16th
Facebook Tips (From Kerri via Cory)
I had a great lunch with Kerri Qunell, VP of communications for the Capital Area Food Bank, and she had some really good thoughts about how to mix the personal with the professional using these media. (All of this assumes that if you’re mixing your personal and MSB online worlds, be sure to be responsible about how you treat them. Once you start talking about MSB stuff in your online world, you become a voice of the school.)
• When you post something to your MSB fan page (or when it shows up via RSS), repost it to your personal page immediately. There’s a “Share” button that facilitates this.
• Monitor tweets by other folks in your org and retweet responsibly. IE, paraphrase and add an opinion or ask for feedback so that everyone from the org isn’t merely a clone of each other.
• She emphasized, across media, “show a personality. That’s how you engage people and how people trust you.”
• Give one person Twitter authority as the “Main Tweeter” so that people don’t get spammed with the same original post from all sides.
• She said she uses Tw for media stewardship, publicly thanking reporters for their coverage (and presumably linking to the stories for more exposure).
• When you tweet about a new blog post, use a compelling teaser, not just “see our new blog post: URL”.
• Use budurl to shrink URLs because they’re TRACKABLE. She said they’ve been able to see how many blog hits they get via Twitter…many many.
• Every couple of weeks she posts some bit of CAFB news to her personal FB news feed and asks, “Are you a fan yet?” to remind people to check out the CAFB fan page.
I asked her about tweeting from events. She said:
• Designate 1 tweeter. Make sure it’s impactful and include an opinion or ask for feedback.
• Tweet every 30 minutes (not more) because it might feel like an avalanche to your followers. (I’m sure there are various opinions about this.)
• Use a hashtag (e.g., #alumniconf) so people can follow just the event (and might feel more compelled to tolerate your avalanche of tweets if it’s clear it’s about a particular topic).
Re: connecting the outlets (blog, FB, Tw):
• Post first to the blog…it’s the main content bucket, where all the content lives.
• Make sure it RSSes to FB, so you’re killing 2 birds with one post.
• Then tweet. And RT.
Many of you are probably aware of and employing many of these tips. In fact, I’ve heard Tracy and Jason talk about many of the same things. But (now that I’m finally tweeting) it was very eye-opening for me. She also suggested following Lisa Goddard (lisa_goddard), whom Kerri described as a star FB and Tw user. Lisa is the CAFB’s director of online marketing.
Just a bit of perspective from someone who’s had great success connecting with the media and the public using these media.
