Smoke and mirrors

I revel when someone says at a photo shoot that "Cindy can fix it in photoshop." The most challenging work I've done recently was a composite of the boy's national basketball team. I was taking the photos that day because the photographer I had scheduled was sick. I struggled to get these active teens to focus for one good shot. The first image is the base photograph and the second is the composite I created from multiple images in order to capture everyone at their best. The poster was created by Derick Harris.

My Social Media Wedding (Strategy)

I have two big buckets of skills. One bucket is Design and the other bucket is Writing. Who knew that they would meet and fall in love? Admittedly, my writing has always been a bit of a stalker of my design work. Most editors have been grateful that I cared about the words, too. For event planning, I'm a one-stop shop. My publishing experience taught me to copy fit for space (yeah, like Twitter on steroids). I learned to be a skilled copyeditor and then to write captions and headlines, then reporting and articles. It's a beautiful union to write a story, take the photos, and then design the presentation, either in print or online. Social media gives me this opportunity and challenge multiple times a day.

Social Media is a powerful communications tool. However, it requires engagement. Success is often measured by likes and shares but even more powerful is mentions. A healthy social media program engages and builds relationships with followers. In effect, followers lead you to—and help you build— meaningful content.

Want to build relationships?

• Be authentic. 
• Celebrate, be grateful, and always be positive.
• Reciprocate to followers when they comment.
• Be immediately responsive to questions and direct messages with answers. 
• It takes 24/7 monitoring to make your social media a safe place for comments. 
• Become a trusted resource for clear, accurate information. Consider yourself a reporter and abide by reporting ethics, ie. don't report anything unless it can be confirmed, be nice, and don't take sides.
• Make every post specific to your audience, ie. your Veterans Day message should highlight veterans from your organization, not just be a generic Veterans Day post.
• Brand flyers with your logo so followers can print and share.
• Resist using social media as just a bulletin board. 
• Use video, photographs, gifs.
• Create some infrastructure to support you—key individuals you can rely on to answer texts promptly so that you can reply to a worried parent and a rich pocket of contacts who will keep you in the loop about information your audience needs.
• Shout out and mention organizations and people who support you and especially those you want to support you in the future.

Use technology to your advantage—

1. Set Google alerts for relevant topics.
2. Program your phone to alert you for activity on posts.
3. Use Hootsuite (or similar) to manage multiple platform posts.
4. Use Asana (or similar) to manage your strategy and delegate tasks, if needed. Yes, there's a strategy to it so use that strategy for it's best purpose—Twitter and Facebook posts are not the same. Your audience peaks at 4 pm...post at 3:55 pm. You have the most engagement with photos of adorable children. Your following businesses actually follow you...mention them, thank them, comment on their posts.
5. Review analytics to make sure you are posting content your audience cares about.

Social media takes much more time to do well than we are usually willing to admit. There's still a stigma that equates social media to pics of cute puppies. Get over it. Unlike other communication tools such as direct mail and telephone marketing, social media gives us an opportunity to truly build communities with people and businesses. That means you have to care and be able to put yourself in your audience's shoes... and then dance around in them. The effort increases the results exponentially, as only social media can—greater audience, more event participation, and larger fundraising dollars.

See a screen shot below of my recent Asana social media calendar tasks.