How many followers do you have on Twitter or Facebook? How can you used LinkedIn to market your organization? What about Instagram, Google+ and YouTube, not to mention direct email marketing? The digital storefront occupies boundless acres of virtual real estate but much of it is uncultivated. If you’re like me you have no idea where to start but you know that the time to start was long ago! In an age where the average person can be turned into an overnight sensation just by posting on the internet (I’m looking at you Frankie MacDonald the Cape Breton weatherman) it’s obvious there is untapped potential to increase organizational exposure but how?
Cape Breton’s weatherman
As part of my ever changing role as the sole employee of the Killam Trusts I have been entrusted with the development of the organization’s online presence. From web content to Twitter to Facebook and everything in between all content begins with me . . . and I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and not enough to be fully effective. (thus the enrollment in this certificate program!). For example, how much time should I be devoting to social media and which platforms deserve the greatest focus? This short article provided some great insight into how to measure effort. In addition, I know I should to create 
a content calendar so I’m posting on a fairly regular basis and it would be great to map that to what’s currently happening in the academic world (writing a feature on a Killam engineering laureate during engineering week for example). We have a database of close to 7,000 Killam scholars so I think it should be easy to develop a following – I just have to be sure I’m saying something interesting! To date I’ve been more reactive than proactive, which according to Evan LePage, a writer for Hootsuite ,is a big no. I need to improve, .
Once we have a set strategy in place we’d like to branch out a bit further and set up a space for our laureates to be able to connect with one another. Not only to encourage research collaboration but to build a kind of alumni network that they can turn to when they have questions or need advice. There would be different categories that people could search for information – for example recommendations for restaurants in a particular town, or links to travel discounts. Things that are completely unrelated to our organization but that would allow our laureates to leverage the fact that they’ve won a Killam award to their advantage. I looked at LinkedIn as a potential place to host something like this – I especially like the way their university pages are set up – but unfortunately they won’t let us set ourselves 
up like that. Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas about what we could use to build such a network? Would it have to be hosted on our site or is there already a customizable service? All suggestions are welcome!!
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 
I’m sure you will improve your skills through this course. Love that rubrics cube visual. Good luck.
Thank you for the introduction to Frankie MacDonald! I checked him out on Youtube and now I’m an official fan, my weather updates will never be the same!
I believe some of the Social Media channels like Facebook offer private groups that you could use to communicate with your network. It would also allow a space where they could communicate with each other. The advantage that I could see to tying into a pre-existing network, like Facebook is that your network probably already use the site for personal use. Therefore it may be easier to tap into them without having to re-direct them. The advantage to running something like this off your site would be that it would drive more traffic to your site. The challenge would be having to drive the traffic to your site in the beginning.
I can empathize with not knowing where to start in this whole new world of Social Media. I loved your line “I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and not enough to be fully effective.” I completely feel that way right now! It sounds like we are in similar positions with starting a new Social Media initiative at work and I look forward to your future articles as you chart these new waters.
Thank you both for your replies!
That rubic’s cube visual was so illustrative of how I feel about unlocking the mysteries of social media I had to use it!
As for Frankie – he is amazing! LOL I read into our course work for week 2 and there are some interesting collaborative platforms mentioned there like Ning.com that might also be useful. We don’t have a lot of up-take on Facebook yet so it’s hard to see where our users are engaging the most . . . Thanks for the suggestions 🙂