EcoKnights®

16 February 2012, Kuala Lumpur – EcoKnights officers Fadly Bakhtiar and Aaina Karina attended the “Social Media Bootcamp” jointly organized by the Department of State, US Embassy and Warisan Global today.

The workshop was held at the International Property Training Facility (IPTF) at the UOA Towers in Bangsar and was attended by about XX people from NGOs to corporate organizations.

The workshop focused on leveraging on social media platforms into organizational communications through easy-to-follow, step-by-step exercises, and also featured latest case studies. The workshop was conducted by American Eric Schwatzman (picture right), author of “Social Marketing to the Business Customer”.

Eric Schwartzman is coauthor of Social Marketing to the Business Customer, the first book devoted exclusively to B2B social media communications.

He has been conducting social media training programs to accelerate the development of digital literacy in the workplace at all levels since 2004. An entrepreneur who founded and sold iPressroom in 2010, he serves as an independent online communications consultant to businesses, the US Military, government agencies and nonprofits.

Eric specializes in online communications strategy, social media policy development and accelerating digital literacy inside organizations. He is a frequenter speaker at professional conferences and has been producing the award-winning podcast “On the Record...Online” (@ontherecord), about how technology is changing the way organizations communicate, since 2005.

During the workshop, EcoKnights learnt about social marketing strategies, methods to monitor social media, and managing blogs among others.

Pic (L): Some of the participants in the workshop.	Pic (R): Eric as the facilitator of the workshop.

For EcoKnight Aaina, she found that the boot camp have helped her understand the power of social media.

"Social media can be highly influential in terms of sharing information (daily and as it happens) to the public directly online. Social medias' platform is not only to send out information to the world but also to leave a strong impact towards the followers, and their followers and this measures how well the organisation is doing by measuring how many people went to the website and how long," said Aaina.

Aaina also added that, "I have also learnt from Eric that about 50% of the public trust NGOs through social media and as for the government and private organisations, they have less percentage than the NGOs. And this would be an added advantage for NGOs like EcoKnights to continue using social media platforms to engage the locals in terms of paving the way for sustainable living", concluded Aaina.

For a gist of the slides used by Eric for the bootcamp, please click here.

EcoKnights would like to thank Yvonne Oh from the US Embassy here in Kuala Lumpur for inviting EcoKnights to participate and we look forward to more useful workshops such as these for our staff and interns.