2011’s Social Media World Forum Europe attracted 4,000 marketers, consultants and social media enthusiasts to the Olympia Conference Centre in London, summing up 2011 as the year of companies beginning to understand what their goals should be in social media. The biggest change over 2011 was that at the start of the year most of the big FTSE-100-type companies were virtually non-existent on Facebook. And 2012 will see many brands increase budgets dedicated to social at the expense of other media.

To address these issues and guide you on how to use social media to your best advantage, a team from Facebook Developer Garage London will be at SMWF this year and featuring in the FREE TO ATTEND Marketing Tech Track to present workshops on successful Facebook campaigns and to handle delegate queries related to the Facebook Platform. This will be led by Geoff Hughes and Candy Chen Shuhui from Social Clay.

Workshop agenda:

• Getting out of first gear: an overview of what the core and advanced Facebook ecosystem consists of. If you're not using all these tools that Facebook provides you are running inefficiently.
• Measuring today to prepare for tomorrow. Set your objectives and allocate budget to measuring these key performance criteria before you start. You are now in a position to understand which parts of your initiative worked out and which bits did not.
• Next period planning: Using the collection of stats you can now be more scientific in your approach. Use yesterday's data to plan tomorrow's initiative. We take a look at what worked and what did not to give you a head start.
• Sean Parker said in ‘The Social Network’: "You don't want to ruin Facebook with ads because ads aren't cool." Fast-forward to 2012, ads are everywhere on Facebook, so can we make ads cool?

You will need to register for FREE to attend the workshop. This will also provide you access to the Marketing Tech Tool Box featuring speakers from BBC, Pizza Express, Microsoft and the full exhibition.

FDGL workshop times:

• Tuesday 27th March, 11:15 – 11:45
• Wednesday 28th March, 11:10 – 12:10

We hope to see you there!

More information on SMWF Europe

SMWF Europe is organised by Six Degrees Events - for more information on SMWF please contact: .

We're pleased to announce our next regular event, taking place on Wednesday 18th May, at our regular venue in the Freemasons' Hall (close to Holborn, Covent Garden, Tottenham Court Road and Temple stations).

This month's theme is measurement and analytics, and we have talks from David Kramaley from Sharkius Games giving their experiences with Facebook Insights and comparing to their own internal analytics, Heather Stark from Kinran talking about 'understanding your elephant', Aaron Huang from Kontagent on the 'seven deadly social game metrics', Pierre Santamaria from Weka Entertainment on big games versus big data, and Simon Cross who is Platform Partner Engineer for Facebook outside of north America, will discuss their tools for measuring success, and if there's time also run a Q&A session for all Platform related queries you may have.

As usual there will be Iskandar Najmuddin, Technical Director at Syncapse (formerly Nudge) briefing us on the latest platform updates, Dave Nattriss, freelance developer and FDGL secretary and webmaster, running down what's hot on Facebook, and an introduction with Facebook product updates from Geoff Hughes, FDGL's treasurer (stepping in for Todd for this month only).

Our events sell out each time within days, so be quick to buy your ticket(s). We'll have beer, wine, juice and pizza, possibly some Facebook swag, and will go for after-drinks in a nearby pub/bar.

Tickets are available at http://fdglmay2011-websiteeventdescription.eventbrite.com - you must buy in advance to guarantee entry on the night. Earlybird tickets are available until Friday before the event, subject to quota.

As always we are grateful for the sponsorship of our events - thanks to our regular sponsors Facebook, Accel Partners, Gamaroff Digital, IC tomorrow, Adknowledge, Syncapse, Conversocial, Logicode and Joyent, and our media partner Newspepper. If your organisation is interested in sponsoring us, please e-mail for more information.