Sean Oakley, Team CM's resident Social Media guru, and the Advertising Association of Baltimore, have teamed-up to present the third installment in the Interactive Essentials series -“Social Media - Taking Part in the Conversation”

In this Lunch-n-Learn Session, you’ll learn the fundamentals of social media marketing, from identifying agency clients ripe for social media, to launching their first campaign and reporting the results to the Executive Board. After the program, enjoy lunch with your peers and presenters while participating in an open forum question and answer session.

Before we go out the masses, we want to offer seats to this event to our blog readers first. We're doing three sessions, each with only 12 seats, so space is very limited. The prior two seminars in the series sold out quickly, so act now if you're interested.

Here are the basics:

Dates
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Time
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM  Presentation
12:30 PM – 1:00 PM  Lunch, Q&A

Location
Congruent Media World HQ
Chesapeake Conference Room
Baltimore, MD

Seating
12 Account Executives from local agencies (limit 2 per agency)

Registration Fee
$40 AAB members / $60 non-members
Includes lunch from Di Pasquale's (they rock!) in Highlandtown, Est. 1914

Registration
Call (410) 534-6800 or email Sean@CongruentMedia.com

Click [Download] below for a rough PDF flier with an overview and agenda. It's not pretty (yet), but l wanted to get this posted quickly as seats are already filling-up.

We hope to see you there!

BudURL sticks out from the URL shortening crowd by adding some interesting tracking tools.Just like it's popular competitor TinyURL, BudURL allows you to easily shorten long URLs, enabling the use of links within confined posting spaces. 

Turn:

http://www.congruentmedia.com/pub/eNewsletter-Campaigns-and-HTML-Email 

into:

http://budurl.com/yn14

Technorati began releasing it's annual State of the Blogsphere report this week. They're releasing each of the five sections over five days, the first two sections having already been posted. 

Already there are some interesting statistics on the evolving demograhic and influence of bloggers. For example, according to the report:

• 42% of US bloggers are 18-34 years old, 58% are 35+
• 51% of US bloggers have household incomes greater than $75,000
• 74% of US bloggers are college graduates

Not exactly the demographic of social media users that the stereotype often portrays. As social media as a whole, and particularly blogs, becomes more and more mainstream, their influence over consumers grows. The report gave insight into this as well:

• 4 out of 5 bloggers post brand or product reviews
• 37% post them frequently
• 1 in 3 bloggers have been approached by companies to be brand advocates

Some marketers are obviously already engaging bloggers because of the blogosphere's influence. But before even engaging, the best question to ask is: What blogs are talking about your company? And how many consumers are listening?

Check out this presentation video from TechCrunch 50 on the Sekai Camera  .

Its an iPhone app (prototype for the moment) that tags “the real world”. For example, if you are at a certain spot (say the corner of Pratt and Charles Streets), you can point your iPhone at a restaurant which will show a tag with a link to the menu. Still don't know what I mean? Its kind of like the glasses Rowdy Roddy Piper wore in “They Live”, but instead of seeing aliens you’re seeing information balloons and tags.

Or you can see tags specifically from your friends eg-“You gotta try the burgers here”. If you point at a subway station sign you can see the subway schedule. It works by finding your location (presumably using the iPhones GPS), then uses image recognition to find and display the tags (which can be visual or audio).

Imagine visiting a historic spot or museum, holding up your iPhone and getting visual and audio information on the area/artwork you’re looking at. Or possibly going to another country (say, Japan) holding up your iPhone to the street corner you’re at and having everything your looking at translated- or at least recommendations (in English) for tourist spots/restaurants/etc. You would think spots could potentially become jumbled with tags which is why they have series of filters so you can just see certain types of tags.

In addition to general information and tags from friends, it can be used by companies for the next generation of Mobile Marketing. Greenbean 2.0 perhaps? The Sekai Camera is still in the prototype stage but could be an extremely cool app once its released. Its just another example of people finding creative ways to use the features available in the iPhone.