Continuing the free Social Media Workshop series that kicked off in December, Glerin Business Resources will present a Facebook workshop on January 23 and 24, 2012 at Riverstone Technology Park in South Boston, Virginia. The popularity of the first workshop prompted Glerin to schedule two nights this month to allow more participants.

This free social media workshop will explore how to use Facebook effectively, including topics such as:

December 6 marked the kick-off of the free social media workshop series that Glerin Business Resources is presenting at Riverstone Technology Park.  For those who weren't able to make it - or those who did come and would just like to review - video of the workshop is now available here.

PDF files of the slides used in the workshop, as well as the social media glossary that was handed out to participants, are also available for free download here.

Local musician Dane Ferguson, a prolific singer/songwriter, posted a video of his rendition of American Idol contestant General Larry Platt's song "Pants on the Ground," and it was immediately a hit on YouTube; Dane posted the video on January 13 and as of this morning, in less than 4 days, it had almost 42,000 views with a 5-star rating and 242 comments.

Dane's experience should serve as a lesson for anyone looking to market themselves using social networking; for a long time I've been trying to get clients to understand that the secret to explosive social network marketing is to post something that has a good chance of going viral, and that's exactly what he did.  While he's a serious musician, he knew that no matter how great his original music is, in order to get a lot of people to find it quickly he needed a hook that our pop culture would latch onto and make it go viral - and when he saw  Platt's "Pants on the Ground" he knew he had it.  His one-minute video has resulted in tons of emails from new fans of his serious music. Take a look: