“This is one of the best workshops that I ever attended” Darya-Varia

“Very useful for my next project. Informative, yet interesting” Roche

“Excellent, descriptive, technical and well delivered” Berita Satu Media

“This is exactly the workshop I’ve been looking for. As someone, who is tasked to develop a comprehensive social media strategy, I pretty much get everything I need” The British Council

Many corporations and organizations are on the same boat, they too were caught off guard. For many they had no choice but to plunge straight into the social media scene for two main reasons: 1) peer pressure – their competitors are already in the social media, they have no choice but to dive in, 2) their audience/consumers are in social media, and they’re already talking (positively and negatively) about them; their business and/or their brands, so they have no choice but to exist in social media.

With the speed that’s happening in social media, businesses didn’t have the chance to take the ‘baby steps’, they were expected to take-off at full speed. Most took the most obvious steps: opening a Facebook page and started a Twitter account. Some may have run a campaign that may have created a buzz and generated many new followers. The follow-on question thereafter is “now WHAT?”.

After running social media for sometime, your boss is now demanding some results. You may tell them you have xxx,xxx Twitter followers and xxx,xxx people ‘Like’ the Facebook page, but what do these numbers mean to the bottom line? How do these numbers translate to the company’s objectives? How to leverage the use of social media to meet company’s objectives?

It’s time to give your social media operation a good health check. Social Media Health Check will give you a full diagnosis of your social media condition. Are you on the right track? How can you run it better to optimize its potential and add to the company’s bottom line? What else do you need to go to ensure your social media runs effectively?

It is a fair question, if you’re aware that Indonesia scores highly in the use of social media on the world stage. We’re now the second largest Facebook market in the world after only the US and the world’s third largest generator of Tweets.

It is perhaps for these reasons that many businesses have plunged into using social media, and opened Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for their brands. They may even have had some modest success at generating buzz, but after the initial enthusiastic burst they are often at a loss on what to do next.

You might be one of the more astute ones who have started to ask yourself these questions:

• - What does social media mean to my business or the brand?
• - Has social media contributed to the bottom line or is it just an extra operational cost?
• - Are we doing it right?
• - How can we optimize our social media to add value the business?

If you want answers to these questions, then join us for the workshop below on Social Media Health Check conducted by Hanny Kusumawati and Jonathan Tenggara.

It seems like only yesterday when they were so vibrant, vital and cutting edge. These days, there seems to be a patina of age about them. They are referred to as the traditional, old media or even Old School, as opposed to the New Media with its associations to bloggers, citizen reporters, the Twitterati and other social media platforms.

There is no doubt that the mass media now has to share the limelight now with the new media and with time its dominance will further erode as a new generation of consumers who get most of their information from the Internet come of age.

Yet for all its decline the traditional media is still important to companies, brands and businesses. This is because many of today’s decision makers still get their information and are influenced by the traditional media.

In addition, the traditional media still command greater trust and reliability than what you get on the Internet because they contain quality information – information that, theoretically at least, has been checked and rechecked before publishing. For example, you may still have a lot of skepticism on something that you read on a blog, a Twitter post or a Facebook update but if it is reported in Kompas then it is more likely to be true.

And when a traditional media brand reports something, it is more than likely to start a round of Tweets and ReTweets that may start another round of new media interest in a subject. You only have to see how often Kompas.com or detik.com gets amplified on Twitter to get a sense of this.

It is for these reasons that engaging the traditional media remain important to any company that wants to build or maintain its reputation. In this engagement it

is equally important that the designated spokespersons of a company have the required skills to speak with reporters with credibility and an ability to project authority and trust.

In fact with the ability of the New Media to speed things up it is arguable that these skills are even more important as the time horizon for companies and spokespersons to react to events and developments is continually compressed.

A thought to ponder on in the midst of all these developments is that the reputation of a company is increasingly dependent on the quality of its spokespersons. How well they respond to a situation may make or break a company. But how skilled are company spokespersons, especially during tough times?