This past weekend I traveled to Milwaukee to speak to a group of Russian college students who were in the US for about two weeks to study American culture and business. Most of them were either finance or marketing majors, some still at the undergraduate level and some working on advanced degrees.
I worked through a translator, an amazing young lady named Katrina (shown on the right above) who had just graduated with an advanced degree in international business. If she is not the CFO of a multi-national corporation some day, I will be surprised.
Having not had much experience at that sort of thing, needless to say there were a few hurdles to clear. I recall at one point early on Katrina telling me, "We can take a few more breaks." (Meaning I didn't need to speak as long a period of time before stopping for her to translate. Heh.)
I was a bit trepidacious about presenting not only to Russian speaking people, but college students as well. Nonetheless, despite their youthfulness, I found this group to be sharp, engaging, inquisitive and knowledgeable.
I also found out that Russia has its own form of Facebook, called Vkohtakte (which means "in contact"). I am now a member and a few of the students have friended me.
We even took time to do a small group activity on how to use the site for marketing purposes. I was taken aback at how well developed some of their ideas were. Below are images of some of the students white-boarding their ideas.
Though the use of social media is not yet as advanced in Russia as it is in the states, there is growing adoption of the medium for marketing. Vkohtakte, for example, is a few years behind Facebook in terms of businesses adopting its use, but give it two or three years and you'll hardly recognize the difference (other than the fact that one is in English and the other Russian).
One issue Vkohtakte needs to address is spam (so does Facebook for that matter). Users who are not friends can send group invitations to you and some of them are, well, prurient in nature if you know what I mean.
Though the presentation took an entire day, it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life in recent years. It nearly rivals traveling to Singapore in 2005 to do the first-ever business blogging seminar to be held in Asia.
I would truly cherish the opportunity to travel to Russia to help introduce social media marketing. But, if not that, I do hope to travel to Milwaukee once again and do the same.
Lastly, I want to thank my hosts, Lana and Richard Taylor, who are the couple responsible for bringing me to Milwaukee to present to the group. I also want to thank Katrina, my translator, as she was the one responsible for actually finding and introducing me to Lana and Richard.
Social media in Russia is growing very quickly and it's really interesting and exciting to watch constantly Vkontakte develop and improve
Posted by: professional thesis writers | January 04, 2011 at 07:04 PM