By Tracy Beyl, director of continuing education at PCA&D
[Editor's note: Tracy attended a one-night workshop in October entitled "Advanced Facebook Strategies." She came away inspired to use Facebook to advance both personal and creative goals.]
It's hard to motivate yourself to take a class in the evening when you've been at work all day. However, often there are courses that really pique my interest or involve subjects in which I need to improve my skills.
This fall, I attended Ken Mueller's Advanced Facebook Business Strategies & Tactics. There was a great group of students from a variety of different businesses in the class. I found it really fun to be with artists, hairdressers, construction company executives, college instructors, and small business owners all interacting and exchanging information. Ken's high energy and passion for social media was infectious. He made me (and I think everyone else in the class) want to go home and set up a business Facebook page, start writing a blog, and tweeting all at the same time. Ken freely shared his knowledge and was happy to stay long after the class had ended to answer students’ specific questions about their business.
Ken Mueller teaching at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Lancaster, Pa.
There were many valuable kernels of wisdom that I took away from this workshop. Of course Ken covered basic information on how to navigate pages on Facebook and showed us tools that are available but I think even more important was hearing his philosophy of how social media should be used. I loved that Ken said the most important word in "social media marketing" is the word "social."
He explained that people don't want to be sold to - the idea is to engage people.
It's was enlightening to know that you don't always have to talk about what you do but you can talk about the seasons, holidays, the Steelers or anything and there are always clever ways to weave these topics into a conversation that includes information about your business.
I came away from the evening with a list of new Facebook tools that I am excited to set up but more importantly, have a new way of thinking about how to use Facebook to interact with people.
Tracy Beyl, PCA&D director of continuing education