David Petroff, Edgewood College Director of Athletic Communications and a member of CoSIDA's New Media/Technology Committee, has launched a new blog called "Small School Social." The main theme will be giving ideas for small school sports communications professionals to produce a strong social media presence - despite not having the resources of the big schools.
You can view the Small School Social web blog here:
http://smallschoolsocial.tumblr.com/. His first post is below.
Edgewood College, which is in Madison, Wisconsin, competes at the NCAA Division III level and is a member of the
Northern Athletics Conference. On Twitter, follow Petroff at
@DavidPetroff and you can reach him via email at
davidpetroff@hotmail.com.
Small School Social blog entry: It starts with a plan
by David Petroff, Edgewood College
Welcome
I know who you are, small school SID. You’d love to turn your little college into a social media empire, but you don’t have an army of eager work-study students or any extra time to devote to developing brilliant Facebook polls and catchy Twitter hashtags. You’re too busy making sure your videocasting computer doesn’t freeze and that the mascot doesn’t play inappropriate music during the T-shirt toss.
One of the beauties of social media, is its uncanny ability to make anything or anyone appear more important, more significant and more ubiquitous than it actually might be. In short, you can make a reasonable amount of time and energy seem like you’ve got a smartphone surgically attached to your hand and an IT staff on standby every second of the day.
Making a plan doesn’t have to kill you
I sat at the CoSIDA Convention one year and a panelist (I don’t recall who it was anymore) implored us all that “You must have a Social Media Plan”. The display screen then lit up with a wonderfully executed Excel spreadsheet detailing a color-coded, day-by-day, multi-platform social media execution strategy. It was brilliant. And it was terrifying.
How can I, a Division III SID, with one graduate assistant (which is more than many have) put together a social media plan this comprehensive and this brilliant?
I started to panic. I’ll need a committee of people! And help from IT! And I’ll need to study the social media sites of other schools both large and small! Mind you, I wasn’t freaking about about executing the plan.
I was freaking out about creating the plan!
By the time I returned home, I had calmed down. I thought, his social media plan was great, but if I just need a starting point, I just need a simple plan. A social media plan need not be a complex Excel spreadsheet filled with numbers, strategies and buzzwords. It can be as simple as this:
OUR SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN:
• Minimum of 4-5 tweets a day (always with something that can be clicked)
• Minimum of 2 interactive Facebook posts a week (polls, photo caption contest)
• Minimum of 1 YouTube video a week (short interviews work great)
• Minimum of 1 Blog entry a week
• Simultaneously bounce website stories to Twitter and Facebook
That’s it. That’s all I did. Five years later, this is still essentially the plan for us. Would I like to have a big, fancy plan full of colors and columns laying out a strategy? It would be really cool to show my bosses at review time, but I realized that I don’t really need that.
I certainly don’t execute my plan perfectly every week. Our blog goes without an update more often than I care to admit. But the plan gives me a structure and framework to build with. When my G.A. needs a new task, I can look at my social media plan and say, “Create a new Facebook poll!”
My last point: Don’t be a slave to your social media plan. Some weeks will naturally generate more tweets or more videos. Sometimes fan interaction will lead you into something you never intended. Roll with it! Don’t beat yourself up if you miss a blog entry on a given week.
Good luck as you build your own social media plan.