On Friday 13 November I'm giving a workshop on social media at the Engage Your Community conference.
Workshop Format
As I'm not sure what the level of experience is across the people in the workshop, I've broken it into five sections. Each of these sections can be expanded or contracted, depending on the level of detail we need to go into. I'm hoping for loads of experience-sharing from the people in the workshop.
Introductions
How do we all use the web? How many of us are running personal social media accounts? How many are running accounts on behalf of their organisation? What happens when personal and professional use start to overlap?
This section is designed to get people talking, and to give me a chance to assess how familiar people are with social media tools. That will help me pitch the following sections at the right level.
Observations from Day 1
A few quick points from the presentations given by Colin Jackson, Nathalie Hofsteede and Chris Brown.
A tour of the social web
What's out there that people could be using?
- Listening in (RSS feeds, Google Alerts)
- Joining in (Twitter, Flickr, blogging)
- Community & collaboration (Facebook, wikis, Ning)
[All with examples from the not-for-profit sector]
The golden rules of social media
Things to ask yourself before embarking on any social media adventure (and certainly before picking a social media tool):
- Why do you want to do this?
- What are you offering?
- Who is this for?
- Who will be doing this?
And (numerous) steps for a successful launch.
Planning exercises
Depending on how much time we have, I've prepared an activity for people to break into small groups and plan a social media 'campaign' for a specific scenario.
Hopefully all this gives a bit more context for my slides
Resources & examples
I've also prepared a rather lengthy handout which I'm now going to reproduce here for ease of use.
Introductions to different kinds of social media
It’s hard to beat the team at Common Craft http://www.commoncraft.com, who make short, straightforward videos about all matter of web (and non-web) things.
These are all available on the Commoncraft YouTube channel
Listening in
Twitter search | http://search.twitter.com
Google Alerts | www.google.com/alerts
Google blog search:
- Google your search terms
- From options at top left of results page, choose Blogs from the ‘More’ drop-down menu
- Scroll to the bottom of the search results
Useful reading
- Social media monitoring (State Services Commission)
Joining in
Blogger | http://www.blogger.com
Wordpress
http://wordpress.com (basic account)
http://wordpress.org (to do your own hosting)
Twitter | http://twitter.com
Flickr | http://www.flickr.com
Examples used:
- Whangarei SPCA blog
- Get in on! Twitter
- Rainbow Youth Flickr
Useful reading
- Twitter case study (National Library)
- Mashable’s Twitter Guidebook
- Twitter for non-profits (Mashable)
- Fundraising potential for Twitter (TechCrunch)
- Darren Rowse’s blogging lessons
Community & collaboration
Ning | http://www.ning.com
Wikis
http://www.wetpaint.com
http://pbworks.com
http://www.mediawiki.org
Facebook | http://www.facebook.com
Examples used
- Mt Cook Mobilised wiki
- Museums 3.0 Ning group
- Cancer Society’s Daffodil Day campaign
Useful reading:
- Case study on Daffodil Day campaign (Ideashop)
- Managing Facebook groups (Mashable)
- Wikis when and why (Nina Simon)
Community management
If you’re going to start spending time with your community online, you’re effectively becoming a community manager. This elderly post from Jeremy Owyang is still relevant if you’re trying to figure out if this is your new line of work.
Like any job, there are some personal qualities you’ll need to bring out in yourself, and some tactics you might find useful.
- A case study from the Brooklyn Museum
- A case study from (the early days of) Flickr
- My notes from Heather Champ and Derek Powazek’s 2009 ‘Designing and sustaining creative communities’ workshop
Planning
One of the most important things you need to ask yourself is – how much time do I (or my team of people) have available? How much time does Web 2 take (Nina Simon)
You’re likely to need some simple policies around how you/your team use social media sites in a professional capacity or on behalf of your organisation. I’m a big fan of the very simple guidelines from the State Services Commission, which were written for government, but which translate over well
The Guardian’s community standards are also helpful if you’re thinking about things like comment moderation
And this page aggregates links to social media policies
One piece of advice: these are your policies. Don’t try to second-guess everything that might go wrong & plan against them, or you’ll become paralysed. Read some of the material above, write some useful & sensible guidelines (aimed at helping the people doing your social media outreach to understand what’s okay and what’s not so okay, both in terms of their own behaviour and that of others) and then update as time goes by and circumstances change.
Generally useful, sometimes even inspiring, reading
Beth Kanter’s blog ‘How nonprofits can use social media’ (the title pretty much explains it)
- http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog
Nina Simon’s Museums 2.0 (Nina is interested in people’s participation in museums & galleries, and frequently writes about social media projects)
blog
- http://museumtwo.blogspot.com
The Community section on A List Apart (but don’t stop there, please, this site is full of delicious reading)
- http://www.alistapart.com/topics/content/community
The Pew Internet & American Life Project regularly issues reports on people’s online activities and behaviour
- http://pewinternet.org/Data-Tools.aspx
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