I had a great time yesterday in the most remarkable setting: The Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College in El Cajon, CA (20 minutes east of San Diego). Spring was in full bloom in this whimsical botanical retreat. You can see a Flickr slide show below
I was working with the marketing and development team to help them create their online social media effort, which to-date amounts to about 62 fans on Facebook. We spent several hours outlining their goals, audiences, story opportunities, and discussing the various online channels available to tell their story. Although we were making progress, I felt that I wasn’t doing an adequate job of explaining the online social media world. Their furrowed brows and confusion in their eyes told me another story. So I moseyed over to their large post-it note and put my extraordinarily clumsy illustration skills to work.
Once I inked out the garden’s potential online social media universe, their world became much rosier.
Your Blog is the Center of Your Social Media Solar System
The Garden doesn’t have a blog and they need one. They don’t have the time and money to redesign their whole website, they just need a plug-n-play wordpress blog to get them into circulation. They have lots of great information to share about gardening and events, and a regular blog is the ideal way to share it. So I drew a circle and plopped in their blog.
Then at the top of the page I drew this little megaphone and labeled it Twitter. I told them to think of Twitter as an easy way to broadcast that a new blog has been posted. They also have this great list of plants called the “Nifty 50.” Using a Twitter scheduler like ObjectiveMarketer.com is perfect for pre-posting 50 different Tweets, each focusing on one of their Nifty 50 plants. This is an easy and non-time-consuming way to remain active on Twitter. ObjectiveMarketer.com also provides you with analytics to see what tweets are effective and when.
To the right I drew an oval with LinkedIn inside and a neck tie, and to the left I drew a rectangle with Facebook inside and a martini on top. To me, LinkedIn and Facebook are kind of like a Mullet: Business in front and party in back. Both sites serve their purposes for The Garden, and each will automatically post their blogs and tweets, which makes it easy to syndicate their own articles within their own universe. We also discussed different ways to leverage each platform when attracting and conversing with their customers.
At the bottom of the circle I sketch the more utilitarian social media sites, including a film camera for YouTube for hosting video content, a picture camera for Flickr for serving up photo content, and a projector screen for SlideShare to host their numerous powerpoint training presentations. From these sites I demonstrated how you embed your video/photo/slide content into your blog and share it with your world. Each of these sites offer ways to increase your SEO and online findability with the strategic and liberal use of keywords in descriptions and tags.
In hindsight I should’ve drawn a big sunflower with the blog in the center and the various social media sites as its leafs. But I suppose you get the picture. At least they did, and now I can’t wait for them to launch their social media solar system.
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