Social Media – The Ready Conference

…if you’re ready to make Social Media a functional part of your organization –

The Ready Conference

While many organizations are focused on the me-too excitement of social media, the Center for Development Communication believes that social media is best used and most effective if it is content driven, strategic in its tactics and focused on reaching target markets that are important to an organization. Our focus starts with a communication strategy, emphasizes defining a message and then looks for ways to integrate the social networks as interactive communication outlets in the media mix of the organization. This conference will also examine issues of social media policy for an organization, success metrics, and being prepared to engage in online reputation management.

Who should attend?

Information and communications officers, programme officers, and technical specialists, will gain the most from attending this course.  This includes those involved with:  (1) writing, editing and developing technical documents for the country programme; (2) Coordination of news releases and media relations; (3) Content Management for web sites; and (4) External communication with beneficiaries, stakeholders, and donors.

Participants will need to bring:

• Laptop or Net Book
• Have determined needs in your communications strategy which might be able to be met by social media
• Delegated authority to create content and use social media on behalf of your agency

Learning objectives –

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

- use concrete social media tools to help implement an existing communication strategy

- identify online influencers in the blogger and twitter spheres for your organization

- target the influencers

- be aware of when your agency is being talked about online

- develop a decision process to engage in reputation management

- measure the success of  social media communication

Day 1: Ready or Not…Social Media Is Here To Stay.

What you’ll learn:

• To tie social media to your communications objectives
• To define your target community
• To define your message
• To build a network within your target community
• To build feedback mechanisms and use external alert mechanisms
• To promote social media through public relations, mass media, and promotions

What you’ll do:

• Arrive with your laptop, a video from your agency and your communications plan
• Select a target community that you want to reach with social media
• Develop a message which will drive all of your content effort
• Identify key words which will enable SEO
• Initiate an integrated social media campaign built upon a blog
• Launch your first blog with social media links
• Create twitter, Facebook and YouTube account profiles
• Build at least one feedback mechanism into your blog which will drive feedback from your target community (i.e. a poll, survey, questions
• Initiate an email to your launch network
• Launch a daily Google alert
• Identify key journalists (relevant to your message) and follow on twitter

Day 2: Your Window on the World: Managing content and feedback

What you learned on Day 1:

• Where are the bumps in the road?
• What was easy?  What was difficult?
• What do you wish you knew and didn’t know before Day 1

What you’ll learn:

• To get around the bumps in the road
• To scan the digital terrain and use social media as your window on the world
• To manage feedback and continue the loop
• To measure results
• To expand the network beyond the launch community
• To involve peers in social media design and analysis
• To integrate social media strategy with web strategy through SEO

What you’ll do:

• Review email responses to your launch network and analyze
• Find evidence of your launch on linked social media sites
• Check your keywords in trendsmap & analyze your alert findings
• Adjust keywords and message based on feedback from blog, email, linked sites and feedback mechanism that you built into your launch blog
• Explore ways to increase viral nature of the blog
• Prepare a recommended follow-up blog
• Present your strategies, program and analysis to your peers and solicit feedback
• Modify your strategies, program and analysis and launch a follow-up blog
• Expand your launch network and notify with an email message
• Respond to all feedback (blog, linked sites, emails) received from your Day 1 launch

Day 3: Managing this new media group especially when there’s a crisis!

What you’ll learn:

• To understand issues of reputation management
• To have a social media policy in place before there’s a crisis
• To monitor your agency’s reputation online
• To make response decisions if your agency’s reputation is potentially at stake based on a systematic process
• To encounter a journalist who has learned something about your agency from social media

What you’ll do:

• Before turning to a crisis, you will monitor the social media efforts of the first two days and be certain that you haven’t created a crisis and provide feedback to your ever expanding community and social media presence where appropriate.
• Participate in a crisis scenario and be interviewed by a journalist who has picked up something about your agency online
• Develop a social media policy for your agency
• Develop or adopt a decision tree for your agency based on personnel, resources and local conditions
• Share your policy and decision tree with your peers
• Develop a list of follow up actions to be implemented upon your return to your mission. Think in terms of personnel and resource implications; budgets; time commitments; daily, weekly and monthly processes that will allow you to participate at the planned level, while still juggling the many other systems and routine activities which continue; and recommendations for integration with other ongoing activities.

For more information contact Walter Gill

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