By now it's been drilled into all of our brains that social media is the foundations of a successful organisation, and a particularly effective tool for institutions or organisations in the not-for-profit sector. Across my degree in PR, I have learnt about the restrictions that the not-for-profit industry faces regarding financial resources, and now I am seeing this first hand. Just recently, Colosoul is implementing a strong focus on social media to create a stronger brand image of Colosoul and all the departments under Colosoul. Each publication or brand under the Colosoul Group will be getting a PR person to manage this, which I think is a very successful move for a not-for-profit, youth group. Because we all know how important and effective social media is, and are quite good at using it, being Gen Y, this blog will be about my role at Colosoul over the last week or so.
My task is to create a consistent social media presence for the brand under Colosoul, called Bird On A Wire. BOW was created by Tricia with the aim to bring awareness about the illegal sex trafficking of women all over the world, in a somewhat interesting and quirky way. From this brand comes artwork, songs, poetry and events to raise money for other organisations that support awareness of illegal sex trafficking. I literally got shovelled all the information about this brand on my very first day of prac, and told I was to be in charge of the whole social media plan and maintenance of it.
It was easy to pick up straight away that there was not a lot of consistency across the different platforms that BOW already existed on, and this was definitely a weakness. Nor were there very recent updates (the latest blog post was 6 months old!). Tricia also mentioned to me that she was thinking of changing her blog format to something more up-to-date and easy to maintain. It was currently using the Blogger format (which we use here!). I did my research and found that Tumblr. offers a very 'user-friendly' way to blog, and found many advantages in using this format. For example; utilising tags to connect with the stakeholders interested in the same areas, more suited to the younger target audience, the ability to reblog or be reblogged etc. I have never used Tumblr before, so I did my research on it to become familiar with how it works. I moved everything from the old blog page it's 'new home' on Tumblr which was an excruciating task as there were 76 blog posts to move, some which included more than one image as well as the text! Although this is complete, my job will never be finished. I will need to continually update and check everything that is going on across all platforms, to keep the social media presence for BOW relevant and appealing.
Check out the blog if you have a spare minute!
That's all for now,
Holly
2 comments:
Hi Holly,
I too have been tasked with the job of creating a social media presence for my organization. After being told time and time again in class how important social media is, it is interesting to see how little attention it is given or quickly forgotten it can be by some people (the last blog post I read from my organization was months old also)
I am finding that the challenge with social media is not the using of it understanding platforms - you yourself have attested to coming to grips with Tumblr quite quickly, but rather getting stakeholders interested and involved.
Finding a way to give the stakeholders the information they want in a format they want is always a key objective - great to see you are deciding what the best avenues are to use to engage your audience
Hi Holly
I totally agree that we learn of the importance of social media in the non-for-profit sector. I too am experiencing this in my internship. I have been developing a social media presence for my organisation and am facing some challenges. I have found that it is difficult to attract people to your organisations social media sites. It's easy to post to followers and fans but attracting new ones can be a challenge. This is similar to what Blair is saying in the above comment.
I too am finding myself learning about alternate social media sites to Facebook and Twitter. I haven't looked into Tumblr but I did look into Pinterest and as part of creating a presence on Pinterest for the organisation I had to pin 22 personal stories which was also time consuming. However I am sure you would agree that it is so worth it in the end
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