Who it is intended for

This social media training has been created for professionals publishing content on a weekly basis, and monitoring social media channels. The course is useful for online marketers, social media moderators and PR professionals.

Whether your scope of work is to maintain web assets for their own organisation, or on behalf of a client, this training will provide a practical framework for mastering corporate blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, with little technical knowledge required.

It is low on theory, high on practical, ideal for marketers who need to build in-house digital competencies.

How the training is delivered

The training is delivered in two ways. 

1. Practical demonstrations. One-to-one demonstration on how to execute an operation. 
2. Readings. Links to articles and videos published on the firestarter website.
3. Case studies. Working examples marketers can reference now and in the future.

29 digital competencies you need to learn

At the heart of the training are 29 digital competencies expected to be performed by a hands-on online marketer. By changing behaviour and learning new workflow practices, online marketers can tap the potential social media.

These tasks are taught in the context of four marketing modules. The training intimately explains the relationship between different social media networks, and different methods available to manage them.

Course modules

1. Using a content management system. Become as proficient using a CMS, as one is using an email application. Learn workflow patterns and short cuts to make publishing easy.
   Length: Half day
   
2. Social media. Learn how to create text based articles, rich media assets, the nature of search and online research. Customise Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages for your organisation or to build a personal profile.
   Length: One day
   
3. Facebook intensive. Define how Facebook will fit into the overall communication mix, understand tools and applications, how to create engaging content and competitions, tactics to deal with negative publicity and measuring success.
   Length: One day
   
4. Online marketing.  Fundamentals of a successful email marketing campaign, developing a laser-focused approach and best practices for collecting emails and unsubscribes. Learn how to create lists of keywords, setting a daily campaign budget and monitoring performance.
   Length: Half day
   

Email for a quotation 

Advanced courses are available catering for social media engagment. Contact Firestarter now for a quotation, or call us directly on +65 6220 6643.

“I’ve built the site – but where are the people?”. The days when marketers could blindly build a website, do some basic SEO, and sit back and wait for visitors to pour into the home page, are clearly over.

Like traditional media became saturated decades ago, so too has the Internet.

Who am I trying to talk to?

Today it is crucial marketers define first define exactly who their audience is, where they congregate socially, and what kind of value and engagement would attract and keep an audience returning and engaged, before they build a digital asset.

Social media networks and communities have made this task easier. Having fragmented the online space into smaller, more predictable packets, marketers can target and attract qualified communities to their website.

Firestarter Digital Edelman story

By combining the core competencies of Edelman’s digital public relations modelling and Firestarter’s best-in-class web development and branding, the right type of asset is specified for the client from the onset, saving time and cost in rebuild, and moving the client closer to community engagement, and away from push marketing.

No public relations firm or digital production house can offer such a powerful combined effort alone. Country by country, region by region, conversation audits identify who the audience is, their maturity and how best to engage them online.

Often a microsite is only part of the solution. To ensure traffic after one year of operation, it may require reinforcement from key positions in social media networks, blogs and forums.

Simplistically, Edelman focuses on the before and after (research and launch), and Firestarter provide the middle (production). Together, both firms offer an end-to-end solution encompassing research, production, content – optimised for long term community engagement.

Post launch, Edelman provide training and resources to maintain engagement with the audience. Each week, clients receive PDF reports detailing the performance of the asset. Metrics include traffic volume, bounce rates, average time spent on the site and popular pages and keywords.

To enhance Edelman’s outreach, Firestarter offer pay-per-click advertising campaigns, video podcasting, and pervasive media like mobile phone applications and gadgets, to further penetrate the social sphere.

Case study - Aviva

Recently Firestarter and Digital Edelman offer their end-to-end digital solution to Aviva. Moneybanter.com.sg was created. This presentation demonstrates the how conversation audits, production and outreach is making this community forum in Singapore a success.

Firestarter treats branding as a fusion of art and science. Science lends the methodology to ensure a holistic approach to branding. Art is the sensitivity to logo design, choice of colour, typography and unity.

The result is more than just a logo, but a narrative that builds mindshare. The narrative provides the space which allows the corporate identity to evolve and work in many ways.

To develop a comprehensive brand, Firestarter spends time conducting brand workshops with stakeholders to calibrate perspectives, assess territories and gather market intelligence.

Brand narrative

Firestarter views branding as more than a visual representation, but as something which is spoken about. It is the story, or the narrative surrounding the brand which is being communicated. Therefore, a brand with a narrative has an advantage over one without.

It can carry meaning in more places – such as a blog, a forum or an editorial piece.

With each brand Firestarter shapes for a client, the firm injects narrative. The results is a communication platform which describes how customers, employees, suppliers will relate and talk about the brand.

Brand narrative permits more than an intellectual connection with the brand - it fosters an emotional one. Brand narrative is as important for B2C as it is for B2B businesses. Relying on facts and figures to create brand recall is not as effective. Facts are temporal and become difficult to maintain since they change rapidly.

Brand narrative lends multinationals a sustainable point of difference which all media can scale from.

Scalability of the brand

An identity has the latitude to evolve, as well as the foresight to work in many places.

The test of good creative concept is the brand’s ability to be expressed in many places. Be it a small or large space, Firestarter architects a brand to work in retail, advertising, online, events and direct mail.

Firestarter can also suggest other media which can be modified to become a cost effective advertising space. This includes media such as notepads, coasters, shirts and stickers.

Brand panels

This can be a useful strategy when repositioning a brand for a new audience. Firestarter uses a microsite and develops competitions as a focal point for collecting insights and participation around content, products and values.

Brand panellists provide real-time research.

By keeping the brand development separate from mainstream communications, Firestarter avoids alienating the mass majority with the new look and feel.

The brand panellists each may reside in different parts of the world, and may be loyal customers or professionals with valued opinions.

Branding online-only businesses

Branding an online entity requires a whole new approach compared to traditional branding. Here, the priorities are different. Whilst traditional brand strategy incorporates the brand proposition, tagline and colour, online brand strategy needs to consider an additional set of criteria such as domain names (URLs), SEO and website functions. Marketers who build brands in a traditional sense, make the mistake of treating URL and SEO research as an after-thought.

When creating an online-only brand, the science of how the brand is remembered and discovered is king.

Corporate style guides

Each corporate identity created by Firestarter comes with standard practices, illustrated in a corporate style guide. The style guide governs logo usage, co-branding, white space, typography, colour palette and examples of grids.

Firestarter designs style guides in Microsoft PowerPoint to make it easy for clients to edit and evolve the brand.

Apart from defining rules, the style guide explains the intent of the logo and the brand narrative. This gives users scope to interpret and apply the brand under different circumstances.

To ensure websites are built with a clear value proposition, Firestarter use online research to laser-guide the development of a website. Doing what was done before, or simply following the market, is no guarantee of future success.

Utilizing a combination of monitoring tools, Firestarter can build a profile of what an audience is looking for in a website by examining what they are key-searching, writing on blogs, and talking about in forums.

Wireframe pages

Using wireframes, Firestarter simulates how a website will look and navigate before production commences. It charters the different kinds of user experience encountered while exploring the site.

This is a cost effective method for clients to test how the site will feel before it is built, and to visualise how their content will sit on the page. What’s more, wireframing minimises the client’s time investment, and produces a positive client experience.

Content strategy

To reduce the cost of writing content, Firestarter can plan content to be contributed by users, or fed from third party sources. Depending on the source, third party feeds can be paid for or free.

In addition, Firestarter can source content writers, and produce podcast videos and audio content.

Social media

Firestarter makes the most of integration with popular social media platforms like FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn and iGoogle. Firestarter can build applications, widgets gadgets, mapplets and RSS feeds to add a community aspect to a website.

User Assessment testing

Firestarter invites users with different online experience levels to pilot the website. Firestarter moderators observe click behaviour and collect feedback forms.

This data provides valuable insights to improving the user interface before a site goes live. Successful user testing improves return visits, and reduces workload on call centres.

SEO

Firestarter provide an SEO checklist, covering keywords, keyword density, image optimisation and link building. Despite the complex nature of achieving search rankings, there are a few simple measures Firestarter consider when approaching search engine optimisation. More

Content management systems (CMS)

Content management systems put control of the website in your hands. Since you can update anytime, anywhere, you can respond quicker to market opportunities.

The modular systems Firestarter deploy allow plug-and-play of new functions, keeping upgrades cost effectively. Many modules are ready to use and include forums, blogs, photo albums etc.

Where possible, Firestarter customises PHP-based open-source frameworks such as Joomla, Druple, and WordPress. Firestarter can also provide solutions using Microsoft .Net framework or ASP 2.0.

Web traffic analytics

Firestarter use a variety of applications to monitor web traffic. These are free tools invaluable to marketing online.

Google Analytics™. Easy to read diagrams report the number of visitors, the length of time they stay, and the most popular pages visited. Analytics is powerful enough to track SEO and SEM traffic from one dashboard. Reports are emailed weekly as a pdf.

ClickHeat. Visual heat map of clicks on an HTML page. Hot and cold click zones describe areas of a page receiving or not receiving clicks.

Web hosting, domain name selection and registration

Firestarter provide domain name purchases and examine how to best translate a brand name into a URL.

Clients are encouraged to host with Firestarter, and take advantage of special partner rates with some of Singapore’s top hosting providers.

E-commerce websites have additional needs compared to standard corporate websites. Their metrics and objectives are different.

All e-commerce websites Firestarter build follow the principles deployed when creating a standard website. In addition, Firestarter provide strategic advice to ensure e-commerce website get traffic and have low barriers to entry.

E-commerce websites are a retail store. An in retail, visibility and store traffic is everything.

The vision.

Firestarter’s team of client service are highly creative and visionary. They can suggest ways to differentiate a brand, by offering non-transactional functions. These ‘soft engagement’ functions like forums or flash games, can offer alternative reasons for visitors to return.

These ideas get picked up in press, and get talked about by bloggers.

SEO

Firestarter conduct extensive keyword research to understand online behaviour. By examining search volumes for different keywords and phrases, Firestarter can suggest a search engine optimisation plan, and offer insights to guide how best to communicate the brand and its products and services. More

User journey design

While optimising the e-commerce, Firestarter breaks each user journeys into a number of clicks. The journey of a non-registered user, a registered user and someone who has completed a transaction, are studied and optimised to improve sales and minimise drop-outs.

Eliminating barriers is a big part of improving the user experience. Firestarter research new methods that make payment easier. For example Firestarter may recommend implementing Google Checkout™ so users can sign-on using Gmail.

Social media applications

Creating a great user experience is not enough. Successful e-commerce websites leverage the large member base of social media platforms. This includes publishing video of products and services, or offering widgets, gadgets and RSS to loyal customers who want to stay in connected with the brand without returning to the website.

e-commerce technology

Firestarter build custom e-commerce solutions to suit your specific needs. Depending on the requirements, Firestarter may recommend an open source or a paid solution. By not offering one platform alone ensures the flexibility and scalability both now and in the future.

Shopping carts, payment methods and purchase databases are integrated to create seamlessly user experience.

Firestarter build using open source frameworks like ZenCart or osCommerce.

Security

Firestarter offer SSL or 'Secure Sockets Layer', is a system for securing and transferring private information over the Internet. A secure certificate encrypts sensitive information (like credit card numbers) while they are being processed.

Recommended payment gateways

Firestarter can integrate online shopping carts with various payment gateways. We have experience in working with popular merchant account providers such as PayPal and WorldPay, using their built-in payment gateways.

Other payment gateways include Google Checkout, a popular method for SMEs; and Transaction Network Services (formally known as Dialect Payments), used by large banks such as Citibank and ANZ; and eNETS, very popular and reliable service for merchants with operations in Singapore.

Monitoring

Apart from monthly updates to content, Firestarter can monitor critical pages for errors or user problems. If customers are not completing e-commerce purchase and dropping out, Firestarter can identify those users and contact them of feedback.