Of the 5700 social media jobs I found on CareerBuilder, only 9 are in Alaska. But that doesn’t mean Alaskans aren’t interested on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter training.
I just completed 2 days of social media training in Alaska, leading a social media training course in Fairbanks on Monday and another social media training course in Anchorage yesterday, and here are my take aways:
Isolation Breeds Ingenuity – I’ve led social media training courses in far away places all over the world. One thing I’ve found is that the further away that place is from a major metropolis, the more resourceful the people there are.
Auckland, for example, is so geographically isolated that it’s residents have learned by necessity to solve difficult problems on their own. In places where the proverbial “subject matter expertise bench” is deep, people are generally more likely to outsource and less inclined to do it themselves.
Use blogs to provide info to solve other people’s problems-they will find you. @complysocially
— Kathy Day (@kathyvirtual) March 5, 2013
Isolation Breeds Creativity – At both social media training workshops, we had a contest to see who could share on Facebook from the session and get the most likes and comments. Here are some of the contest entries.
The photo of Hannah Blankenship with her tech gear and geek glasses was the winner in Fairbanks and this one of Emily Tyrrell, Mary Deming Barber and Angela Gonzalez was the winner in Anchorage.
Isolation Brings Broadband Issues – I’m pretty sure Seoul, which 233 square miles, has the fastest broadband in the world. Alaska, in the other hand, is 633,300 square miles. Seoul has 10.4 million residents and Alaska has 731 thousand. For economic and logistical reasons, it’s not feasible to wire Alaska up with the same level of connectivity. So while the internet is certainly more accessible in Fairbanks and Anchorage than it was for me in Phuket and Boracay, there are outages, and they disrupted our social media training courses at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks Community and Technical College and the Crowne Plaza Anchorage. The technical requirements required to host a live social media training course can tough to find even in major cities, but in far out reaches, it can be particularly tough, which is way on-demand, online social media training via home or work broadband makes so much more sense.
I’m off to San Francisco this morning for meeting down there tonight and tomorrow to demo online social media training course bundles to clients to help them manage the risk and capitalize on the opportunities of social media in the workplace..