Les Squires Workshop Tour

New Zealand and Australia

New Zealand (Sept 14-Oct 5)

Australia (Oct 7-Nov 2)

Use REPLY below to register your interest in having Les Squires visit a Transition gathering or an International Project Management (IPMA) meeting during these dates.  You will be invited to a Skype chat used to coordinate planning.  Workshops may be scheduled for companies, organizations, local events. The visits are complimentary. Couch surfing is highly desirable.  Download the attached file for further description of options and curriculum.

Les Squires believes that the best way for organizations to understand the power of social media is to actually build a network and use it. This workshop is hands-on. Therefore, participants are required to work in small groups, preferably on their own personal notebooks. Each participant will walk away with an operational social networking network. Tools used in this workshop are generally free of charge:  Skype http://skype.com – Ning  http://ning.com -- Linkedin  http://Linkedin.com  -- Facebook  http://facebook.com – Google Reader and Google Analytics at http://gmail.google.com 

Available Workshop Formats

There are many options for venue, duration, and content of workshops.  Specific workshop curricula will be tailored to the needs of workshop participants.  See menu of available topics below -- “12 Social Networking Tools that Change Everything” for popular topics.

•  Keynote conference-style presentations of approximately 40 minutes. 
• Two-hour executive overviews.
• Four-hour or all-day hands-on workshops for developers. 
• Two-day advanced sessions for both executives and developers. See WorkshopTours below for more options.

Workshop Tours

In addition to single, one-off events, companies, universities, non-profits, conferences, and other organizations are invited to schedule events for extended periods of time and with multiple hosts. Recent examples of social networking tours:

• Nepal scheduled a week of public events and private tutorials, leading up to their nation-wide conference in Kathmandu.
• South Africa hosted a full month of activities from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Pretoria -- consultations in board rooms of coal and diamond mining companies, and day-long, revenue-producing public workshops, as well as consultations in local universities. 
• A Slovenia Chamber of Commerce created multiple meetings with their local member companies in the city of Celje. 
• Local school systems in Slovenia scheduled a 5 day tour in 5 grade schools, and then scheduled a workshop for executives from the local municipality of Ormoz.

Squires believes that Tours maximize local resources. The idea is simple:  Once situated in a geographic area, he works with as many local companies, groups, organizations, universities, and independent sponsors for as long as there is demand.  Cost?  Each hosting group reimburses expenses attributable to their specific event.  No consulting fees are charged.  Local hospitality is preferable to restaurants and hotels.

Workshop Objectives

1. Participants will learn how to define a social constituency.  Who is to be served?  How does this group fit into the organization’s products and services?  What organizational development must occur to accommodate the new community?

2. Participants will implement a live website to service this constituency, integrating communication tools and existing media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, Google, and other social media applications.

3. Participants will learn how to repurpose existing corporate content for the new online community, including commercially available news feeds.

4. Participants implement “group résumé” to control fragmentation, messiness, and triviality  normally associated with social media.

5. Participants will be invited to join participants from other workshops in a community of practicing community builders.

12 Social Networking Tools that Change Everything  

1. Member Directories – One click access to details and relationships.
2. Profile/Resume/Interests/Reputations – Access to member history.
3.  Member to Member Patterns – Replacing org charts with actionbases.
4. Categories & Tabs – Classification is the mother of focused services.
5. Custom Searches – Searches defined by specific organizational needs. 
6. Cross-Group Calendars – Day, Week, Month AND organization at a Glance. 
7. RSS Syndicated Group Activities – coordinated content across communities.
8. Group Readers – Tell me about it only if it is new or has changed.
9. Community Analytics – Cut guesswork!  Empirically speaking, what’s doing?
10. Skype Communications – Free intelligent history, categories and groups.
11. Desktop Sharing – My desktop is your desktop.
12. Local Trading Exchanges – Compensation based on barter & local currencies.