided to buy two full days of in-house search marketing and social media marketing training for their brand marketing team BEFORE meeting to discuss the proposal – so they will know exactly what we’ll be planning and discussing with the agency. This was really surprising, but I have to say that it also demonstrates professionalism.
Chapeau. I love to have clients like this, by the way.

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Search and social media marketing training is a big trend not only on the advertiser / client side, but also for agencies. This year started for me with a two-day training session to the team (marketing, creative, developing and sales/accounting) of one of the GSI’s partner agencies, Wooi and parent company EcohMedia ^[3], while last month I offered several training sessions to the editorial team of the Rome-based lifestyle portal GaiaxRoma ^[3], another recent partner of Global Search Interactive. I also delivered training to other agencies in Italy and Europe who ask me for confidentiality, but I have to say that I see the internet marketing agencies more and more strategically focused on the training to their resources – definitely more than I am used to see in the online marketing industry since the early ’90s.

There was more search and social media marketing training across Europe for me over the last months, since I have been invited to give a workshop in Spain at the Internet Meeting Point ^[4] of Gijon, Asturias (the slides of the presentation, in Spanish, are available on Slideshare ^[5]). The Spanish workshop has been closely followed by a Master Class I gave for the DigitalMarkedsFørung 2010 ^[6] in Holstebro, Denmark – the training slides in English are also available on Slideshare, but let me embed them here for your convenience! =)

I’m also committed to teaching at several Master in Social Media Marketing, such as the Spanish Master en Redes Sociales ^[7] (Master in Social Networks) organized in Bilbao, Euskadi (Basque Country) by the prestigious Universidad de Deusto. The master, already announced, will kick-off soon. I will also be teaching at the Master in Community Management organized in Bilbao by Comma ^[8], the Spanish Community Managers Associations in partnership with EITB ^[9], the public Basque TV broadcaster. The program of the Comma Master is very complete and interesting, teaching to from marketing to psychology to technology, communication and project management, not forgetting all the geeky stuff of the profession, like the topics of Social Media Optimization that I will be covering. Other university Masters where I am involved on the teaching side are the ones just launched by the University of Sassari ^[10], in Sardinia, Italy (focusing on art, culture, environment and sustainable growth), or the one organized at UNISOB ^[11], one of the Universities of Naples, by the Italian food leader authority Gambero Rosso ^[12], who launched a Master in Gourmet Food Marketing last year.

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The teaching / training format for the classes I gave at UNISOB is pretty new and very hands-on. I came out with it after realizing that people needs to fully understand the practical aspects of social media, as well as the strategic ones. My two classes at Naple’s UNISOB, divided in two full day of class training and interaction, were focused on “how to create a WordPress blog“. During the first class, after a couple of hours of review of search marketing, social media marketing and blogging topics, I asked each of the students to propose a blogging theme. then we drafted one and I went from scratch through all steps of the blogging process, from strategy and keyword/competitive analysis to tech implementation, optimization and publishing. The result has been the blog Cucina Sensuale ^[14] (sensual cuisine), that I created live by using a free template, free widgets/plugins and no customized CSS. Of course it is possible to work a bit more on the blog, but the idea was to show that everybody can set up a performing blog in just few hours of work.

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The students at UNISOB had a month before we met again to create their own blogs on the topics they proposed – the second full day class at the master was a site clinic session where I dedicated half an hour to each of the students, analyzing their blogging efforts. The students loved the format, and now they all have a blog each, rather than just a bunch of slides and the head full of notions. Here below is the step-by-step presentation that I prepared after the class and embedded also on a blog page named “training blog ^[16]” – but will I also embedded here above for your convenience.

The conference + training workshop formula has today been adopted by the major and most advanced industry events, such as Search Engine Strategies ^[17] (SES), Search Marketing Advanced ^[18] (SMX) or Web Congress ^[19]. Among the other training commitments, I also offered a social media marketing workshop at the recent Web Congress Barcelona, which I will replicate at the forthcoming Web Congress Valencia next month. Did I mentioned that I will be also deliver social media marketing training workshops during the month of June in Nairobi (Kenya) at the forthcoming AfriTech Summit Kenya ^[20]?

So many training opportunities to skill up yourself and your team in all the latest strategic and operational topics of search and social media marketing – which one is the right one for you? Just get in touch and let’s talk about your training needs!