Towson University’s Outreach Blog

Sharyn

Last week I had the opportunity to return to one of my alma maters, University of Baltimore, to attend an event hosted by the Public Relations Society of America’s Maryland chapter. “10 Questions to Ask When Developing a Social Media Strategy” presented by Sean Carton of idfive was exactly the new information I was looking for. I’m eager to keep learning more and more about social media and how it can be used in a business capacity. What I liked about Sean’s presentation was that he spent a little time on the basics of social media and then he posed questions that really made me think and evaluate the strategy that we have in place for DECO. I was smiling and even laughing out loud throughout the presentation because Sean was able to share his 10 tips in a humorous, yet informative manner. Below I’ve highlighted a few of the questions he posed.

from fresherthan.com

Why chose social media?

Don’t think jumping on the bandwagon is a good enough answer. Just because everyone under 25 is doing it, make sure your organization is doing it for the right reason. You have to know your audience, or have a desire to build stronger relationships with that audience. Maybe you’re an organization that attracts a certain niche or you do something better than your competitors. We found that within our organization that offers services like economic analysis, it solutions, GIS consulting, business incubation, small business development and education, that we have a story to tell and we wanted to make sure the region was hearing about it.

Are you ready to give up control?

This is something that can be tricky. You can’t control what people say about your organization. And today, it’s easier and easier for people to say what they want in forums, twitter, blogs, and really anywhere. So don’t be scared of that, join the conversation. The whole point of social media is that it should be a two-way conversation. As Sean pointed out during his presentation, the truth can hurt, but it may be worth hearing.

How do you plan to get users to visit?

You can build it, but will they come? How will you spread the word? We’ve found that the content we create on our blog can help generate tidbits for our quarterly newsletter and twitter account. We’re asking university and business partners to help promote our blog and we’re sending relevant blog posts to clients hoping they will be enlightened or even share the information with other colleagues. Since the blog’s launch we have received more and more comments and also had our articles picked up internally at TU. You could say our approach is a little more on the grass roots side right now.

Who’s responsible for maintenance?

This is the tricky, but critical part of an organization’s social media strategy. At DECO we didn’t want to jump in head first and just hope the blog would work. We spent an entire summer talking with our team in DECO to find out who was interested in working with the blog, impressions of social media, and developing policies. We reviewed other blogs for what we liked and didn’t like, and then started building the framework. Since the launch, we formed a user group and meet monthly to talk about our posting schedule. This helps to keep all the contributors in the loop of the expectations. Editing and posting the articles then becomes a pretty easy task. It’s a good idea to make the maintenance part of someone’s job responsibilities so that it gets done. It’s also important to establish criteria of your social media, allow autonomy to your staff who oversees the social media and integrate it with all the forms of communication you are currently using.

Hearing this presentation gave me a few things to think about and I have a better idea of how to evaluate our social media strategy and make our presence stronger.

Click here to view the presentation