How to Train Staff to Support Social Media Efforts

Unknown Speaker 16:45
How's everybody doing? Today we're going to talk to you about how to support how to train staff to support your social media efforts. So you can't have digital without social media. It's how people communicate today, with over 4 billion active users. 53% of the global population uses social media as well as 70% of the US population. So like it or not, your audiences are on social media and they're often receptive to the types of communication that you send out. So it's important to at least educate your staff and hopefully leverage them to use social media best practices and help to support your social media efforts to bring more visibility to their projects and the institution overall. So Emily's gonna give you a little bit of background or know I'm going to give you some goals first. Whether your internal as a museum, social media manager, staff member of another department or consultant. This session is meant to help you understand how to support your institutions or clients social media efforts. So we're going to walk you through a project that Emily and I recently completed, or I guess Emily's continuing on the next steps internally at the New York Historical Society. But in this session, we're gonna go over what we did to educate the staff at New York Historical Society. That included developing a strategy for educating and empowering those staff members, surveying staff for their fluency and interest in social media, exploring social media best practices and identifying opportunities for them to contribute and identifying opportunities for the institution to share on social media. And then how to help staff make helpful contributions to museum social media efforts.

Unknown Speaker 18:56
So

Unknown Speaker 18:59
hi, everyone, I'm Emily Haight. I'm the Social Media Manager at New York Historical Society. And I started at the museum back in 2019. And I think later that year, we applied for an IMLS grant for part of the kind of museums and powered grant all about expanding staff capacity, and knowledge. So our thought process was, we have a pretty big organization. There's like over 300 people in our organization and since I'm managing social media, I can tell pretty quickly who is following us or commenting or engaging with our channels. And I wanted to encourage more staff to get involved and also to know that we have social media and that we are on those platforms. New York Historical Society is the oldest museum in New York. And I wanted to make sure that we were at least making efforts to be part of the 21st century. So one of the things we decided to do was to hire a consultant, Lucy as someone who has previously worked inside cultural organizations and understands the challenges and sometimes the barriers that we have to face when we are explaining what social media is to other staff or what works best or, you know, when I say no, it's not because I'm trying to be difficult. I'm, I'm saying no, because it's not going to be effective, whatever it is that we're talking about. But I also wanted to kind of help democratize it. I'm the only social media manager I don't have my own staff. I do have support of my wider department and the institution overall, and I just really wanted to capitalize on some of that part of the project. Also involved having guest lectures, other social media managers are people who've previously managed social media at museums and cultural organizations. In part because I think, even though I'm New York, historicals read resident social media expert. I know that people really enjoy hearing from people outside of the organization, and it's just it's one thing for me to say it and it's another thing for someone else to say it and confirm the things I've already been saying. So we invited guest lectures for different workshops that we held for staff on different topics and yeah, I think that's most of it is just overall we kind of wanted to address the disconnects. The first phase of the project involved surveying staff to kind of figure out where they are so that I could meet them where they are. I also involved a lot of work. We hadn't had a formalized, written social media strategy anywhere. And I think that made it really difficult also, when explaining to other staff certain concepts and principles, because there needed to be some transparency with having it formalized. And so that was a big part of what I was doing digging into our analytics talking to other social media managers on the ways that they kind of approach this. So I definitely tapped into our social media manager brain trust across all of these organizations. And I also wanted to talk through some best practices. And then from there, I also created a senior staff group of senior staff were usually making the decisions on a lot of these bigger projects, and I wanted them to be thinking about social media even when I wasn't in the room or in the meeting, and a social media working group of non director level staff members who are often the people on the ground creating content and forming some pipelines into those departments so that we can like expand on all the things that everyone's doing, because I don't know what's going on all the time.

Unknown Speaker 22:41
So the first phase involved, I mean, New York Historical Society, like I said, we are the oldest institution in New York. And I think sometimes even now, even though we've been talking about this for a while, social media still kind of treated like either a magic wand or dismissed as a shiny new thing, when in reality, it's neither. So I really wanted to see what people in our institution thought of social media, as well as if they're on it themselves, if they're interested in it. I wasn't trying to force people to use social media if they're not already inclined. That's not my goal. It's more to tap into people who, who do use it and want to be more involved. Because that way, it's not like I'm asking too much of them either. So I created a staff survey and I will drop in the links here. I had one that went to all staff. And I should say that we got probably less than half of the people responding, which was still pretty good because at this point we were well into the pandemic, and things were crazy. So the fact that 131 People responded to my survey was a pretty good sample size for me to use. Based off of their responses. I whittled that down to a smaller group of people. And I sent them a second survey that was more involved like you know what are some hidden gems in the collection that you wish we featured on social? You know, if you had your dream partnership, like, Would it be New York Historical Society and Fashion Week New York Historical Society and Ken Burns? Like what would that be just to get a sense of where people's interests were? And you know, kind of have some pie in the sky ideals. So that was the second survey and from the second survey, I was able to kind of identify who I wanted as point people in these different content creating departments. And I just dropped the both the links to them in the chat so you guys can kind of look through it. And if it's helpful, feel free to adapt and adopt that for your own institutions if you're trying to get a good sense of where people are because it's one thing to assume and it's another to actually have their written responses. They're available to you.

Unknown Speaker 24:56
So just really quickly, I was actually pretty surprised at how MANY people responded saying that they do use a lot of these social media platforms. Some people wrote in their own options like that they forward our emails and that's social media. Sounds like oh, okay, not really, but I was impressed to see that a lot of them are on Facebook and Instagram, some on Twitter, MANY on YouTube and Pinterest. And this was all information I didn't have before. And some other surprises is that I kind of thought attitudes would be a little more negative. When it came to social media. Again, maybe because this was during the pandemic and I think social media slash the internet was highlighted a lot more within our institution that this actually really helped. People said that they you know, half of the people said that they actually share what New York Historical Society posts on their own channels. A lot of people said that they've been proud of their work at the museum and wanted to share it on their own channels. And some people said that they would love to be involved in more digital storytelling initiatives. And over half, were like, maybe you know, it depends on how much time is required of me to do this. But overall, I was really pleased and surprised with how positive the reactions were to what we currently post and to staff attitudes.

Unknown Speaker 26:21
So after Emily surveyed the staff and selected members of the senior staff and working group groups, we formulated five workshops each given to both of the groups in separate Zoom meetings. So the first was intro to New York history and we're going to go through more detail on each one. In subsequent slides, but I'm just gonna list them out right here. So introduction to New York Historical Society, social media efforts. The next one was amplification, digital storytelling and campaigns, strategic partnerships, and tying it all together. And Emily and I work together to figure out the topics for each of these five workshops with the goal of educating the staff on best practices and also finding ways for them to contribute and support Emily's efforts in the social media. Manager role. So the first was the introduction to New York history. And these are some of the topics we covered. I'm not going to read them all out loud, but on this introductory workshop we talked about specifically New York Historical Society's presence on the various platforms and their audiences, how they determine quality content, how to optimize content, and part of this was also demonstrating the amount of planning strategy and effort that goes into the Social Media Manager role. Not just, you know, a single Instagram post, you know, that takes five minutes, not necessarily right. And especially when you multiply that by the volume that we're working with, as social media managers for New York Historical Society that includes 42 to 60 posts. per week. So that amount of content really requires a lot of foresight and a lot of, you know, structure for this workflow to get that content produced, published, managed, all the comments that come along with each post, etc. So, really trying to hammer home the point that this isn't just, you know, some job for an intern or Emily's not a junior staff member. She's an integral part of the communication strategy for the institution. So just a couple more examples from that introductory workshop Emily you can go ahead and voice over these.

Unknown Speaker 28:50
Yeah, of course. So I think it was actually really helpful for staff to understand what it kind of looks like behind the scenes in the organized chaos that is all of my platform. So we use Sprout Social as our scheduling platform. And I also wanted to explain a little bit about how we strike a balance on our feed. So these are examples of two of the slides, one shows that we kind of have this 8020 rule where 80% of our content caters to the interests of our audience, and then 20% kind of asks something of them that doesn't necessarily this is just purely the organic stuff. Obviously, we run ads and I would love to encourage people to put up more money for more ads for things that require an action from our audience, like paying to sign up for a program or registering or applying for a fellowship. Those are all things that have a really hard time floating on organic, social or relying strictly on organic social. But I just wanted to also explain that a lot of our content like 20% is exhibitions. It kind of shifts when we have like, for example, this month, we had six shows open so it's been more heavily exhibition content than I would typically do. But overall, we have a lot of people who follow us specifically for kind of our evergreen, here's New York City and the nation history. And I kind of explained a little bit about how we balance that. So for history organizations were using a lot of hashtag on this day content. To me, I'm like, sometimes that doesn't, I'm not super excited by that. But it is kind of the foundation of our channels, and it is often what performs the best for us. So it's clearly what our audience wants from us, even if I sometimes get a little like oh, I want to do something totally off the wall and different. I'm not limited to this, but it just helped explain the way that we kind of make sure that we're imbuing our channels with content related to women's history, how we are focusing on kind of the different kinds of content that our different departments create. So we have an education department we have specifically a women's history initiative and Women's History Center and how we make sure that that stuff is always present on our feeds. That was just kind of an example. And then if you can go to the next slide I also kind of chatted through. Brian dodges previous quality content checklists. And I kind of said that I go through the same things when creating content so that people can understand if something they're providing to me doesn't meet these things. It's not best served on our social media channels. And another slide that I really enjoyed and part of our Strategy Workshop, our initial workshop to staff, we kind of show people what it is did have optimized content to in terms of length on different platforms so you know that you get a cut off on Instagram after 125 characters so really creating that first kind of header intro into your post is super important to get people to click to read the full thing. And this was just one of the ways we demonstrated that

Unknown Speaker 32:02
Okay, so our next workshop and before I get into the rest of the workshops, I just wanted to let everybody know in attendance that if you have any questions as we're talking about specific concepts during the presentation, you can feel free to use the raise hand function on Zoom and we can answer your question in real time or drop it in the chat. Or we were hoping to leave some time at the end for q&a. But like I said, sometimes it's easier to answer questions during the presentation when we're on that topic. So feel free to raise your hand if you do have something related. So our next workshop was amplification and we discussed tactics for amplifying organic content because as we all know, there's a lot of noise on social media. There's tons of content going out from tons of content producers and individuals. So we really wanted to go over with our our working groups or working group and senior staff. What that means and you know, why organic content, you know, needs that assistance to get seen by audiences and followers on social media. So who sees organic content? Well, a small percentage of our followers in fact and sometimes non followers, but really the way to help get non organic content seen is through tactics on amplification, like having the staff like comment and share if everybody on the staff if 300 People liked and commented and shared every single post right there your engagement rates would go up not necessarily realistic, but every little bit counts and the fact that those actions and engagements on each post result in more people seeing them so friends of the staff that's liking, commenting, and sharing friends of friends of the audience that's liking, commenting and sharing that trips the algorithm and helps more people on the platforms see the content that you're producing organically and give it a higher ROI. Because sometimes, you know, an individual piece of organic content takes time to produce and post and then if it doesn't get any traction or engagement, fewer people see it and so unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't have the reach that you would hope. So, then again, we talked about how staff can help with that. And then we also discussed user generated content, what it is and why it matters, the power the value of using influencers, calls to action in house signage, exhibition immersive design, which is also another big opportunity for in person sites so that museums and institutions that have the opportunity to design the exhibition in a way that encourages user or visitor photography or visitor social media sharing definitely makes a difference in the visibility of the exhibition. So you know some challenges are also always come up. So sometimes there is no photography. Allowed of artworks that are on loan or or whatever. And so there are opportunities and case studies that have been done where if there is no photography allowed, then sometimes the exhibition designers can incorporate in a photo wall or some opportunity for visitors to share their experience in a different way. So the result of that is obviously creating an inviting experience. And, you know, the hope is that the more people that attend the museum, or attend the exhibition, the and share it out on their social media, the more people that will know and it will give that aspirational kind of encouragement for additional people to come and see. So

Unknown Speaker 35:54
Emily, and then our third workshop was on digital storytelling and campaigns and again, another great part of this series has been having these guest lectures come in because Lucy and I are kind of going through the nuts and bolts of all of this, but then it's a different kind of thing to have the second half of the workshop involve a presentation where you can see what's possible when you're doing all of these things. Right. So another great example was our third workshop on digital storytelling. We asked Jessica Johnson, who previously worked at the Smithsonian's Museum of African American History and Culture to present on storytelling through the archives and specific exhibition and general campaigns. And then an element of that involved what you know the anatomy of a post if you're going to break it down what is involved. We had them do an exercise where we asked them to create an exhibition specific Instagram post, keeping in mind all these best practices. And then we also talk through campaigns, like what's involved on a basic level would be an announcement post toolkits for program partners or influencers, key dates tied to the exhibition or trending topics that this exhibition is going to cover. And then other amplification strategies which we've covered in the previous workshop, like user generated content and having a lot of strong call to actions, calls to action calls to action.

Unknown Speaker 37:20
Calls to Action. So Emily, we did get a question in the chat. It's from Mel and she says so in your case, it's stuff outside of the marketing department creating content for social channels.

Unknown Speaker 37:32
So great question. Currently, I am the only person creating content and putting it out on our channels. That being said, I draw heavily from other departments when they have content. So an example would be someone from our library actually manages our Pinterest for the most part, because it involves how to get like we don't have full digitization efforts all the time. So someone on our library once somebody asked to have something scanned even though it wasn't a full collection. We had one image from this collection. How do we go about sharing that on our digital platforms? And the answer had been Pinterest. So she primarily organized that we also have someone in the library who for similar reasons, uses Tumblr. And so we have a trove and an archive of content on those platforms that I obviously dig into when I'm trying to find things to share. We also have people who write blog posts so we do have people in these different departments who are creating programs, or creating content for tours through exhibitions or something like that. So I'm still the person that's trying to grab all of it all the time, but I'm not the only person making stuff at the museum which is part of the reason for this workshop in general is to get people more involved but to be able to contribute in effective ways. Either to remember that we are there and then this is what I need to make something happen. So that was that was part of it. I don't know if that answers your question though. But we can continue talking through it.

Unknown Speaker 38:59
Yeah, I think specifically creating content for social channels. Outside of Pinterest and Tumblr. As Emily mentioned, Emily is doing Instagram, Facebook and Twitter which are like the main three. And so some of the content she's drawing from Tumblr and Pinterest, she still has to like translate it to the format of the other three platforms. And then all of the other content that goes out on those three big platforms comes from the exhibitions, the tours, the educational materials, everything, got everything under the sun. But the point of these workshops which we just wrapped up a couple of months ago, is really to provide that foundation for the rest of the staff to be able to feed Emily with things that are happening ideas, content resources, and in some cases, perhaps finished posts finished content but not quite there at that point yet. It's really more to point her in the direction that the content of the content but definitely educating them about best practices so they're aware of like what she does and doesn't need.

Unknown Speaker 40:09
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We kind of struggle with some of the same things that are museum. I don't I don't work in marketing department but I work very closely with them as a web a digital media manager. And yeah, I know that they're constantly are always constantly trying to push and fuel out to the exhibits department, the education department to say like, Hey, please let us know when things are happening because we need to be able to post about this stuff. But it is kind of that. That whole kind of concept of they're not quite educated in how to create these posts or how or what exactly what kind of content marketing is always looking for. So I think these workshops are pretty useful.

Unknown Speaker 40:53
Oh, yeah, no,

Unknown Speaker 40:55
it was all about tools.

Unknown Speaker 40:59
Sorry, Mel, what institution are you with? I see you're from Austin from the chat but

Unknown Speaker 41:04
I work at the Bullock Texas State History Museum.

Unknown Speaker 41:07
Okay, thank you. And thank you for your question. So the next workshop was strategic partnerships.

Unknown Speaker 41:15
Yes. And so I just also want to like reinforce the fact that a lot of I mean, I work with highly creative brainy people at the museum. So it's all about trying to get what they're doing to really shine on social. Our fourth workshop was on strategic partnerships. And as luck would have it, I was like, you know, it'd be really good to talk about this. Lucy, our consultant, since she previously had worked on a lot of big strategic partnerships, and it was really important for me to explain this to some staff because I often get a lot of things in my inbox that are like, hey, like, this is a partnership and I'm like, okay, but it's not strategic or we're not really getting anything out of it. And that's really key to our growth. So basically, we outlined what is a strategic partnership, how do they happen? And then we had a checklist that we created that was kind of like, this is how you can tell if it's going to be a strategic partnership, or if it's something where we're just trying to do a favor for someone which doesn't end up really working for us long term. It's not part of our strategy. And then we also had a we shared the survey responses that we had shared from staff, our second survey, where people had actual ideas of like, what Prime strategic partnerships are out there that like we could really fill and we shared those back out with our senior staff in particular. And then we also brainstorm some partnerships for an upcoming exhibition. So kind of a collective exercise in okay, this is the topic who are some local community partners, like getting people to think about this when we are prepping for a big exhibition and Lucy had some great examples from retirement, the MIT and LACMA working with people like Disney and Sesame Street. So again, giving some kind of like aspirational pie in the sky. This is what can happen if you're doing it right. I think really helped give a lot of color and flesh out some of these ideas.

Unknown Speaker 43:13
Yeah, definitely. And just a thought or a note on what we covered under the what are they and how do they happen? Questions. There's a difference between a strategic partnership and just cross posting or you know, having someone posts on your behalf it was really a designed approach to having two separate organizations, the museum and an outside organization if it's another museum or Disney or Sesame Street or Mashable. I'm collaborating together to create what goes out on the social media platforms and working together to figure out how they can piggyback off of each other. So in in our definition, a strategic partnership isn't just here's a post, can you put it up on your social account? It's really working together with the collaborator to orchestrate some kind of thing that feels somewhat organic and somewhat like in some cases, like back and forth, or a q&a or one half of the partnership pushes creates the content and puts that on those social and then the other half the institution may, you know answer the questions or vice versa. So that's how we kind of defined it in this context. And so the last workshop was really tying it all together. We had some loose ends that we wish we could have covered in the previous four workshops, but it didn't make sense to kind of compile them all into one last minute. Bla bla bla workshop, so we ended it on those, those four topics. Before the fifth workshop and in the fifth workshop. We actually quizzed our attendees, with the Jeopardy game and everybody participated really well. answered our different questions based on the categories about specific New York Historical Society social media, definitions, best practices, platforms and star power, which I think was more oriented towards like influencer culture and stuff like that. So it was a fun recap session where we covered a lot of what we had previously covered and kind of drilled home some of the concepts we wanted to make sure that didn't get lost. And then after our Jeopardy game for each of the working group and senior staff workshops, we had a guest speaker in Ryan dodge again, so he if you don't know him, he's from Canada, and he has worked at a number of museums and is very well versed in social media strategy, so we thought he would be a good person to help tie up this this last workshop and talk about why it's important for an inter institutional effort toward digital content and social media in particular. So it was really helpful to have him kind of wrap up and say, in his experience, what he's done to bolster the social media, managers resources within the museums that he's worked at. So you know, what we were doing with the workshops was kind of one step that can be done for internal staff. This was you, Emily?

Unknown Speaker 46:32
Yes. So we finished up those five workshops. Yay. We had one a month for the most part. I think we you know, in terms of scheduling, it's like a little hard to get eight senior staffers, plus me and Luthy plus an outside consultant to have a time that works. And they were two hour chunks, so it really did take up a good chunk of people days. But more or less over five months after that we sent a survey to our social media working group. The idea is to continue the social media working group meetings ongoing into the future, but I wanted to put it on their terms like what day's work best. How often do you want to meet what else do you want included in these meetings? And some of the things that came back we just had our pet our kickoff, which was great, was a request for more guest speakers. They really liked hearing from social media managers from other institutions. And you know, I think it helps us not be so navel gazing, sometimes, like we can really get stuck in our own worlds. So I love that feedback. They also asked to see like what our highest performing posts were like they're curious. They like knowing you know what performed really well, what didn't and maybe why that happened in terms of informing their own work. And then they also wanted updates on like larger institutional initiatives and how this fits in. The idea is to have all of our recordings and all of these resources available for staff when we're onboarding them. So kind of like we have an online HR system that when you are starting to do your historical society, you do like the harassment trainings and all these other things. Part of that, if you're, especially if you're in a content creating department will be to watch these lectures so you're familiar with it. When you start. And then in terms of longer planning, the social media working group goes through like what the next two months are on the social calendar so we can identify opportunities or things that are coming up in their own departments that could slip in really easily, as well as brainstorming other ideas for social integration. You know, I'm not on the ground when exhibits is putting something together. But if there's a cool opportunity for something behind the scenes, I now have someone who's in that room when it's happening, knowing that this is maybe something for him for social. So it was really about relationship building to and just tapping into stuff that they're already doing.

Unknown Speaker 48:55
Yeah, I just wanted to add also, the hope for our series of workshops was to keep social media front of mind for the staff that we were speaking to, and maybe some of their colleagues, even if they're talking to their colleagues about what they're learning and that's important because often in my experience, and I think in Emily's experience as well. Social media sometimes gets like a shorter lead time. And so by the time an exhibition comes up, it's like okay, the social media plan is a couple months in advance, but the exhibition design is set there's no opportunity for photo wall, what happened, why didn't the Social Media Manager have a part in that conversation? And so the point of this was to really utilize the people that are in the departments that are thinking in a longer lead for exhibitions and for other projects that they might kind of have a little light bulb moment and and support Emily's efforts. And hey, what about social media? What you know, if it's early, early, early in the planning stages, and the Social Media Manager rightfully doesn't have a part of that conversation, then is there another person in that department that can maybe advocate for social media ideas? So that was that? So takeaways?

Unknown Speaker 50:14
Yeah, so I can start with the challenges so I wrote this proposal with a lot of help from our development department and again, like I had the supportive my boss, who was like, this is a good opportunity. We've been talking about how to get staff more involved. I wrote it pre pandemic, obviously, things were very different. They the workshops were actually devised is like half day workshops where like, you have lunch and you get to chat and that's not what happened. And I think, you know, Zoom burnout was very real. And I think people had a lot more demands on them in terms of the work that we were doing just more stressors in general. So I say that that maybe didn't work as well in breaking down silos in our working group. Senior staff knows each other really well already because they're already in tons of meetings together. But I think some of the people in the working group really didn't know each other that well we did icebreakers and things like that in our workshops, but I think I I had hoped that we would have had a little bit more of that kind of water cooler talk. That isn't really as possible on Zoom. Yeah, so that would be that would be the downside of this. And I also wanted the guest lecturers to come in person. I think kind of the idea for this workshop even way back when was, I mean, years ago, I was a guest speaker at a class that Hilary-Morgan Watt teaches. So she was our first guest lecture in our workshop on amplification. And I remember just thinking like, everything on your like syllabus is so cool, and I wish I could just share this with staff. So then I actually did have like, links to additional reading for people that were really geeking out and loved our workshops and wanted to know more about XYZ or other examples. It was great, so shout out to Hilary-Morgan Yeah, but Lucy you can talk some about our successes.

Unknown Speaker 52:03
Yeah, so um, besides the lack of team building or the not as awesome team building opportunity, that Zoom limit limited us on, we were happily surprised that Steve senior staff in particular was incredibly engaged and they asked a lot of questions and they were very involved in wanting to learn the best practices that we were sharing and asking specific questions about New York Historical his efforts. And I think that really speaks to a lot of yeah, maybe it's not their main job and or obviously, it's not their main job, but the fact that they want to support social media and want the work of their departments and their colleagues to get out there, you know, to a wider audience was very impressive to me, and not only the senior staff, but the working group was also quite engaged as well. I think it was just more surprising that these higher level director level individuals were as involved as they were and wanted to learn as much as we were presenting value was acknowledged. So Emily was asked to give a board presentation about the New York Historical Society social strategy. So that was a win. And then one of my favorite successes also was the fact that the guest speakers really, really supported and bolstered the concepts and best practices we were sharing, just by ship sharing their own work and what what worked for their institutions and what worked in their in their jobs. And how some of the concepts that we were talking about amplification, user generated content, strategic partnerships, why, like real examples of how those worked in real life so that was really awesome to have support from the guest speakers. To share about that.

Unknown Speaker 54:00
Yeah, I echo everything that Lucy already said. It was a really fun experiment, and it's still it's still going on. But I'm optimistic about it, even even during the pandemic, but we have a couple minutes left, so if there's any big questions, feel free to throw it in the chat or use that raise your hand function. We'd love to address a couple of them. I mean, I think some of this is kind of like, I'm sure a lot of you have already done work in building inroads in your departments and pipelines into other departments. And sometimes it's helpful to just have the opportunity to speak to I gave an all staff presentation to remind everyone who I was what I do, and I think it really helped. So some of the things seem like no brainers but I think people respect the effort that goes into explaining it. And really breaking it down.

Unknown Speaker 54:53
Yeah. Any questions? That if not questions, maybe some of you have experienced in educating staff at your organization. I don't know any questions or comments

Unknown Speaker 55:15
Well, if that's if no one has any questions. Oh, you're from someone. Hi, I

Unknown Speaker 55:20
am my name is Jocelyn. I'm so I'm not a social media manager. So I would be sort of the kind of stuff who would get trained up and I'm curious if you remember, any sort of like aha moments with your, with your colleagues, anything that was sort of like, now I understand that then that you've been looking for or asking for something that you could sort of identify as a moment of translation or new understanding.

Unknown Speaker 55:42
I think some of the kind of like showing how the sausage gets made for staff outside of communications department was really helpful like when I just showed them kind of the the madness of like my 50 different Google calendars and my content calendar, and how to balance what when and then I think another thing that was really helpful as we did go through these exercises of showing our top posts from the year and asked our staff like why they thought those performed well, and then we kind of were able to like hit that home over and over again through the through the presentations, but now, I mean, people will come to me be like, Hey, I remember you saying that, like, our audience really likes this. Well, they might like this other thing that is going on view or hey, I know you, you know, said that a lot of our audiences hyperlocal like they didn't even know what our breakdown was on these platforms like So those could actually translate to in person foot traffic. I think a lot of it was pretty eye opening. I got a lot of good feedback in that way. And I think sometimes even just sharing that when they had to make their own posts and it was difficult to even give them like, you know, 15 minutes to write an Instagram post and a lot of them couldn't turn it in. I think it kind of shows that it's not as easy as it sounds, and we break down like Okay, someone forgot to hashtag or like, where's our image credit, or, you know, we didn't tag the lending institution or even just little things that separately don't seem like much but when you're actually put in that position, it becomes a lot more and I think actually sharing the volume of what we what I put out every week. I think some people were impressed by or weren't aware of because they're not seeing every post that we put out.

Unknown Speaker 57:28
Yeah, I was I was unmuting to just say, what Emily just said about like the exercise of having them create their own piece of content. And we've really tried to hammer home here, this is just one piece of content. This isn't all the planning. This isn't all the organization that goes into posting to Instagram. So but here you you draft to put here's a set of images and here's a press release, make a post and it was eye opening to see that for them. I think to see that it's not just a copy and paste situation. It's it's really kind of trying to think strategically about how to fit the content onto the platforms functionality and format it in such a way that is optimized for each platform to

Unknown Speaker 58:15
and I should say some of them came up with really great like, kickers and headers into their posts and I was super proud because like I said, everyone is really talented. It's just a way of like honing it in a way that works for us. So yeah, it was it was great.

Unknown Speaker 58:32
Yeah, I think we don't want to play our mini violin too much. But as social media managers, we often get discounted and people don't count us as subject matter experts, because we're not in curatorial, but we're experts. In the social media field and we know the best practices for what we're trying to do. And so I think just sharing that knowledge and showcasing the fact that Emily is intentional about what she's doing, helps to give her a little bit more respect and in her role, because, you know, people don't necessarily consider how difficult it is to feel a million different requests and a lot of different content sources and then try to actually massage that into what goes out to the audiences on the social so we are at time but I have a couple more minutes. Do you Emily? Yeah, I

Unknown Speaker 59:27
have a couple more minutes. In case there's anything else we won't get to take up the Zoom link for too long. But yeah, I would say that, in general, I think I, I feel at least anecdotally that I've received fewer just put this up kind of comments, which warms my heart. I think sometimes we still kind of think of social media as the receptacle for things that like we don't want to put on the blog or we don't want to deal with in other departments. So sometimes it's a little bit of an uphill battle to just explain like there is a cost to us doing stuff that doesn't make sense on social. And yeah, it's just just educating and empowering people to know this already. Yeah, thanks, Sara.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:10
So if there was a question in the chat, I can read them to you Emily. It says, Okay, what kind of follow up evaluation and reworking do you plan on doing?

Unknown Speaker 1:00:20
Well, there's definitely part of our grant was a test case of basically like seeing how this would all work in person and we decided to make that an exhibition. So we're supposed to measure how well this works with this exhibition. That came out the exhibition that we initially planned and pitched in the grant. We had to cut because of COVID. So we had to switch gears to a different exhibition, which is just interesting, because it it's not quite the same. But I imagine I mean, that's the thing about these workshops is a lot of this. On social, it's going to need to rework in a couple years, like knowing how fast this field goes. I think a lot of the best practices and things that we outlined here, even if like different platform features are no longer applicable. The meat of this is so that's why that's going to remain in this HR onboarding system. But in terms of like our social strategy, I kind of think of it as a living document like hopefully it wouldn't change a lot but it's it's really involved. It's pretty long. So I think there's obviously opportunity for me to tweak and update that as things change, whereas the institution changes. And with the social media working group, I'm going to be getting constant feedback. So I'll know what's not working or what is and then I also have someone to point to in other departments where it's like, Hey, you can ask Luis or Alli about this because they're part of this working group. So they know I'm not the only one that can answer that question,

Unknown Speaker 1:01:51
which is really nice. Thanks, Emily. And then one other question from Marta was what was the most difficult topic for the trainees and the easiest one which I'm thinking back and I'm trying to try to wrap my head around. There was anything that they were tripped up by.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:13
I mean, I think in the digital storytelling, we mentioned this before, but I think they actually a few people really struggled to create a post I think that was difficult as a concept. I also think, what did they like the best?

Unknown Speaker 1:02:32
I think they like strategic partnerships a lot. They like to think of other organizations that they might or Emily might connect with, to support the exhibition that we're talking about. It was kind of a fun exercise to just go through all of the ideas that we might have, even if they're super far reaches like we work with the Supreme Court, social media manager and stuff so right

Unknown Speaker 1:02:58
and yeah, no, Lucy Lucy's right on that one. I think they were really excited about building new audiences. I think that's always kind of something that we always want, but we don't always know how to go about it in a in a strategic way. So being able to talk about that, I think was huge. I really got everyone's gears turning.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:19
Yeah. Well, awesome. Thank you for your questions. And thanks for attending. You guys are awesome for making it through the fourth week of MCs.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:31
Yeah, thank you all and if you have other initiatives that you're working on at your institutions, or you're part of something like this, like tell us because I'd love to know. I hope hope everyone's doing well.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:45
Yay. Everybody, have a great day. Hope to see some of you in the happy hour on spatial chat in an hour.