Knowledge Oasis Muscat’s Digital Nation Seminar Series is all about bringing together, celebrating and strengthening Oman’s digital community. It gathers the diversity, innovation and creativity of everyone involved in a tech and digital focused activity with an aim to encourage sharing, growth and innovation.

Indeed, companies, government agencies and individuals can really get a lot out of the Digital Nation Seminar Series in so many ways, from creating and encouraging discussion and learning new skills to networking and developing new relationships. It’s about sharing and absorbing. As a platform for exchange, the more people that get involved the more everyone benefits.

The Power of Social Media
This Digital Nation Seminar is aimed at giving attendees a foundation in the world of social media. It will provide an equal balance of interactive presentation, discussion and group work on the applications that local businesses should be starting to use in their marketing mix.

Twitter, for example, was without a doubt the #1 Social Media application of 2009. Indeed, everyone from Barack Obama to Britney Spears are using it. But how can an application that only allows you to post an update of 140 characters be such a powerful tool for organizations? In addition to Twitter, the Digital Nation Seminar will explore how companies are using blogs, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook to communicate with customers and others within their industry and how your organization and staff can harness its full potential.

e-Gov & the Virtual World
Virtual worlds offer exciting, unprecedented and economically important opportunities for mass participation and collaboration for citizens and businesses across the globe. Already there are millions of users of virtual worlds including: children, adults, businesses, academic institutions, local and national governments and international bodies.

This Digital Nation Seminar will explore virtual worlds and why they matter, particularly in the context of government services and public diplomacy. It will look at the public policy benefits and challenges of virtual worlds.

Digital Marketing for Dummies
This Digital Nation Seminar will look at the key considerations for digital marketers, how to build the dream online strategy and assess what the future holds in store. This Seminar will run through the acquisition tools (search, affiliate marketing, display advertising) and retention techniques (e-mail, web personalization) as well as some of the management issues (legal issues, data gathering, integration with off-line activity). It will also demystify the technical jargon commonly used in digital marketing: RSS feeds, mash-ups, tag clouds, AJAX, social bookmarking and more - all in a simple and easy to understand format.

Talking to Oman’s Generation Y
If you've ever tried to talking to a teenager, you may have noticed how hard it is to engage them in a conversation. Surprising as it may seem, 16 – 24 old year-olds have not lost this age-old skill, simply go about it in a new, fresh way. At this Digital Nation Seminar discover how to engage Gen Y in a conversation with your brand. We'll take you step-by-step through: Why we need to talk to the new generation in a slightly different way; how to hold and develop a conversation; what this means for designing user experiences; how social media will help keep the conversation going; and why play is integral to all of this.

Digital Nation’s Stand-up Slots
Each Digital Nation Seminar will start with a 5 minute introduction and then be opened up to 30 second 'stand- ups'. Anyone who comes to a Digital Nation Seminar will be eligible to take advantage of the stand-up time, however, to get on the list you must have a completed profile on the KOM website with a picture, profile and web links. Once this is done you can let Ibtisam (ibtisam@kom.om) know you want to do a stand up. Only those who have pre-registered with Ibtisam will allocated a slot.

The 'stand up' slots are for you to describe what you need from the Digital Nation community (for example, funding, advisors, mentors, consultants, partners, etc). You have 30 seconds to speak (no slides, no demos) and the audience then has a minute to respond. You can also simply ask a question rather than describing a fully-fledged need as such. The idea is that these short interactions will trigger more useful engagements after the 'stand up' session.