Gillian Meier’s e-Guru Internet Marketing Workshop was one of my greatest learning experiences. Mango, Luyanda and myself had the opportunity to attend her e-Guru conference held at the beautiful Indaba Hotel on the 13th & 14th of May.

Gillian is the founder of Blue Magnet, a company that specializes in eMarketing workshops that are designed to be easily understood by marketers, website owners and business managers. She has a vast knowledge of internet marketing and is generous enough to share her expertise in an informative two day seminar.

With the number of internet users in South Africa passing the 5 million mark for the first time in January 2010, it’s no wonder such a vast majority of marketers and PR executives are looking to the web to build relationships with their clients and customers. Gillian’s lectures teach various techniques on how to optimise your online presence and implement a successful online marketing campaign, right from defining your vision and goals through to tracking and measuring the results.

“The power to define and control a brand is shifting from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities”. This is a quote that comes from my e-Guru manual at the beginning of the Web PR chapter. Before the internet, organizations must have had a pretty hard time developing and maintaining a good relationship with their clients, but the above quote could not be more true with regards to the way brands are communicated these days.

Now days a company’s successes and failures are determined almost entirely by consumers and their mighty power of peer persuasion. All over the web users are discussing the quality of your product or friendliness of your service and communication like this has a profound impact on where consumers will spend their money. Consumers who actively participate in online communities have a higher propensity to recommend you to someone else and become brand advocates.

A large portion of Gillian’s workshop was dedicated to Search Engine Marketing. Going into great detail on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per Click Advertising, she explained the importance and benefits of improving the traffic to one’s website via “natural” searches from search engines. She discussed how businesses with a budget could maximize their online exposure with a strategically planned Paid Search campaign that would guarantee visitors and allow you to target specific audiences or how to simply monitor your website’s traffic with Google Analytics.

Social media has also become very important in the bid to secure a positive online presence. Now more than ever customers are posting comments about an unfavourable experience or service compliments on social websites like Facebook and Twitter. Gillian explained that in order to develop and maintain a positive public perception, organisations should strive to use social media sights to communicate with their clients.

Gillian delivered her workshop in a very professional yet casual manner that allowed for some great audience interaction. The audience participation showed that people did not only get a great deal of online marketing insight from Gillian but that they were also eager to put their new found knowledge into play and develop a solid strategy for their business. An absolutely delicious buffet lunch was served on both days at the very festive Chief Epsom restaurant where we enjoyed a great meal while being entertained by the sounds of live traditional African music.

“We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers, we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it” ( The Cluetrain Manifesto – Levine, Locke, Searls, Weinberg)

 

Mango, David & Gillian at the eGuru Workshop