Welcome to this Email Course. (Timing: ~ 5 Minutes)

This is the first email (and first day) of your 5 Days to Social Media Strategy course.  Thanks for signing up and for donating to Project Fierce!  Over the next 5 days, you will create a concrete social media strategy that helps you meet your goals. Every lesson will include a quick summary of why/how of the day’s lesson, some links to different resources to make that lesson easier, and an action step that moves you closer to finishing your social media plan.

First: Why Social Media?

For lots of people, social media has negative connotations: it brings up questions about the digital divide and who gets left out of our rapidly changing technological world. For others, social media feels like a giant conversation that they can’t keep up with -- because of the fast pace of social media, or the lack of control they have over the algorithms that make Twitter or Facebook run, they feel like they’re missing out. Then, you know, there rare the objectively evil things the people who run these giant corporations do -- with our data, with their access to giant audiences, and with their control over politics.

Still: social media has 2 qualities that make it great as an absorption tool (a way to get more people involved in your work, OR as a way to get people to pay you) and as a teaching tool.

That’s because goal oriented social media requires consistency and scale.

Consistency means you have to post regularly over a long period of time. If you write an incredible 5 paragraph essay about your organizing work on Facebook and then never log in again… nothing happens.

Scale means making an appropriate amount of time and energy for social media in order to meet your goals. Many writing teachers suggest using social media to get better at writing quickly because it builds the habit of processing information, analyzing that information, and turning that analysis into a coherent 180 characters. It also builds the habit of engagement -- if you’re saying something worth saying, people will have reactions to that, and you can get a lot out of responding to those reactions (we’ll talk more about that later too).

Those two elements are key to all communications/marketing strategy, but imperative in social media.

That’s why this course is focused on social media strategy -- it helps you build consistency and scale for your overall marketing+communications work in an arena where you have the highest locus of control (you could develop a similar practice for say, op ed writing, but the publication and distribution of your opinion pieces would be outside of your control).

However, if you want to follow these lessons and adapt them for a more low fi channel like a church bulletin board or with flyers you use canvassing, go for it. Also, let me know how it goes so I can talk you up!)

Who is this for?

This course is based on the most common questions I get asked about social media in the work that I do. Since I work with organizing groups, nonprofits, artists/filmmakers, small businesses, people running for office, tenant associations, neighborhood groups, and journalists. Something all of these people have in common? They don't have money or time. So I guess if you feel like you have all the resources in the world and all the time you need... this course is not for you.  Again, this course is for anyone who wants to set up easy, automated social media plans that will actually move you towards your goals (more members, more paid gigs, more friends, whatever). The only technical requirements are below, and since it’s all about scheduling, it can easily be done even with limited access to the internet or a computer.

Setup: This course assumes that you already have a few things set up for your nonprofit/business/brand/organizing group/dog walking collective. I'm getting kind of sick of the slash sign so I'm just going to call it your project for the rest of this course, okay?

Here's what you need for this course:

• At least one social media account specifically for this project, (because of the scheduling tools I recommend you use, know that a personal Twitter account is okay, but a personal Facebook account will not work).

• Some sort of email/phone number collection method for your project**. This includes a way of collecting email addresses (google forms or survey monkey works) and a way of keeping track of the email addresses you receive (Google Forms creates a spreadsheet for this automatically).

If you do not have any of these things, you should take 10-15 minutes right now to get them all set up -- create a Twitter account, create a Gmail account, make a form with your project name on it (and some text asking if it’s okay for you to contact them after they fill it out) and make sure that you know where those names/emails go.

The perfect is the enemy of the good: it would be awesome to have a comprehensive SEO’ed up website and full CRM for your project. If you don’t know why that would be awesome… don’t worry about it right now. Just make sure you have an active social media account and a collection tool (it can even just be a link to a blank Google spreadsheet. Seriously.)   You might also find it helpful to have a way of tracking websites/documents you return to over and over again (I use my browser bookmarks bar), and a calendar.

If you can’t do any of this now, consider snoozing this email (and the rest of the course emails) until you can. (How to “snooze” emails in Gmail is here).

** A Note on Security Culture: I use Google Drive for a lot of my communications work even though Google is a corporate behemoth committing various human rights violations and privacy infractions every day. There are lots of other tools that would work for this course with better privacy, including protonmail, owncloud, and riseup.net, but my goal is for you to set up the easiest possible actionable plan for your goals that flows easily, because that means you’re more likely to stick with it. If you’ve got bigger security concerns, or if you want to talk more about using one of these tools for the course, email me.

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Action Step for Today: Once you have a social media account for your project and a collection method set up, you’re good to go until tomorrow!

Signal Boost: Want to start off accountable on this course before the course even starts? Use one of the social media accounts you will be using for this project to post your goals for the course. If you use the hashtag #feednet (like the script below) I’ll be able to find and amplify it (ie, more people will see your project!)

Example: Just got started with the setup for 5 Days to Social Media Strategy -- over the next 5 days, I want to ________________________________ . #feednet

See ya soon, H