Wendy Meadley's @SocialWendy Blog

One week ago today at this moment, my social media team was training volunteer to help National Tweetup guests “Get Social for Citizenship” with Nate Garvis- Target, Sean Kershaw-Citizens League. and Mark Ritchie- MN Secretary of State.

What a fun and amazing night it was in Minneapolis, in the Mill City Museum Ruins.  The blend of old and new- of technology, music, and people who gathered to make a difference in America.

So, why wait to blog about it until a week later? Well, I didn’t wait… as you see when you blend social media and an event, you have a recipe for long hours of editing the event content and memories of it’s attendees.  What is challenging about that is  that in this day and age is that everyone is used to internet speed of delivery and let me tell you folks- producing worthy content is not a quick process. 

The good news is my team is dedicated and talented at it, but I will let you be the judge of that as you see their efforts in our post event social media content release over the next couple weeks. We are also using a larger collection of tools than has been traditionally used which will enhance how these are delivered to you, so instead of the historical simple use of just You Tube and blog posts or forums, we have added some current tools taht allow for more sharing as there are hundreds of people involved in this effort.

Here is a spotlight of the newer tools and the ways we are using them to amplify Civic Voices Across America:

Vimeo- www.vimeo.com We are using Vimeo for consistent video delivery and for transferability of our content.  So, more specifically, with hundreds of organizations involved, we have created a reliable serve yourself approach to taking the hours of content we have, breaking it into meaningful message segments and making it available for embedding on websites, blogs, links, tweets, however people want to share our video, it will be delivered in a reliable format at our expense, not theirs, so we maintain quality and the responsibility for the content. This is a must when dealing with large corporate partners on a project.

Slideshare- www.slideshare.net  There are several presentations that were formally shared as part of the National Civic Summit. Of course, we want these to be evangelized beyond the event so that the organizations that invested their time and talents enjoy the long tail that the internet provides.  We are using Slideshare to house them, brand them to our event and deliver them to attendees and anyone else who is interested in civic life in America.  So we take the time to fully name them, tag them, and do our “organic search magic” behind the scenes to get the proliferated into cyberspace.  Again, organizations can embed theSlideshare player into whatever online presence they have, so this is a win for them as well as they do not need to direct them to our site to share their content, yet they get the credit for the presentation being presented at a premier event.  We will of course have links on our sites as well but the focus is on the organizations themselves first, not on our promotion.

Flickr- www.flickr.com While Flickr is not a new tool, I find many people don’t maximize it’s opportunity to create groups and communities.  We have yet to really build our group, but, as David Meerman Scott would point out, you need to have content worthy of people’s interest, so that is our first step.  We hired photographers and videographers to collect visual assets throughout our three day event. 

Of note: There is some strategy as to what to collect so that you have good content to work with, I recommend you go back to the business/marketing/client goals of the event and define from there.  having a shot list to check off from is a good strategy especially for events as you can’t go back, the moment is simply missed if it isn’t capture.

So, you camp out with your assets immediately after the event and you start organizing, labeling and uploading them to your Flickr account.  The key here is to keep in mind how event attendees want to see them, not what you are interested in.  Make clear categories so they can sort through them quickly and view the ones they are interested in.

It is also good to support their posting with an email thanking and linking your guests to the collection- on this project we sent our 800+ VIP RSVP list the Flickr photo collection link and within a day we had over 500 new views of our collection. Who doesn’t want to see photos from the event, right?

Facebook- www.facebook.com Again, not a new tool but, we know from what we saw over the last Presidential election process that the civic community wants to be engaged in defining the future of our country.  We want that too. That is the core of our National Civic Summit mission, so we have created a place that becomes our community hub for the ongoing conversation to support that happening. Our Facebook Community is open to all, yet again we have our master event invitation and participant lists to include, and we assume they want to be included so we invite them to our Facebook community, this  is a natural invitation. We have nearly 600 friend in a weeks period of time who have joined in to continue the conversation of changing America.  It is a good start!

Prior to the event we launched a Social Media Training Microsite to support event attendees learning how to use today’s social tools prior to the event.

CivicTraining- www.civictraining.com is our training microsite where we currently have demystifying introductory videos to the eight key social tactics that I believe are core to creating a World Wide Rave in a planful & organized fashion. We have event presentations, video and real life example links that we will continue to add in the coming weeks to bring to life the model of how to use these new social tools to create meaningful civic engagement within and beyond your organization. The first addition will be of Mark Kurtz, Chief Growth Officer and VP New Media- Gage Marketing- his National Civic Summit presentation on using LinkedIn Groups to support & build your organization. 

More will be coming on our Group building and post event content venues, but for now we want to get step one in place for the National Civic Summit movement.

This is an exciting time in our country and there are people ready to take part, so let’s continue the conversation, link arms and move forward.

You can join in the National Civic Summit in lots of great ways… our conversation can be heard on Twitter

Follow our Tweeters (of course not just one voice )

@civicsummit09

@civicsummit

@askaneesh

@targettwitizen

@nategarvis

@bethcieslik

@citizensleague

@seankershaw

@socialwendy

@thetylerhayes

@lynnhillen

@nationaltweetup

Join in the Conversation

Our Conversation Hashtags

#civicsummit

#askaneesh

#danwilson

(to follow Dan Wilson- he is @DanWilsonMusic )

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Our Civic Participation Portal is being built at www.nationalcivicsummit.com

Come Get Social for Citizenship with the National Civic Summit!

Wendy Meadley

Event & Development Director- National Civic Summit

wendy@nationalcivicsummit.com