The final installment of my social media presentation...
"My second example I wanted to share is the Library's online pressroom. I developed this with the help of my Communications Intern, Maggie Kierl. Again, we started by researching online pressrooms, and we used the Library's delicious account to share our research as we went. We found examples of other pressrooms that we liked and we found several great articles on how to build a pressroom. All of those links are still there in our delicious account, so if an online pressroom is something you are interested in, you can go check out our research there.
First we have the media contact information front and center, then we added links to the documents we get the most media requests for: our mission statement, organizational chart, stats, directions, past releases. We included basic information we thought would be useful: hours, personal directory, policies. Under Background, we have items that help our beat reporters generate story ideas: a link back to our current headlines, events calendar, high res photo and logo to download, and links to our current publications. Then you can also choose how you want to receive news from us: you can be a fan of our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, get an RSS feed from our Twitter account or an RSS feed from anything we tag as news in our delicious account.
The real highlight of our online pressroom and the piece that I was really excited to get off the ground is our electronic press kits. Each one is a little different; some are more in depth than others. But we've been trying to do one for all major events (and we leave these posted for about a month post-event) and we have some on our special collections.
If you pop one open and take a look, you'll see we start with contact information and a standard media advisory. Then we have links for more information. We try to present electronically the kind of things you might include in a more traditional press kit. So, there are links to photos, online invitations, online ticket sales, a full press release on the topic, and we try to include in each press kit a purpose-built delicious page, which means that link will take you directly to the Library's delicious bookmarks and open a list of everything we have tagged for this topic.
The great thing about using delicious as opposed to including the list of external links in the press kit is that you can send it out and still continue updating. So I can email an electronic press kit at 5 pm, and then find 3 more great links. I tag those new links in delicious and I've just update a press kit I already sent out. And if you have a really big story or something that is going to play out over time, people can subscribe to an RSS feed of your delicious tag and get an update anytime you bookmark a new page.
Just like our Facebook page, there are several big things I'd really like to add the press room, but I got it to the point that I thought it was a valuable tool for our reporters, and I put it up there. I really think you can't obsess over the idea of being finished, because it's never finished. You have to think of it as a living document that will continue to evolve. You put out something that is quality and worthwhile even if you don't consider it done."
Friday, October 17, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Social Media & Service Delivery: Part 2
If you missed part 1, just scroll down. The Social Media presentation continues...
"We're talking today about using these tools strategically. I think one of the keys to doing this is to go where your audience is. At the Library we have several key audiences; one of our largest constituents is undergraduate students. Any guesses what social network you might find undergrad students using?
Facebook.
I checked this week and there are over 24,000 OSU students on Facebook. That's a lot of students that are already part of a community we can join. Our foray into Facebook began a few years back. My boss and I were at presentation on Millennials. We came back and she told me to go figure out the Facebook thing the kids are using. I logged on, built my profile invited a couple friends and started looking for other people who were talking about the library.
For while, we really just lurked, and that a great way to learn about the culture before you invest too much. I was really excited to see how many people were already talking about the Library and were already building their own groups around a Library-theme. It gave me confidence that this would be a good place to try to connect with people.
We started by placing ads with Facebook. It's a great place to start experimenting with online ads, because they make it very easy. You can customize who see your ads and can choose between pay per click fee structure or a pay per impression fee structure. Facebook will track for you how many impressions and clicks you get each day.
Then Facebook started their business pages. Until that point an organization was not allowed to have a profile. So we started researching how we could make this work. My staff and I looked at every other Library business page out there and took notes on what we liked, what we didn't, how many fans the other libraries had. We used this information to brainstorm ideas of our own and we started putting together a page.
This is a good time to mention how helpful it is to identify existing expertise in your organization. Many of the new tools you're thinking about implementing for your organization are already being used by someone who works with you. It will be worth your while to spend the time to find those people and employ their help. I have a young staff in the communications office. Four people work for me and they are all in their 20s. Facebook is their world, so I really just handed this project over to them and encouraged them to be creative and experiment.
We have all the basic information on the page: hours, contact info. some photos. We post notes: there are couple right now about upcoming hours changes, there are links to our Chat & IM services, create event pages, and occasionally we send out notice to our fans. And we still have so many good ideas we'd like to implement. With social media it's an ongoing time commitment, you have to update and keep things fresh. It's never going to be done, that's something you have to get comfortable with.
For our office and what we do, the one feature that has been the most useful for us is the event pages. Any of the administrators can go in and create an event for the library. The event basically gets its own Facebook profile. You can upload photos, we usually post the invitation or a print ad we've already used, you can link press releases or external sites about the topic or speaker, and there's a wall where guests can talk about the event.
Then you invite people. The response I got from the first event I created for the Library blew me away. It was 3 days before the event when I posted the page and invited 24 friends. By noon the day of the event over 900 invitations had been distributed. Now, I'm not going to try to tell you 900 people showed up, in fact the vast majority declined. We had about 24 yeses and 50 maybes. But it was an amazing example of how quickly and how far our message went by using this network."
Stay tuned for the second case study...
"We're talking today about using these tools strategically. I think one of the keys to doing this is to go where your audience is. At the Library we have several key audiences; one of our largest constituents is undergraduate students. Any guesses what social network you might find undergrad students using?
Facebook.
I checked this week and there are over 24,000 OSU students on Facebook. That's a lot of students that are already part of a community we can join. Our foray into Facebook began a few years back. My boss and I were at presentation on Millennials. We came back and she told me to go figure out the Facebook thing the kids are using. I logged on, built my profile invited a couple friends and started looking for other people who were talking about the library.
For while, we really just lurked, and that a great way to learn about the culture before you invest too much. I was really excited to see how many people were already talking about the Library and were already building their own groups around a Library-theme. It gave me confidence that this would be a good place to try to connect with people.
We started by placing ads with Facebook. It's a great place to start experimenting with online ads, because they make it very easy. You can customize who see your ads and can choose between pay per click fee structure or a pay per impression fee structure. Facebook will track for you how many impressions and clicks you get each day.
Then Facebook started their business pages. Until that point an organization was not allowed to have a profile. So we started researching how we could make this work. My staff and I looked at every other Library business page out there and took notes on what we liked, what we didn't, how many fans the other libraries had. We used this information to brainstorm ideas of our own and we started putting together a page.
This is a good time to mention how helpful it is to identify existing expertise in your organization. Many of the new tools you're thinking about implementing for your organization are already being used by someone who works with you. It will be worth your while to spend the time to find those people and employ their help. I have a young staff in the communications office. Four people work for me and they are all in their 20s. Facebook is their world, so I really just handed this project over to them and encouraged them to be creative and experiment.
We have all the basic information on the page: hours, contact info. some photos. We post notes: there are couple right now about upcoming hours changes, there are links to our Chat & IM services, create event pages, and occasionally we send out notice to our fans. And we still have so many good ideas we'd like to implement. With social media it's an ongoing time commitment, you have to update and keep things fresh. It's never going to be done, that's something you have to get comfortable with.
For our office and what we do, the one feature that has been the most useful for us is the event pages. Any of the administrators can go in and create an event for the library. The event basically gets its own Facebook profile. You can upload photos, we usually post the invitation or a print ad we've already used, you can link press releases or external sites about the topic or speaker, and there's a wall where guests can talk about the event.
Then you invite people. The response I got from the first event I created for the Library blew me away. It was 3 days before the event when I posted the page and invited 24 friends. By noon the day of the event over 900 invitations had been distributed. Now, I'm not going to try to tell you 900 people showed up, in fact the vast majority declined. We had about 24 yeses and 50 maybes. But it was an amazing example of how quickly and how far our message went by using this network."
Stay tuned for the second case study...
Monday, October 13, 2008
Social Media and Service Delivery Part 1
Last month, I was very excited to be invited to serve on a panel for the YWCA Regional Conference in OKC. I was a bit of a last minute emergency fill in, but it was still an honor to be asked.
I can do this, I thought. It was a low-tech crowd with little marketing experience. Our job was to get ideas flowing. They wanted concepts, not technical how-to. With just 2 1/2 days to prep, I frantically scripted my 15-20 minute remarks. Now I have an 18 min talk on Social Media & Service Delivery. What to do with it? Ah-ha I'll put it on my blog.
I had a great co-presenter, Shane Kempton of Phase2 Interactive. He started us off with an overview of social media: what is it, how is it different, how did we get here. Then I gave some examples of how the library is employing social media in our service delivery.
This is what I told them: "In way of introducing myself and telling you a bit about my background, I put together a list of new media tools I use personally. Now, obviously this isn't everything I've ever tinkered with, but this are the ones I tried and liked and stuck with: Twitter, Delicious, Facebook, Oklahoma Social Media Club, LinkedIn, Flickr, MyRagan, AIM, a family Web site, personal blog, and MySpace.
I show you these also because long before I implemented any of these tools to promote the Library, I tried them out for myself. To use these tools strategically, we have to start by doing our research, and that in part means learning about the community you want to join. There are cultural norms within these communities. If you want to be effective, you need to understand what's appropriate there. My personal accounts often started as research for work projects.
When I was preparing this talk, I started by making a list of all the new media tools we use at the Library. I was actually kind of surprised at how many things kept occurring to me. If you sit down and think about it, you are probably already using some new media at work. So you might try thinking about ways to expand or improve what you are already doing.
I took what we do, and broke these up into internal and external tools. Internally, we publish a twice-a-week email newsletter for employees, we use personal text and IM accounts to facilitate our work flow, we use delicious to share research on joint projects, We have an intranet and our Reference Librarians have built a wiki to share information and build a collection of commonly asked reference questions.
But what are we doing externally to communicate with our audiences about Library services? We have a Facebook presence, and I'll talk in more detail about that in just a second; our librarians answer questions via chat and instant messenger; the communications office uses blogs. And I want to mention here that to utilize blogs, you don't necessarily have to have an organization blog. We have one department in our library that has an "official" blog, but we also
have several employees who blog and they will occasionally blog about our services. We've also had some luck pitching stories to external bloggers.
We use Google Alerts to monitor external conversations, the Library twitters, I mentioned that we use delicious internally, but we also use delicious externally in our electronic press kits, we send a monthly email newsletter to the University Faculty, and we are starting to develop video tutorials. Not all of these I would consider successes. And in Q/A I'd be happy to talk about what didn't work well and why I think that is, but now I'd like to focus on a couple success stories..."
Actually, this blog entry is just a teaser. I went over two examples-our Facebook presence and our online newsroom. I'll blog those in Part 2 and 3.
I can do this, I thought. It was a low-tech crowd with little marketing experience. Our job was to get ideas flowing. They wanted concepts, not technical how-to. With just 2 1/2 days to prep, I frantically scripted my 15-20 minute remarks. Now I have an 18 min talk on Social Media & Service Delivery. What to do with it? Ah-ha I'll put it on my blog.
I had a great co-presenter, Shane Kempton of Phase2 Interactive. He started us off with an overview of social media: what is it, how is it different, how did we get here. Then I gave some examples of how the library is employing social media in our service delivery.
This is what I told them: "In way of introducing myself and telling you a bit about my background, I put together a list of new media tools I use personally. Now, obviously this isn't everything I've ever tinkered with, but this are the ones I tried and liked and stuck with: Twitter, Delicious, Facebook, Oklahoma Social Media Club, LinkedIn, Flickr, MyRagan, AIM, a family Web site, personal blog, and MySpace.
I show you these also because long before I implemented any of these tools to promote the Library, I tried them out for myself. To use these tools strategically, we have to start by doing our research, and that in part means learning about the community you want to join. There are cultural norms within these communities. If you want to be effective, you need to understand what's appropriate there. My personal accounts often started as research for work projects.
When I was preparing this talk, I started by making a list of all the new media tools we use at the Library. I was actually kind of surprised at how many things kept occurring to me. If you sit down and think about it, you are probably already using some new media at work. So you might try thinking about ways to expand or improve what you are already doing.
I took what we do, and broke these up into internal and external tools. Internally, we publish a twice-a-week email newsletter for employees, we use personal text and IM accounts to facilitate our work flow, we use delicious to share research on joint projects, We have an intranet and our Reference Librarians have built a wiki to share information and build a collection of commonly asked reference questions.
But what are we doing externally to communicate with our audiences about Library services? We have a Facebook presence, and I'll talk in more detail about that in just a second; our librarians answer questions via chat and instant messenger; the communications office uses blogs. And I want to mention here that to utilize blogs, you don't necessarily have to have an organization blog. We have one department in our library that has an "official" blog, but we also
have several employees who blog and they will occasionally blog about our services. We've also had some luck pitching stories to external bloggers.
We use Google Alerts to monitor external conversations, the Library twitters, I mentioned that we use delicious internally, but we also use delicious externally in our electronic press kits, we send a monthly email newsletter to the University Faculty, and we are starting to develop video tutorials. Not all of these I would consider successes. And in Q/A I'd be happy to talk about what didn't work well and why I think that is, but now I'd like to focus on a couple success stories..."
Actually, this blog entry is just a teaser. I went over two examples-our Facebook presence and our online newsroom. I'll blog those in Part 2 and 3.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
A Blog Breakup with Yahoo
Basically, I given up. I have been defeated by the craptacular piece of junk blog-thingie that came along with our Geocities site. I think Yahoo has given up on it too. They don't even seem to be supporting it at this point.
So if you found me from JohnandBonnie.us and are looking for those fascinating few entries from the original J&BLog, they are supposedly archived at 360.yahoo.com/woody_74075. If you are looking for John's blog, it's on his MySpace page.
Drumroll, here it is: There's Only Ever One Bonnie.
Enjoy
So if you found me from JohnandBonnie.us and are looking for those fascinating few entries from the original J&BLog, they are supposedly archived at 360.yahoo.com/woody_74075. If you are looking for John's blog, it's on his MySpace page.
Drumroll, here it is: There's Only Ever One Bonnie.
Enjoy
Friday, August 8, 2008
All A-Twitter
I'm a twitter-pusher. If you talk with me personally on a regular basis you already know this. In the last few days I've started to push my Twitter goodies on young unsuspectings. I decided it'd be easier to do in mass.
So here's the why: Mostly I'm talking to young PR/communicators or young soon-to-be PR/communicators. Social media is the "it" thing in our industry, right? It goes without saying (except that I just did say it). Everyone is looking for a new hire that can help with "social media efforts." So how are you going to convince anyone that you are in-the-know if you are not already part of the conversation when you walk in the door.
Sure, you can Facebook and MySpace. You can blog, YouTube, and Flickr (you can do all this, right?!). People complain about social media taking over our lives for a reason: it's never-ending. Prepare to meet your newest obsession.
The How: go to twitter.com, create an account. Simple, right? Now don't sit in Twitter all alone and go "this sucks." You have to follow people and be followed. It's simple, just play for a few minutes and you can figure out the basics.
Still want me to draw you a picture? Someone else already did: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter.
Ok, so who should you follow? Well, for starters, me, of course! Just type FOLLOW BonnieAnn or go to www.twitter.com/BonnieAnn and click the follow button.
Who else? Here are some PR/communicators I follow. Following people in your industry is great. Twitter becomes a professional community where you can get feedback 24/7.
@samsims @kamichat @eschipul @lindsaylaird @dpkpr @publicityhound @jenniferds1127 @knhalvorsonapr @holleym @vtrammell @muddypebbles @cluster_funk @ncoggins @okprdustin @daniwalker76 (these are just a few mind you!)
Just fun: @okstatelibrary @okc @cnn @twitter @thebloggess @pickensplan
And folks I love: @sarahelaine @vbaeza @andrea862
You might be surprised who tweets. Maybe your congressman? http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Members_of_Congress_who_Twitter
Don't stop there. These folks will lead you to other folks. If someone interests you, teaches you, or entertains you, follow them.Alas the madness won't stop here. If you want to establish and maintain a reputation as an innovator or even an early adopter you'll have stay on top what's new, and that seems to be changing daily.
I'm not saying you have to like it all (I hate RSS!! Just for example). I'm not even saying you have to use it—for long. But you have to understand it enough to explain why it is or isn't appropriate for a project, client, etc. and when if ever it would be.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Skydiving: Bonnie's Story
I feel like every morning for the rest of my life I'm going to wake up and think, "I jumped out of an airplane."
This feeling will surely pass in a week or so, but our sky diving adventure will definitely remain as one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had. Stepping out onto the wing of plane, clinging to the strut with your feet dangling 4000 feet above the ground and then just letting go is not the kind of thing you have any context to understand. My brain does not know what to do with these sensations.
I thought I'd be scared. I actually wondered if I might chicken out. As it got closer and closer to go time, I couldn't believe I was actually doing this. This is crazy; normal people do not jump out of planes. They only do this in movies, right?
Surprisingly, it really wasn't scary. In fact, watching John jump was 10 times scarier than doing it myself. As the plane rose into the air, I ran through the protocols in my head. I kept waiting for the terror to come, but it never did. We'd drilled and drilled all day, I found that I really did feel ready. I knew what expect, I knew what I needed to do, and remarkably I had complete trust in my instructor (who would be pulling my shute for me).
As prepared as I felt when Waz asked "Are you ready to skydive?" I was, not in fact, prepared when he opened the door and shouted "Feet out and stop!!"
Waz told us it was windy. He did not stress that it is, in fact, so incredibly windy that a 140 pound woman will need her instructor to hold her down lest she blow away. When I tried to place my second foot on the step, I couldn't put it down. The wind was that strong. Waz grabbed my leg and pressed it to the step. I leaned close to the strut and grabbed hold as I'd practiced.
If it hadn't been for Waz's firm grip on my pack, I'm sure I'd have been straight out, flying alongside the plane like superman. Waz let go and my feet flew off the step. I hung from the strut for moment, enjoying the ride. I thought one last time about my body position and let go. That was when things really deviated from the plan.
I thought I was arching, I really did. But the wind hit me and I started to tumble through the air. I did a complete backflip before my shute opened. I was convinced my lines would be tangled, and I stared for a few seconds in disbelief trying to locate the line twist that was sure to be there. It was good.
I started navigating my shute, spinning 360's and generally enjoying the ride to the ground. It seems like you're barely moving. That is until you're about 20 feet from the ground, then you realize you're actually coming in at a pretty good clip. I was ready to put on the brakes, though, and my landing was perfect. I was so excited by the perfect landing that I forgot to collapse my shute and it promptly knocked me to the ground, but that part was fun, too.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Taking the Plunge
John's birthday is coming up and after much prodding, he has decided on a birthday present. We're going skydiving!
On July 27, we take the plunge. We'll both be doing our very first solo dive after 4 short hours of training. If you happen to be in the Cushing area midday that Sunday. Look skyward. You may just see two redheads plummeting towards Earth.
On July 27, we take the plunge. We'll both be doing our very first solo dive after 4 short hours of training. If you happen to be in the Cushing area midday that Sunday. Look skyward. You may just see two redheads plummeting towards Earth.
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