Takeaways for Staff

The main takeaway is that there are ways to manage this effort that make sense, but yet don't need to be superformal.

Instead of having one overall objective, create specific objectives and measure how you meet them individually.

Note those who attended. (Some well known guests JD Lasica, DigiDave).

There are Five Basic Steps (tactics) that build on each other:

• Listen
• Participate
• Tell Your Story
• Generate Buzz
• Build Community

You keep adding steps until you are doing all of these things simultaneously, but it's important to start at the beginning (listening).

The listening step is another tool for competitive intelligence in general.

We played a great game designed to help craft a social media strategy that had us consider:

• objective
• audience
• strategy
• tools

There are excellent worksheets available on the wiki for building our own strategy and for duplicating this game so we can play it here with staff and apply it directly to the Resource Center (go to the Materials page and scroll down to Social Media Strategy Simulation Game).

Social Media ROI
People tend to be skeptical about the value of social media. Show value by capturing data as you go along. Although you want to be strategic, don't overplan - you have to engage in order to learn. Great slideshow on this: Listen Learn Adapt.

Segue into discussion of capacity. The more successful we are at this, the more time it will take, but we can still work smart and efficiently.

Two things that got reinforced to me as a direct result of things I learned at the workshop. These are areas where I wish we would have educated CNCS and stood strong on our position:

1. keeping our name - brand recognition - it would be easier to listen now if our name was still nsrc
2. their institutional implementation of twitter is being criticized and they don't know it because they aren't listening. There is still room and time to educate them on this. UPDATE: Jason is handling this - he is doing a great job of teaching CNCS to chart these new waters!

I'm glad I was reminded to use Twitter search as a listening tool because I found this nice example of a fellow Twitterer promoting us (more specifically promoting our YouTube channel) to others.