Garen Distelhorst is the Special Initiatives Director at the Marble Institute and in just 30 minutes a day is making a serious impact by using social media.
The screen capture above is an example of their Facebook Fan page. They promote their social media with links on the company’s website.
The organization uses social media to supplement their email blasts, direct mailings and faxes to their members.
This is how their social media program works:
- Garen set up 4 accounts: Facebook fan page, Twitter company account, Linkedin group, and a YouTube Channel.
- Each account features the Marble Institute’s logo. Each links back to the website. Each account has a mini profile about the Marble Institute.
- The Facebook fan page is linked from his personal Facebook profile page, but his personal page privacy settings are set to “private for friends only”, so business associates don’t inadvertently have access to his friends’ random comments on his wall or photos.
- The Marble Institute’s fan page is “public”, meaning the privacy settings are set so that anyone can see it. Side note: Garen also has a kids baseball team that he coaches and he made a point to say that he set that fan page site to “private” so that he approves any of the fans before they can view a page or photos.
- The 19 YouTube videos they have posted are a combination of professionally created ads and “homemade slide show” with audio and in some cases, video via a Flip Camera feed. They use the Windows Movie Maker software pre installed in every PC to edit the show before posting to YouTube.
- Everyone in the Marble Institute’s organization helps to brainstorm new ideas of content that should be shared, tweeted and updated.
- They tell Garen their ideas.
- One person, Garen, is the one person responsiblity to post the ideas.
His job responsiblity expands beyond the e-communications and web initiatives. He’s also responsible for the magazine that the organization publishes. This gives him first hand access to alot of other content as well.
In the six months that he’s been implementing the social media program, it’s really beginning to pay off.
It’s fast.He’s figured out some social media posting shortcuts on how to hold to his 30 minutes a day promise. One is to tweet using the #fb hashtag from the Marble Institute Twitter account. The tweet automatically does a status update to the association’s Facebook fan page account. The tweets post onto the Facebook Fan page with the use of the “Selective Twitter” application (search for it from Facebook’s search box.) He just includes 3 characters:#fb hashtag to the tweet to send to Facebook.
If he wants to elaborate on the Facebook Fan page, he can. Facebook’s status updates allow for much longer posts than the 140 character limit on Twitter and also allow video, photos etc. Plus then the fans can comment on the status update and it’s much easier to follow the conversation than on Twitter because its all in one place.
Then he takes the same tweet/status update and posts it as a discussion in the Marble Institute’s LinkedIn Group discussion’s page. This will automatically send an email to all the group members on the schedule that the group member’s preselected when they signed up for the group (as it happens, once a day, once a week.)
Pretty slick, eh? I was skeptical that he kept to his 30 minute limit, but this makes sense.
Besides effeciently helping to build awareness and keep the organization top of mind, social media is helping the association in other ways too:
- Social media is helping them to cut time out of their marketing schedule. This helps them be more flexible with their planning and execution.
- A recent status updates on LinkedIn group page has helped the organization to get renewals earlier and develop two way conversations faster.
- A recent education program with new CEUs they posted received 2 inquiries within an hour of the status update.
- This past week they got a new member inquiry.
By tweeting and updating to the 3 social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) with a link to their YouTube hosted videos, they are able to publish content within 30 minutes that before required hours, days and weeks of distribution.
One thing that Garen stressed. The goal is awareness and education. It helps to build their brand as the go to organization for all things related to the natural stone industry. They use social media as a tool for marketing and education. They are not pretending that the goal of social media is to increase sales. But guess what? Turns out… marketing and education do lead to new sales. Who knew!?!
Garen made this presentation at the Greater Cleveland Society of Association Executives at the Holiday Inn on Rockside. Thanks Garen for a very informative session!!
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We’ve had members who lost their teaching licenses because of material that appeared on a social media site. So for years, we at NEOEA have been hosting legal updates at which our attorneys scare the bejeebers out of our members about the risks of social media.
For our members, the risks go beyond the need to exercise normal prudence. Under the law, licensed teachers are held to a higher standard of morality than the general public; so even a youthful indiscretion, particularly improper language or pictures, can be the subject of a hearing with ODE’s Office of Professional Conduct, and those hearings don’t usually go well.
So it’s hard to use Facebook as an organization when our attorneys are telling our members to stay away.
Still, we’re seeing some evidence that our state and national organizations are realizing that if all we tell members is to “just say no,” we’ll have about the same effectiveness as other kinds of abstinence-only programs. We’re watching closely to see what sort of guidance we’ll be getting in the near future.