Experience at social media bootcamps organised by Digital Vidya

Social media was a huge buzz word in the year 2010. There were big debates happening around the world on the virtues of social media & how to leverage that. Social media is fast becoming a part of our life & soon the assimilation will be such that we will stop referring it as a 'social media' because it will be as natural to us as any other medium of communication. Interestingly, these days some universities around the world have started courses on social media marketing. Thinkers like Jeremiah Owyang have done extensive research on the emerging role of corporate social strategist & the increasing importance of social media within & outside the companies. With so much effort going into this space, Digital Vidya in India has been unique in conducting social media bootcamps, which intend to impart social media marketing knowledge to marketers from different industries.

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Recently i got invited to be a part of their 'Twitter for Business' & 'Social media for business' bootcamps as their twitter partner. Here's what i experienced in these bootcamps for 3 days.

1. Trainers:
Digital Vidya usually have 2 trainers in all of their bootcamps. Pradeep Chopra & Kapil Nakra are the co-founders & lead trainers who are having extensive experience of over 10 years into digital marketing. Although Kapil was not a part of these bootcamps but Pradeep was joined by Shrinath Navghane for Twitter specific bootcamp & Bhaskar Thakur for overall social media bootcamp. Both of these are successful entrepreneurs. All these guys make a very potent & credible team!

2. Participants:
All the participants were from diverse industries in senior marketing roles. They had arrived here to learn the new age marketing concepts & apply the same in their companies. They were coming up with interesting examples from their industries which was giving a very good perspective as in how social media marketing can be utilized. The diversity of participants also helps in networking which i did well over there.

3. Course Content:
Content was in the form of excellent slides, hand-outs, exercise sheets, resource guides etc. Case studies both Indian & international of various companies were discussed intelligently spread over different sessions. Various aspects of social media application like community building, brand promotion, sales, engagement, online reputation management etc. were discussed in these case studies.

4. Live exercises:
What i liked most were the sessions where the participants built upon their learning by developing social media strategies for their companies & then they presented in front of the group & healthy debate happened around. This added to the learning of all the participants.

5. Guest speakers:
Digital Vidya has a practice of inviting industry leaders or practitioners in the space of digital marketing to take sessions around specific topics. Like we had a session by Mahesh Murthy (founder of Pinstorm) on how to effectively handle communities on facebook backed by interesting data & another session by Achint Parekh & Lavin Mirchandani (both co-founders of SMC Mumbai) on online reputation management.

6. Certification:
At the completion of these bootcamps, all the participants were given certificates by Pradeep which certifies them as knowledgable social media personals.

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To end the bootcamp on even happier note, all the participants were given some really cool freebies! :)

More Information:
Here's the coverage by other bloggers in the past on their experience of these bootcamps:
1. Praval
2. Permeate360
3. Prolific Dyslexic
4. Youpid
5. Vijayendra Mohanty

Also i found out the list of previous participant companies & testimonials from participants on Digital Vidya's website.

My Recommendation:
I would earnestly recommend these bootcamps to anyone who wants to learn about social media marketing or want to sharpen their skills in case they are already practicing social media marketing.