Web 2.0 For The Food Movement
Posted: May 21, 2010
Categories: Food Strategies
Social media is fairly young, but has already proven to be a powerful tool for spreading news and events quickly, in an interactive, engaging way. Farm and food leaders across the province are using a number of social networks to spread the word about healthy, local, sustainable food.
Here are five social media tips for those of you interested in using these tools.
1. Focus & Strategy
There are many conversations going on out there, and it’s important to hone in on the ones relevant to your organization. It’s better to find out what’s going on first, before jumping in. Listen to the conversations that are taking place, then begin to contribute, rather than just sending out messages about your newest issue, sale or product. The key to social media is that it is a two way conversation. Check out this slide show by Beth Kanter about Creating Your Organization’s Social Media Strategy Map.
2. Facebook
As an organization or business, you can easily create a Fan Page on Facebook to keep people in the know about upcoming events, issues, etc. There is some discussion about whether to make a Facebook group or fan page (read about the pros and cons here). Fan pages are newer and do not have a limit to the number of fans, whereas groups can only have 5000 members. Another benefit of a fan page is that once you have 25 fans you can customize the hyperlink to something shorter, and easier to pass along, as well as look more professional. Rather than “http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/your-business-name/1773919” the link is customized to “http://www.facebook.com/yourbusinessname/” which looks a lot better on a business card or brochure.
3. Twitter
Search for keywords that are relevant to your organization in order to listen in on what’s being said. It can be difficult to sort through all of the tweets sent by people you are following, but one feature that makes things easier is creating a list. These lists don’t have to be public, they can be private and only for you to see; here’s a guide to Twitter lists.
4. Blogging
It is said that everyone and their dog has blog nowadays, but that doesn’t mean many people will actually go to your dog’s blog (unless there is some really interesting content on it!). Having a blog on your website allows your site visitors to get a better sense of your organization’s personality. People like going to websites that have updated content; if you blog once a week, then it’s likely that people who are very interested in your organization will check back once a week. They are likely to share your content with others if is useful, insightful, entertaining, or relevant to their crowd in some way. With or without a blog on your website, you should definitely have an RSS feed for your website, so that people can receive updates on any new content you post on your website without having to visit it directly. Here’s a guide on how to set-up an RSS feed on your website.
5. Tools
You can now integrate your Facebook Fan Page with Twitter by going to http://www.facebook.com/twitter. This is a great feature when posting events to Facebook. It will automatically tweet about the event starting with “Come to” “my event June 9th, 1-4pm….” and then it links back to the event’s page on Facebook. If you feel overwhelmed (or your computer is really slow) with all the social media networks windows you have open, then try out Hootsuite. This is a great dashboard for keeping tabs on your various social media accounts and for easily posting to them all at once. Another great tool is NetVibes which is a dashboard tool for visual organization of the RSS feeds you subscribe to.
Here are a few examples of how Sustain Ontario members are using social media:
- Toronto Food Policy Council’s Wayne Roberts on Facebook: he keeps a very active profile, always sharing useful news and resources for the food movement. He has over 3000 friends and is a fan of many food movement groups. He also has his own website.
- Rebecca LeHeup of the Ontario Culinary Tourism Alliance is great to follow on Twitter & Facebook for food related events, issues, & news in Ontario. The OCTA team actively posts interesting and useful articles to their website a couple times a week. Here’s a good article on their site about using Twitter.
- The Holland Marsh Growers Association does a great job of keeping others in the loop and sharing news & events, on their website, Twitter, as well as Facebook.
- Sunny Lam of FoodCycles is very active on Facebook, Twitter, & updates FoodCycle’s blog regularly.
- Steve Green of Windsor-Essex Community Supported Agriculture has been a good resource for interesting articles ranging from farming to urban chickens. Check out WECSA’s blog, find their group on Facebook.
Kyle is available to Sustain Ontario members for a half hour social media consultation – contact kyle@sustainontario.com.