Brainstorming Social Media Conversations

PART 1: Your Social Media Goals:

What goal(s) are you addressing through the use of social media?

What could be different in the way your organization is communicating/using social media?

What are you hearing from staff, clients, customers, patients, funders, community members, colleagues, etc related to your social media efforts? What would you like to hear?

Looking ahead…

How do you know you are being successful in your efforts?

Who is working on your social media plan?

What does your leadership team in the organization now say about the use of social media?

What does success look like? What are the impacts in the organization that you feel are a result of your social media efforts?

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PART 2: Building on Your Social Media Goals - Look around your organization and ask your colleague the following questions:

Partner name & organization:

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Using the communications goal you determined, think about how to describe it as a specific goal you can begin working on now.

In order to meet this goal, Who will you try to reach? What audiences (Consumers? Patients? Politicians? Co-workers?) Where are they? Where do they gather – on-line and off-line?

What do you need these audiences to do? How can you measure whether or not you were successful in getting them to do it?

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What are your internal & external realities? Capacity? Competition?What communications tools – social media or otherwise – are you already using?

What are the kinds of messages that resonate with these audiences? What are THEIR realities? What do you hear from staff, clients, customers, your boss, your funders, etc?

Who are the best people to deliver those messages? Leadership? Staff? Community members?

What kinds of many-directional communication are you interested in developing using social media?

Take each of these and work on your goal to incorporate them.

PART 3: Making it a reality: Go back with your partner and ask each other the following questions on developing a social media strategy to make your vision a reality.

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Now look back at your goal; How can you make it Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic & Timebound?

Decide with your partner how you want to do it, take 10 minutes per individual. Write down their answers and then share and discuss, or take turns talking it out (external processor, and then do individual time)

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Who needs to be involved in figuring out how to move forward with this plan? Who will be involved in making decisions about the plan?

If you were to start somewhere, what would you suggest? 5 things you would start with? How might you experiment?

Who could you get to do the work with you?Internal resources, external consultants?

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Who needs to be convinced to let you (and others) spend my time working on this? How could you go about convincing them?

How will we know we are on the right track, and how to make course corrections? What can you measure?

What would work for you, given your work style? What motivates you to succeed? What motivates your organization to change?

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What social media tool do you feel MOST comfortable with? Is this the best tool to move forward