Facebook Knowedge Share Event: What Went Down

What’s your social media editorial policy? How do you build your Facebook fan base? What is the difference between a Facebook Fan Page and a Group? Have you seen online networking result in off-line organizing?  These are a few of the many questions answered during our Facebook Knowledge share held here at ONE/Northwest central earlier this month.  We hosted about 100 people from all over the environmental and advocacy community—if you made it, we sure enjoyed seeing you face-to-face, in-person.  You look a lot different than your profile picture!  J/K.

Our own Director of Client Strategy Karen Uffelman and Support Manager Sam Knox started the evening out with a little Facebook 101, including an entire slide devoted to the Fan Page vs. Groups question.  (Umm, yeah.  You know you totally want to look at page 2 of this.)  The big take-away from Team Uffleman/Knox?  No matter what the newest medium- smoke signals, homing pigeons, tin cans and string, Morse code, pen and paper, telephone, beeper,  Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter—it always comes back to building strong relationships with your people.

Watch Karen and Sam give an overview of the world of Facebook. 

Next up, People for Puget Sound's Creative Services Director Troy Coleman, and Bonnie Loshbaugh, Communications Intern, shared what's working in their Facebook world. One of many interesting ideas? Make Facebook an avenue for connecting with board members—identify them as page administrators and ask them to post regularly to your organization's page.  

Watch this video and learn more about People for Puget Sound and Facebook.

Lauren Braden, Communications Director for the Washington Trails Association shared their guidelines: WTA posts 4-6 times per week, they always post a link back to the WTA website, they have an editorial calendar for Facebook just like they do for their newsletter and blog, and they do a mixture of 4 “Candy” posts (hiking trip info, cool stories and photos, etc.) to 1 “Caffeine” post (call for action, advocacy information). At WTA, they use Facebook as a part of their larger online communications strategy to provide educational, useful, value-added content that pushes people back to their webpage.

Hear more about a bear-hunting blog post and some heated conversation on the WTA Facebook page here:  

Finally, Toby Crittenden of the Washington Bus shared some insights from the heart of the Facebook world—those 15-29 year-olds who live online. The Bus, who works primarily with this demographic, sees Facebook as an effective tool for getting the word out—they recently filled a local issues forum by telling their “core folks” on Facebook about it, who then told their “core folks,” who then told their “core folks”—which helped pack the forum for the evening.

Find out what Toby thinks about the Terms and Conditions of Facebook.