Making Lemonade

With economic conditions such as these, sometimes the best we can do is provide a shoulder for terrified clients and consultants. High Tech Connect has amassed a huge nationwide network of friends and colleagues, many of whom are literally paralyzed with fear right now.

And most of our friends believe their tried/true skills and decades-old experience will catapult them back into the black when The Recovery arrives. What they fail to recognize is the world, especially the world of marketing and communications, has already changed. The rules, the players, the influencers, the tools, the teams have all changed.

Press releases are gone, replaced by social media releases optimized for Google. Marketing events can accommodate a worldwide audience without a conference room, catering, AV and signage. Executive speeches can be modified in real-time based on Twittering audience members. Grass-roots Facebook groups give companies more visibility into their customers’ minds than ever before.

So, where do you start? If you’re like me, you attend a few local seminars, webinars and read a lot. But I found these speakers only frustrated me and made me feel guilty. They told me what I needed to do, and how awesome things would be if I did them, but then I was left to figure it out all by myself. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, RSS, newsreaders, Digg, Delicious and several hundred other newfangled things. Shyeah, right.

Thankfully, I have an awesome friend named Brian Johnson. Brian is a PR god with a knack for the newfangled. His real talent though, is identifying exactly what I need and SHOWING me, using plain English. I ran back to the office and showed the High Tech Connect gals what I had learned. And soon we knew more about social media than most people.

We decided instead of waiting and praying for the phone to ring, the responsible and brave thing to do was “upskill” as many of our clients and consultants as possible, so they would be wildly successful in the New Economy.

Lemonade from lemons.

We’re extremely proud to present our first High Tech Connect Social Media Crash Course. This is a one-day, hands-on workshop for seasoned professionals to learn just the few tools and applications they need to catapult ahead of their peers. http://www.htconnect.com/events/social_media_crash_course.html

I hope it goes well. I hope the attendees will have fun and erupt in “Ah hahs!” I hope this will be the start of many more sessions. And I hope when everyone is back to business, doing marketing again and spending money on great talent, that they will remember the fun, forward-thinking folks at High Tech Connect.