Notes from a day-long training seminar which covers the effective use of social media, from developing a strategy, to looking at how to use a variety of social networking platforms, and where to get help!

1. Effective Social Media June 2011
Effective Use of Social Media
1. Developing a social media strategy
2. Privacy
3. Twitter
1. Anatomy of a Tweet
2. Your Twitter Profile
3. How to Tweet
4. 3rd Party Applications
4. LinkedIn
1. Company Profiles
2. Groups
5. Flickr
6. SlideShare
7. FourSquare
8. Facebook
1. Privacy
2. Pages vs Groups
3. Facebook pages
4. Like buttons
9. Blogs
10. Bringing it all together
1. Social media aggregators
2. Google alerts
11. Support and further help
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2. Effective Social Media June 2011
1. Developing a social media strategy
What are your marketing goals?
What would you promote on social networks?
• News
• Events
• Merchandise / specials
• Something else?
Who will you be building relationships with?
• Rotarians?
• Rotaractors?
• Other family of Rotary?
• General public?
How will you build those relationships?
• Which social media channels will you have official presences on?
• How will you foster interaction?
• Will you promote related posts / events / news from other sources?
• How often will you post updates?
Who is responsible for your social media?
• Which staff will maintain the official accounts? Will multiple staff be involved?
• Who will be monitoring what is being said about you elsewhere?
◦ How will you address negative press from others?
◦ Who will deal with any breaches of intellectual property?
• Will you be using your own personal profiles for promotion as well?
2. Privacy
• Important to consider privacy online regardless of what site you use
◦ Do a Google search for your name – you may be surprised at what you find
◦ Using Google Alerts can be a useful way to see what is posted about you
• Consider what contact details you enter
• “Open” groups – be it Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, groups on LinkedIn,
Facebook etc – are publicly available. Anything you post is indexed by search
engines
• Consider the impact if what you posted was spread beyond where it was intended.
• If in doubt, don't post
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3. Effective Social Media June 2011
3. Twitter twitter.com
“Microblogging” - sharing bites of information in 140 characters or less.
Anatomy of a “tweet” :
• Up to 140 characters of text
• RT = “Retweet” - forwarding the same tweet to your own followers (referencing the
original source with an @)
• @ = a direct message to a twitter user
• #hashtags = adding keywords to a tweet
• Short URLs
◦ Bit.ly is a URL shortening service which enables you to bundle multiple links in
one short address. This is the service used by Twitter.
◦ Goo.gl is a URL shortening service offered by Google.
◦ TinyURL was the first URL shortening service, and offers the ability to specify
your own memorable URL rather than just being assigned random letters and
numbers.
Your Twitter profile:
• Usernames can contain up to 15 characters
• Your “Real Name” can have up to 20 characters
• Can create a custom background – an image around 1600 px by 1200px with a left
column of around 200px.
How to Tweet:
• Log into Twitter
• By SMS to 019 808 9488
• Twitter for iPhone app
• From Facebook pages (http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/)
You can pull tweets into your Facebook profile (use the Twitter App
http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/) or LinkedIn profile.
Some 3rd party services:
• Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/
• Twitvid: http://twitvid.io/
For further information, see the Twitter Guide Book:
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/
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4. Effective Social Media June 2011
4. LinkedIn linkedin.com
A networking site for Professionals.
Company profiles: http://www.sitepoint.com/create-linkedin-company-profile/
• Logo
• Description
• Specialties
• Type
• Year establised
• Industry
• Twitter account
• RSS feed
• Products and Services – including URL and YouTube video
Groups
• Official Rotary International Group
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=858557&trk=anet_ug_hm
• Australian Members of Rotary International
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2101737&trk=anet_ug_hm
5. Flickr flickr.com
Photo sharing application.
• Can be a good source of stock photos (check for Creative Commons licenses)
• Limited options in free version
• Family of Rotary group http://www.flickr.com/groups/familyofrotary/
6. SlideShare slideshare.net
Share presentations, documents and videos.
7. FourSquare foursquare.com
Members “check in” to a location via their mobile phone.
Businesses can offer specials to people who earn badges and points for checking into a
venue.
See more: https://foursquare.com/business/
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5. Effective Social Media June 2011
8. Facebook www.facebook.com
“Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.“
Privacy on Facebook
• Privacy settings do change every few months. New controls normally default to your
data being public.
• Use friend lists to have very fine-grained control over who can see what / who can
interact with you
• Rotarians on Social Networks Fellowship provides updates about privacy on
Facebook
Pages vs Groups
• Both are constantly changing
• Groups are intended for people who know each other / share a common interest to
keep in touch. Groups can be Open, Closed or Secret
• Pages are intended to provide an “official” profile for businesses / organisations /
products / celebrities.
• Which is appropriate depends on what the purpose of your Facebook presence is.
Facebook “Fan” Pages
• Consider the purpose of your page.
◦ Category choice impacts what fields you are offered in the Information tab
• Create a new page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
• What to post:
◦ News / updates – longer updates (blog posts) as “Notes”
◦ Links
◦ Events
◦ Photos
• Other applications
◦ Static HTML / iFrame pages for fixed content – can be member only
◦ “Liking” other Pages
◦ Pushing your page feed out to Twitter
• Moderation and administration
◦ How many admins?
◦ Posting as an individual vs in an official capacity
◦ Fostering discussions
◦ Contacting all fans
◦ Notifications of activity
• Vanity URLs (25 fans required): http://facebook.com/username
Like Buttons http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
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6. Effective Social Media June 2011
9. Blogs
“Web logs” = Online articles
• Require more planning, time and layout than most other social media
• Regular schedule
◦ How often? Daily? Weekly? Fortnightly? Several a day?
◦ How many topics? One? Several?
◦ One author or several?
• Most popular platform is Word Press
◦ wordpress.org to download, find extentions and support
◦ wordpress.com for free hosting (with limited options)
• Can import your RSS feeds into Facebook, LinkedIn etc
10. Bringing it all together
Social Media aggregators
• Tweetdeck: http://www.tweetdeck.com/
Update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare
• Hootsuite: http://hootsuite.com
Update Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress.com and Ping.fm
Google alerts http://www.google.com/alerts
11. Support and further help
• Help pages on each network
• Rotarians on Social Networks Fellowship http://rosnf.net
◦ Training resources on http://www.rosnf.net/projects/training/
◦ Regular updates and articles on http://facebook.com/rosnf
◦ “Experts” volunteer help with specific networks
◦ “Champions” volnteer general help in specific clubs, districts and zones
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