Advocacy and engagement through social media

Sara Jones, Class of 2012

Tonight was the second session of our Social Media for Managers course. This is a new class in the TMMBA Program and one I was looking forward to. It’s both relevant to the work I do and a personal topic of interest. Our instructor is Andy Boyer, a Principle at Social3i Consulting and Co-Founder of Relaborate. He’s also a Foster Alum!

Alonso Chehade talking to the TMMBA Class of '12

Our first class on Saturday was an initial overview of our class project, basic social media strategies, and what platforms are out there. The class project is for each study group to pick a non-profit, small business, or cause and build a social media campaign around it. The idea is to teach by doing. It was harder than I thought to come up with a topic. My group finally settled on encouraging individuals to volunteer through a focus on more trivial benefits of volunteering such as free swag, free knowledge, free concert tickets ,etc. The hope is to reach an audience that hasn’t volunteered much in the past while being a bit humorous and lighthearted.

Each class session we are focusing on a different aspect of social media management and building that out for our projects. Tonight we talked about tools and strategies for blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other platforms. We also had a guest speaker, Alonso Chehade, who talked about creating engagement.

Here are a few takeaways from class so far:

• Social media needs to be tied to organizational goals and the bottom line. Have metrics to measure success of a campaign. It’s easy to get caught up in getting likes, follows, etc, but there need to be other measurements to ensure that your time and dollars are going to the right efforts.
• Create engagement by being passionate, including people’s names in posts, responding to others, and asking questions to create a conversation.
• People are motivated by Selfish Altruism. If we’re trying to get people to care about our cause, we need to think about what’s in it for them. What about our story will appeal to them? We shouldn’t just ask them to help, like our page, etc.
• We can use the basic principles of Dale Carnegie to find success in social media engagement.
• Find your social media superheros like Bill Sleeper, a 96 year old tech enthusiast who made headlines after he attended a local social media event, or Dan Dewey who was featured during Starbuck’s #everylove campaign.
• A neat tool that I wasn’t aware of: www.followerwonk.com. I’ll definitely be using this one at work!

Over the next two weeks our groups are supposed to build content and launch our campaigns so that we have some data to work with during our next session on analytics. Now it’s time to create some engagement of our own.

What organizations or groups do you think have done a great job of using social media to support their cause?