Presentation: How To Use Social Media To Market A Large Event

Today I had the great opportunity to present to a socially vibrant class of undergraduates at the International College of Management on the growth of the web in the last 20 years, the new rules of marketing and how social media marketing is transforming the marketing industry. I also listed 3 case studies on how events have been marketed with social media.

Here are some interesting web facts and figures starting from 1990 about the history of the Internet which we covered in the presentation.

• First Website in 1990
• 130 Web Sites in 1993
• 16 Million Users in 1995
• 1.8 Billion Users in 2010
• 234 Million Websites in 2010
• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day
• 738 Million Internet users in Asia in December 2009
• 252 Million Internet users in North America. In 2009
• 30 billion – photos uploaded to Facebook per year 2010

The college is situated on what must be one of the prime locations in Sydney overlooking Manly Beach on the North Head just near the entry to Sydney Harbour. The campus buildings are grand sandstone halls that make you feel like you are in Oxford or Cambridge. It almost feels like a Harry Potter movie.

It was also intriguing to catch a glimpse of the “Gen Y” perspective on how they view the social media and Web universe. I asked them how many of them were “not’ on Facebook and the class didn’t raise one hand. So doing the very complicated math, 100% of  the undergrads were on Facebook.

Another question I asked was  how many had a YouTube channel?… the response .. 50%, a true “Gen Y” answer which I certainly expected.

The unexpected response to a question I ventured was “what other social media platforms do you use?” and one lonely hand was raised in reply. I asked them if they had heard of

• LinkedIn
• Slideshare
• Flickr

The answer was  “silence”.

I also made a mention of who was using Twitter and one very brave student slowly raised his hand.

So in this post they will experience one of those platforms which at least takes them on the first step of a journey beyond just Facebook and YouTube.

I have embedded the powerpoint presentation in this post which has been uploaded to my Slideshare account which transforms a powerpoint presentation into a slideshow that can be viewed in my  blog  post for viewing not only for my readers but for Anne-Marie Flynn’s class to view online.  An online video of the presentation is also available and will be uploaded shortly.