Danae Wolfe: Alright so I'm getting the message that this is recording. Well, welcome everybody. I am done a wolf with the learning and org development unit.
Danae Wolfe: And this kicks off our digital engagement and design boot camp series that we're doing all week.
Danae Wolfe: Every day at 1pm will have a different session for you the session that we're doing today focuses on sort of a high level aerial view of
Danae Wolfe: Strategic engagement sort of focused on things like social media and digital engagement specifically
Danae Wolfe: But we will sort of be housing this conversation and a broader conversation just about engagement in general.
Danae Wolfe: So a lot of what you'll learn today are things that you can take back to your county offices once we're back doing traditional face to face events.
Danae Wolfe: And think about how you can strategize to not just do digital engagement, not just do face to face engagement, but how you can create sort of a hybrid engagement strategy that covers a little bit of everything. And that offers our clientele.
Danae Wolfe: Really high quality ways to get in touch with us and to engage with us both digitally and face to face.
Danae Wolfe: So before we kick it off before I get into the the slide deck here, I would like to know how each of you.
Danae Wolfe: Is using digital engagement specifically what social media platforms, you're using, or whether you are facilitating maybe online courses or an email listserv.
Danae Wolfe: What are you all doing in terms of digital or virtual programming right now and it might not be like SUPER FORMAL programming like teaching an actual event. It could just be hey we're doing a social media campaign or hey, I've been communicating
Danae Wolfe: Via like informal zoom office hours or things like that.
Danae Wolfe: So Facebook camp counselor meetings zoom meetings, Facebook, Twitter, email.
Danae Wolfe: Lots of zoom
Danae Wolfe: Social media, I'm assuming, Facebook is probably going to come up as a pretty high one here, Beth said creating Canvas courses. That's excellent and Facebook and emails.
Danae Wolfe: So you'll notice we have some formal stuff going on some of those Canvas courses, a little bit more formal fight types of engagement and then social media, a little bit less formal county websites would be less formal so let's go ahead here. I'm going to jump into our slide deck.
Danae Wolfe: You should all be seeing the strategic engagement slide deck. I thought we would jump off into this session today talking a little bit about social media platforms and who is spending time on what platform.
Danae Wolfe: There's a lot of other things that we could talk about right now like formal online courses or like zoom meetings or email list serves
Danae Wolfe: We can touch on some of those things as we go through the discussion here today. I'm hoping the formal part of this will take like 30 to 40 minutes and then we can open it up for conversation.
Danae Wolfe: I wanted to focus a lot on social media, because that's a lot of the questions that we're getting right now is about like social media engagement. And you know what platform. Should I be using. I will kick us off by saying we are in a situation right now.
Danae Wolfe: Where we are being asked to not create any new social media accounts that represent extension.
Danae Wolfe: So if you maybe are in a county that doesn't have a Facebook page. Or maybe you want to start an Instagram, but you don't have one or Twitter, but you don't have one.
Danae Wolfe: We're kind of being asked to not create those
Danae Wolfe: If you're in a situation where you don't have like any social media accounts representing your county in any capacity, then I would recommend you touch base with Cheryl buck or Mitch Mosher
Danae Wolfe: And they might have some recommendations for how you can apply for a social media account. So basically moving forward, based on our
Danae Wolfe: University policy that came out last year, any new social media account has to go through an application process, which is kind of
Danae Wolfe: A little bit lengthy, you do have to submit like a, an example content calendar, you have to submit like how you intend to manage that account they have certain specifications for, like, how much time.
Danae Wolfe: Should be spent, you know, thinking about content and designing and disseminating content. So it's kind of a lot to work through
Danae Wolfe: The last thing I mentioned before, we really jump in here is that our Wednesday session at 1pm will be doing a Facebook one on one course. So for those of you who are actively managing Facebook accounts or maybe you have one, but you're not actively managing it.
Danae Wolfe: Will help you kind of jumpstart those accounts to and talk a little bit about how to get the most engagement out of those platforms.
Danae Wolfe: And as always, I'm going to open up my chat box here. If you have questions, go ahead and just keep sending those in my team will kind of be observing the chat and I'll try to keep an eye on the chat too as we go through. So feel free to send your questions as we go today.
Danae Wolfe: So I'm going to jump in by starting with who is spending time on which platform by certain like demographics.
Danae Wolfe: All of this information comes from Pew Research and you can access all of this information for free directly through Pew Research Center. I think it's pure research.org maybe
Danae Wolfe: There are tons of like social media fact sheets and information about digital engagement and
Danae Wolfe: You can look at how many people by age and by different like socio economic demographic are spending time on social media platforms. How many people use those platforms to get their news.
Danae Wolfe: How frequently they use those platforms, there is a plethora of information here.
Danae Wolfe: But I thought we would start by kind of breaking this down by age because that's one of the easiest demographics to look at
Danae Wolfe: So if we look at our. This is primarily a millennial group sort of
Danae Wolfe: Might get some Jen's ears here is we look at, like, aged 18 we get into like younger and mid millennials. This doesn't cover some of our what I call our elder millennials, which is the category that I would fall into
Danae Wolfe: 91% of this age group uses YouTube. It's huge. You might be surprised to learn. Know that 79% use Facebook. So we hear a lot that Gen Z and millennials. Do not use Facebook that is statistically, not an accurate statement almost 80% of us who use Facebook.
Danae Wolfe: And they asked cuz I don't fall in this category. But a lot of the next age group uses Facebook as well. You'll notice Facebook has a strong hold over every single age demographic compared to
Danae Wolfe: Other social media platforms, except YouTube. Now, why do you think YouTube is one of the heaviest used
Danae Wolfe: And you'll see this as we go through some of the ages. Some of the other ages as well. YouTube is by and large, the one of the the most use social media platforms. So why do you think that is
Danae Wolfe: Some of you might even not use other platforms like Facebook or Instagram, but you probably have watched a YouTube video or two in your lifetime.
Danae Wolfe: So, okay, says, because it's video based videos are content King. So if you're going to think about the most engaging type of content videos are it Sydney says all other social media platforms link back to YouTube a lot do
Danae Wolfe: Because you can find out how to do most anything. Yeah.
Danae Wolfe: The real reason is because you can access YouTube and gain benefit from YouTube without actually being a content creator and without having an account. So even if you don't have a YouTube account.
Danae Wolfe: You can search for and view videos on the platform, whereas on a platform like Facebook, generally speaking.
Danae Wolfe: You're probably going to be a content creator, you're probably going to have a profile, you're probably going to be submitting content.
Danae Wolfe: And some people just don't want to do that. So that's why YouTube is so heavily used
Danae Wolfe: So among this younger demographic Instagram is pretty high up there at 67% Snapchat, of course, is pretty popular with this group, and especially younger audiences at 62%
Danae Wolfe: And then only 38% of people use Twitter. So I know a lot of counties are using Twitter right now. Twitter is not one of the most use platforms. In fact, it falls pretty far down there in just about every demographic
Danae Wolfe: So if we look at our 30 to 49 year olds YouTube install has the stronghold at 87% Facebook remains the same at 79 Instagram 47 Snapchat, a little bit less than 25 Twitter even less at 26 less than the younger age range.
Danae Wolfe: So we're getting into age 50 to 64 YouTube still has the stronghold at 70%
Danae Wolfe: But you might be surprised that Facebook is 68% of this age demographic uses Facebook. So over the years and teaching digital engagement. I've heard a lot of my colleagues and extension say Well, nobody in my county uses Facebook so I shouldn't have to either
Danae Wolfe: Statistically, that's probably not an accurate statement. A lot of people use Facebook.
Danae Wolfe: This age range almost a quarter use Instagram. That's pretty high. Notice those Snapchat falls quite a bit in this age category only 9% use Snapchat.
Danae Wolfe: And a lot of people that I talked to in this age range who do use Snapchat say they do it to stay in touch with either children or grandchildren 17% use Twitter.
Danae Wolfe: And if we look at our 65 plus age group. All of a sudden, YouTube is no longer the king.
Danae Wolfe: It's Facebook 46% of this group uses Facebook only 8% on Instagram might be surprising that even more of this age group use Snapchat at 9% than Instagram and Twitter is still holding kind of strong with this group at 26%
Danae Wolfe: So was there anything surprising about any of these statistics, who's like by age, who's using which platform.
Jared Morrison: A as you're asking that someone did type in, is this just using but not necessarily frequency of use. Do you know
Danae Wolfe: Correct. DIANA. So this is using, you can dig into the Pew Research statistics and you can look at how frequently that uses so they kind of break it down by like daily use. And I think weekly use
Danae Wolfe: So yes, it is not like a daily thing a lot of people do use social media date daily. The other thing that I will mention here is with Facebook.
Danae Wolfe: Even though. Facebook has a stronghold, especially with those younger demographics. If you're using Facebook, you are probably likely using other programs to like other platforms to
Danae Wolfe: So like I think most millennials most Jen's ease. They're not just on Facebook, right there on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and they might have a Twitter account.
Danae Wolfe: So even though they're using Facebook, it might not be their primary platform. So that's another key thing to keep in mind. So, Erica says I'm surprised at the 6065 plus is using the Twitter social media. Yeah, I think that's kind of surprising.
Danae Wolfe: I was also surprised. I mentioned this before that.
Danae Wolfe: If we look at the younger demographic so many are using Facebook because I think the media has had us believe that non like know Millennials and know Jen's ease are using Facebook. And again, that's just not true.
Danae Wolfe: So I tell people, like if you have time to spend on one social media platform. Facebook is probably it. So let's go into if we're looking at
Danae Wolfe: We're looking at all American adults to this is aged 18 and over
Danae Wolfe: Who is using which platform. Facebook is at 69% so 69% of American adults aged 18 and over use Facebook. The next one is LinkedIn at 25%
Danae Wolfe: I have gotten questions here and there. I think a lot from our community development educators about using LinkedIn because you do
Danae Wolfe: LinkedIn has changed a lot over the years. I personally don't use LinkedIn, I deleted my account, years ago, and then I recreated it I just
Danae Wolfe: Yeah, I'm sort of far removed from using LinkedIn. But if you are using it to blog or to create high quality content for
Danae Wolfe: Clientele, it can be a really good resource, particularly for anything business related or entrepreneurship or things like that that next one that camera icon is Instagram 37% and then Twitter only 22% of American adults are using Twitter.
Danae Wolfe: Next up here, we have Pinterest Snapchat YouTube and WhatsApp, which is a messaging app so Pinterest is pretty low at 28% what is Pinterest. Great for and what demographic, do you think is using Pinterest. The most
Danae Wolfe: It's great for pictures great for recipes. Great for anything like food related health and wellness children's activities Pinterest is probably blowing up right now with like what to do with kids at home.
Danae Wolfe: Anything like home projects or gardening, so there there could be a lot of really good uses for how we use Pinterest and extension.
Danae Wolfe: Christina said, especially moms. Yeah, there's all kinds of products on there for families with with young kids homeschooling, things like that.
Danae Wolfe: It's primarily women. I think it's largely women that use Pinterest, which is probably unsurprising
Danae Wolfe: So Snapchat 24% of American public age 18 or over using Snapchat and who primarily use a Snapchat.
Danae Wolfe: It's younger audiences, primarily. So if you have like four H youth that you're trying to reach Snapchat could be a good platform Snapchat got a really bad rap. When it first came out, because it was known as
Danae Wolfe: The Disappearing content platform, right. So you would send somebody a snap.
Danae Wolfe: A lot of kids were using it very inappropriately to send inappropriate content to their friends because it would disappear.
Danae Wolfe: And then people caught on that you could screenshot some of that content and they were posting it on other social media platforms so
Danae Wolfe: Content doesn't ever disappear. And that's important to note, as well as we think about the professional use of some of these platforms.
Danae Wolfe: Next one is YouTube 73% and then finally WhatsApp, which is at 20% and I think a lot of people around the world use WhatsApp because it's encrypted, I believe.
Danae Wolfe: So it's a little bit more secure than using other messaging apps like your native like I message for us IOS, iPhone users. So anything surprising in here. Again, YouTube's huge and then Facebook would be that next the next big one.
Danae Wolfe: We use WhatsApp to communicate my son in school. And I know a lot of people internationally use WhatsApp is their primary messaging app. I've always heard that.
Danae Wolfe: So the next thing that I want to talk a little bit about here is what we call this web of engagement early on when we were talking about
Danae Wolfe: Engagement. We sort of we called it the path of engagement, which is sort of a very linear way of thinking about how people engage with us.
Danae Wolfe: I sort of rework this into what I like to call the web of engagement, which basically kind of shows how we create and then map out certain pieces of content to help people move from
Danae Wolfe: awareness about an issue to actually a behavioral change around an issue. So I think it's really beneficial for how we think about our work and extension, particularly because we are not just in the business of creating content for entertainment.
Danae Wolfe: We are in the business of creating content for real change and impact and I love looking at this from this web of engagement standpoint. You'll notice there's a lot of different engagements.
Danae Wolfe: Like frameworks in the marketing world. So you might have like different consumer engagement models, the
Danae Wolfe: Marketing Funnel i think is one of them, which basically dictates how a consumer becomes initially aware of a product
Danae Wolfe: To purchasing that product than advocating for their friends and family to purchase that product. So our extension web of engagement starts with initial awareness. We want to create awareness around a particular issue. And we can do that in a variety of ways.
Danae Wolfe: People might accidentally come across a piece of information. It might be scrolling through a social media feed and they happen to come across a piece of content from extension.
Danae Wolfe: They might go into Google and Google search a question and happen to come across a fact sheet that we've written
Danae Wolfe: With they might hear a word of mouth through a friend of theirs. There's a lot of different ways that people become aware of issues. But that's sort of the starting point.
Danae Wolfe: Next we want to move people strategically to a trial experience with us and a trial experience could be a number of things.
Danae Wolfe: It could be somebody attending a face to face workshop of ours, of course, that's not happening now in the next, you know, a couple of weeks, anyway.
Danae Wolfe: So in the digital world, it could be somebody signing up for an online course or signing up for zoom webinar or participating in a zoom meeting.
Danae Wolfe: But it's a little bit of a deeper connection than just like scrolling through your social media feed and coming across a piece of information at that next step.
Danae Wolfe: Then we have some deep learning that happens people are interested in the topic. They're now aware of it.
Danae Wolfe: They've come to some sort of trial experience. And now we've hooked them somehow. And they want to learn more. So they continue to learn more. And again, we have to move them strategically from one step to the next.
Danae Wolfe: And then finally, if we're doing things really well and really right. Hopefully these participants these learners will become advocates of that type of content.
Danae Wolfe: So this is where the real behavioral change starts to happen. It's where people start to advocate for change or impact in their community.
Danae Wolfe: This is the level where we start to see things like Master Gardener volunteers and for each volunteers or donors.
Danae Wolfe: People who have a deeper relationship with Ohio State University Extension.
Danae Wolfe: They understand this content area or this issue and they start to spread the word to their friends and family.
Danae Wolfe: And it might not be in a formal relationship, right, it might just be this person consistently shares out information on social media. This person might be advocating
Danae Wolfe: For their friends and family to take an online course or to attend different programs. But this is sort of a simple way of thinking about this web of engagement and we will revisit this web
Danae Wolfe: In a few minutes. Once we kind of start to wrap up, and I go through a couple more pieces of information.
Danae Wolfe: The thing that I want to stress here is especially when it relates to social media.
Danae Wolfe: A lot of what I've seen happen with extension people is they focus on only pushing out content that is marketing related
Danae Wolfe: In other words, they're only using social media platforms to market traditional face to face events. They're not thinking about social media.
Danae Wolfe: As a vector or as a platform to actually distribute and educate audiences and I want us to kind of shift that thinking a little bit
Danae Wolfe: So I like to talk about this this other model that I like to think about its high touch high tech hybrid
Danae Wolfe: We tend to be very siloed in that we think about content is being either high high tech or high touch. Excuse me.
Danae Wolfe: Which is things that would be largely face to face, or things that can only really happen through connection with an extension educator or county office or it might be like connection with a master gardener volunteer for each volunteer.
Danae Wolfe: So in the chat box, or if you'd like to unmute yourselves. Can you tell me some examples of extension programming or events that might be high touch and that need to remain high touch. We couldn't move them into a digital world very easily.
Danae Wolfe: Four H camp is a huge one club meetings nutrition education, particularly if you're doing things like cooking demonstrations that might be difficult to do that.
Danae Wolfe: In a high tech way.
Danae Wolfe: Any other ideas that you can think of that have to sort of remain high touch AG trainings.
Danae Wolfe: I'm thinking about like field visits and stuff. I used to. I started my career and extension as an educator. So anything that would be
Danae Wolfe: Like out in a field that might be difficult to do in a high tech way state fair. Yeah, you're not going to get the same experience, are you, Elliot, if you like, take the State Fair in a completely virtual way.
Danae Wolfe: You're exactly right skill athon food tastings. Yeah, you're not going to taste food very well over zoom
Danae Wolfe: Not likely. Anyway, so next we have things that can be moved to an entirely virtual platform.
Danae Wolfe: In this situation, your audience may never come into contact with you as an extension professional, they might not even know who you are, where you are the work that you do. They're never going to know your name.
Danae Wolfe: But you can still create content and your audience can still engage with that content in a very meaningful way. So what are some examples of high tech programming or high tech could be events.
Danae Wolfe: What are some things that you can think of email challenges. Yes. So chances are you're never really going to know who all those participants are you might never know their name. They might never know your name.
Danae Wolfe: But you can still deliver really impactful programming and educational materials to them.
Danae Wolfe: Webinar trainings, of course, helmet safety videos. Yeah, so high tech would be things like you might have a YouTube series of videos.
Danae Wolfe: This would probably be people who follow you on Facebook, but never come to any programs. This could be people who take
Danae Wolfe: Like an online course, like a self paced online course where you aren't actually instructing them, but the content already built. It's made
Danae Wolfe: And they just enter in the the program or the online course and take all that content, but they they never come into contact with you.
Danae Wolfe: Neither one of these methods is right or wrong. Both of these are really great avenues to take, but we want to get to a point where our strategy becomes more of a hybrid strategy.
Danae Wolfe: Where we have both face to face stuff high touch where we build deep relationships with people. But then we also offer some stuff in a completely high tech way. So the people who don't really want a relationship with us can still have that
Danae Wolfe: In a lot of cases, what you'll find is, we have people who engage with us in both ways.
Danae Wolfe: Sometimes simultaneously right so they might be at a program
Danae Wolfe: And they like it so much that they're tweeting it out to their followers. That's a pretty high tech thing right so then their followers are getting the very high tech piece of it, but they're not at that program face to face.
Danae Wolfe: We want to get to a point where people come to a face to face program. And when they walk away, they can still engage with us in a meaningful way. They don't have to be
Danae Wolfe: In front of you as an instructor to be getting high quality content. So we want to we want to try to move our content into that hybrid strategy. So does anybody have ideas for how you're already doing this.
Danae Wolfe: Strategically not just like accidentally like oh it accidentally happen. But do you have examples of how and I'll just spit out a couple theoretical examples here.
Danae Wolfe: You're at a face to face program. And before you get started you tell everybody. Hey, we're on Facebook. Go ahead and take your mobile devices out and follow us on Facebook, so that you can stay up to date with the great content that we are distributing
Danae Wolfe: Or it might be. Hey, sign up for this email challenge from this face to face program so that when your participants walk away from that programming, they can. They're still engaging with you. They're still engaging with your content.
Danae Wolfe: So does anybody have examples of how they've done that strategically in the past.
Danae Wolfe: And again, feel free to unmute yourselves here.
Danae Wolfe: Create a WhatsApp group Nora son, so you can continue the conversation.
Danae Wolfe: Any other ideas or any other examples of how you've created this hybrid strategy.
powers-barker.1: This is Patrice. Um, one thing that it's very early stages, but working with OFA, and the new homebuyers
powers-barker.1: They do an online test through OFA, and then the educators talk with them and it's on a phone conversation. So we never see them, but it's about their personal details and information and then my hope is that our next step. But this is kind of down the road.
powers-barker.1: Maybe it's quarterly updates by email or maybe it's a website or something like that that we have some ongoing contact with them as new homeowners in the future.
Danae Wolfe: Yeah, so, Patrice that's such a great example. Right. So you're giving them different opportunities to still engage with you, even when they're not like in front of you, face to face, and that's what this hybrid strategy is all about.
Danae Wolfe: So some other ideas that we're getting trying to get everyone an email newsletter. That's great.
Danae Wolfe: collecting email addresses, I cannot overstate the importance of getting people's email addresses email addresses sometimes change but not very often. Right. Sometimes we get bounce backs, but
Danae Wolfe: Getting people's contact information is huge because email newsletters are one of the greatest ways that we can reach people social media is great too. But as you might know, and we'll talk about on our Wednesday session.
Danae Wolfe: Facebook doesn't always feed our content to our followers. Right. So statistically, what they say is only two to 5% of your Facebook followers will ever even see your content.
Danae Wolfe: Unless they make a point to actually go to your Facebook page, which is probably unlikely. That's not how many of us use Facebook.
Danae Wolfe: A couple of ideas here, Instagram, Facebook scavenger hunt at the county fair. That's a great example of sort of a hybrid strategy there in person, but they're also engaging and an online world training in person and office hours. Yes.
Danae Wolfe: Remind group chats to share content with each other after virtual meetings Cobra clips video information for for each clients via social me. These are all great examples. So some of you are already engaging in this hybrid strategy.
Danae Wolfe: And I'm going to give you guys sort of a framework that you can use to think about actually how you can blueprint this out like kind of map out the different pieces of content.
Danae Wolfe: To strategically move people in word on that Web of engagement and that'll make more sense as we get to to that piece of the session. So my, my biggest piece of
Danae Wolfe: Guidance here is to don't silo your content out. Don't think about
Danae Wolfe: What happens on Facebook is existing in this silo completely aside from what happens during your face to face program, think about
Danae Wolfe: Like if you have a certain educational topic, think about that as like a campaign. Right. And under that campaign, you will have a portfolio of content. Some of it will be high touch some of it will be high tech
Danae Wolfe: Think of that that portfolio as being your program right your big P program so avoid sort of siloed things out and thinking about it very individually.
Danae Wolfe: The biggest thing here is we want to avoid that engagements. We don't want people to walk out of a face to face event.
Danae Wolfe: And have no idea how to continue engaging with us. We want them to follow us on Facebook.
Danae Wolfe: We want them to come to our webinar. We want them to sign up for our email listserv so that we can continue to hang on to them and continue to move them in Word.
Danae Wolfe: On that web of engagement. So avoid those dead ends always give people that stepping stone forward so they know exactly how to continue engaging
Danae Wolfe: And in order to do this, you really have to strategize. I think
Danae Wolfe: As an educator, I can admit that I was all over the place, right. I never just sat down and mapped out programs. I was doing an ad hoc program here and some ad hoc social media work over here and my email.
Danae Wolfe: List over here. I wasn't really strategizing I didn't have this like blueprint that I developed for myself. And I think that that blueprint is really key to being impactful.
Danae Wolfe: When it comes to social media, in particular, I mentioned earlier that a lot of what I have seen on social media is people just using it as a platform to market face to face programs.
Danae Wolfe: And I think we have to move away from that and into the idea that Facebook is a really powerful program as our other social media platforms for actually teaching and educating and creating impact on a platform that
Danae Wolfe: Is never really face to face. You don't have to be face to face to have a really strong impact with your clientele.
Danae Wolfe: Those of you who have attended digital engagement sessions with me in the past have probably heard me say this before.
Danae Wolfe: When it comes to social media. I've often heard people say things like well
Danae Wolfe: It's really difficult to measure impact on Facebook. It's really difficult to measure impact on Twitter. So why should I bother investing time in it when I can't get those measurable goals.
Danae Wolfe: And what I always come back with is, when is the last time we have measured the impact of a fact sheet.
Danae Wolfe: When is the last time we've measured the impact of a peer reviewed journal article. We don't. We can measure reach and we can measure engagement.
Danae Wolfe: But it's very difficult to measure the impact of a fact sheet that's just living out there on the web.
Danae Wolfe: With social media. I don't want to say that it's impossible to measure impact because there are some ways that we can think about. And a lot of that is just again being strategic
Danae Wolfe: And if you have a social media campaign all around a particular issue. And this is where the outcomes come into place. It's really, what do you want to accomplish here, identifying those metrics of success up front and then finding ways to collect that information.
Danae Wolfe: Oftentimes with social media, though. I like to think about it as a vector to get people
Danae Wolfe: To move inward on the path of engagement. So you start with social media to create awareness.
Danae Wolfe: But then, from social media, you start to really develop relationships with people and then they start to attend face to face programs or then they sign up for your email lists or then they attend that webinar and you're moving them in Word.
Danae Wolfe: So some of the outcomes that you might develop for yourself. I like to think about this as the dime method di m e, which stands for diversify inform market or
Danae Wolfe: Engage and educate so diversify is I think one of the best ways that we can use social media is by just thinking about
Danae Wolfe: diversifying the audience's that we reach there might be some audiences who due to some sort of constraints in their life. They may never come to one of your face to face programs.
Danae Wolfe: And that's okay. We can still reach those audiences through platforms like social media and the great thing is social media is free.
Danae Wolfe: And even though you might not reach all of your followers. If you are creating high quality consistent content you can reach a lot of people and have a lot of impact there.
Danae Wolfe: You can also use Facebook or other social platforms as a means to inform people
Danae Wolfe: So this might be just like you could be informing your for each advisors have certain deadlines or your for each families have certain deadlines. Same with like Master Gardeners
Danae Wolfe: I see a lot of people using Facebook groups for dedicated audience segments. So you might have like a Facebook group that's private just for your for each family's in your county
Danae Wolfe: Same with a master gardener group, we'd have that in summit County, which was really effective.
Danae Wolfe: We're stuck in this market bubble, though, for the most part, again, most of us are only using Facebook as a means to market.
Danae Wolfe: Programs that are traditional face to face programs, we want to move to that engage and educate, we want to move to
Danae Wolfe: A platform where we can actually engage our audiences meaningfully and then educate them on important topics. And again, move them inward on that path of engagement or that web of engagement.
Danae Wolfe: Any questions about anything I've said so far before we head into this quick framework that I'll show you. And then I'm going to drop a link eventually when I can find it into the chat box, which is a
Danae Wolfe: Syllable PDF of this framework, this life framework and you can actually work through that either individually or with any teams that you're working on. It's just sort of like it kind of helps you map out different types of content your audiences. What they care about.
Danae Wolfe: But before we head into this. Any questions or comments from anyone.
Danae Wolfe: I get really excited when I talk about digital engagement. So I tend to talk really quickly, which I think like some people feel like it's just a whirlwind. So if I'm going too fast.
Danae Wolfe: Please just stop me.
Danae Wolfe: And don't hesitate to continue typing questions into that chat box.
chapman.894: This is Rachel.
Danae Wolfe: Cherry Joe
chapman.894: From Medina County. I just had a really quick question. Um, first of all, great information is all very, very interesting. But I wondered what your thoughts were about, like, you know, engaging across like multiple platforms versus like focusing really hard on one platform.
Danae Wolfe: My best advice is, it depends on who you're trying to reach and I will give you an anecdote and I, some of you have heard me say this, or tell this story before as well.
Danae Wolfe: Years ago I was in a program, we were teaching a digital engagement session. And somebody asked the question I'm on Twitter because my supervisor told me to create a Twitter account and it was a two part question. How do I
Danae Wolfe: Teach my county folks how to use Twitter because most of them don't use it. They don't know how to use it. And then how do I get them to follow my county on Twitter so that we can use this as a delivery platform for them.
Danae Wolfe: What's wrong with this question.
Danae Wolfe: If your audience isn't on Twitter. Why are you
Danae Wolfe: Right, we need to go where audiences are so Rachel. My advice for you. And this kind of helps you work the fly framework that I'm going to teach helps work you through this. You start with identifying who is your audience.
Danae Wolfe: Who is your audience. What do they care about, how do we frame our content to really hook them based on what they care about, not what we care about.
Danae Wolfe: And then What platforms are you going to use to engage those audiences, depending on who your audiences are you might be engaging different audiences on different platforms.
Danae Wolfe: And this is another I think default that I tend to find an extension professionals, is we just tend to regurgitate a bunch of stuff on social media. We just tend to like use it as a sort of a dumping grounds for content.
Danae Wolfe: Without any real strategy behind. Who am I trying to reach here really and with what message so
Danae Wolfe: You might have a better idea of kind of how to work through this after I get through this model. And I think it looks like Amy put the link to that.
Danae Wolfe: That syllable PDF in the chat box. So thank you so much, Amy for that and you can open up this link and kind of follow along with me if you're interested.
Danae Wolfe: I'm not going to. I'm going to do like a super high level of this this framework starting first with so the life framework l i F e
Danae Wolfe: Stands for learn interpret frame and engage and in that first portion. What we want to do is learn about our audiences. So we identify who is our audience.
Danae Wolfe: And what do like What do they care about what What challenges are they facing. What needs do they have what opportunities do they have in their community.
Danae Wolfe: And then we start to kind of develop out in the marketing world what we would call character profiles. So in the marketing world. They go, as in depth as creating a name for this character.
Danae Wolfe: And going and finding a stock image that represents this character and basically you're developing a profile of a person that represents a broader audience group.
Danae Wolfe: And for any given educational topic, you might have
Danae Wolfe: Five or 10 different audience segments that are interested in that group, but instead of just saying, like, we're going to, we're going to give out a bunch of information that we hope is relevant to everyone.
Danae Wolfe: Which probably isn't the case. We're actually going to separate out these audience segments. Each one is like cares about something different.
Danae Wolfe: And we're going to dig a little bit deeper. Figure out what they care about and then create content and use delivery platforms that are specific to those audiences.
Danae Wolfe: One of the examples that I tend to like to use because I've used it so much now.
Danae Wolfe: Is if you wanted to teach like a pesticide safety course for backyard like home gardeners are just homeowners in your community and maybe you like you're driving down the road, just like I always do when you see a lot of people out like spraying
Danae Wolfe: Pesticides in their yard without wearing like proper protective gear right there out like sandals and their kids are playing in the yard and they're out just spraying pesticides like to kill the weeds in their driveway.
Danae Wolfe: How are you going to teach this right so you could start by identifying who are the various like audience segments that would care about this. Well, we might have just the regular LIKE HOMEOWNER
Danae Wolfe: That uses pesticides on a regular basis. You might have Master Gardener volunteers be another audience segment. You may even include
Danae Wolfe: Skeptics people who hate any and all chemicals and think that they should be banned across the entire world that might be another audience segment who you might be able to pull into the conversation with the right content framing.
Danae Wolfe: So once you have those character profiles sort of built out. Now we start to interpret the needs of these audiences, so
Danae Wolfe: My background. I used to work for the National Park Service as an interpretive park ranger and my job was to basically translate
Danae Wolfe: The park resources, whether they were cultural, historical or natural resources, translate those resources into things that people care about and we call those interpretive themes
Danae Wolfe: So if we were talking about the bald eagles that nest in the National Park. For some people, bald eagles represent freedom. It represents America.
Danae Wolfe: For other people bald eagles represent a comeback story. It represents conservation.
Danae Wolfe: And as a Park Ranger, I would have to On The Spot identify what does this person care about how do I engage them in this beautiful story of bald eagles nesting in the park where there was once no evils in the park left
Danae Wolfe: So you sort of have to get into the heads of people here.
Danae Wolfe: So if you were talking about, let's say those skeptics who hate any and all chemicals. Well, why did they not like chemicals.
Danae Wolfe: For some people, that emotional connection or intellectual connection might be the health of the Earth. It might be the health of like natural resources. Other people might care about human health or health of animals.
Danae Wolfe: Each of those are entirely separate emotional connections. So if you frame the issue as an environmental health issue, but your person couldn't care less about environmental health. Let's hope that's not true.
Danae Wolfe: But if your person doesn't care about the health of the natural world, you're not going to be able to hook them.
Danae Wolfe: By having this wrong interpretive theme. So it's important to like interpret the needs of your audience and what once you've done that.
Danae Wolfe: You can start to frame your messaging. So you start to think about what is the actual message that we want to send to these people.
Danae Wolfe: And I like to divvy this out into both positive framing and negative framing so positive framing would be something like if you use pesticides responsibly in your yard.
Danae Wolfe: And if we're thinking about this from the environmental perspective, if you're using pesticides responsibly and your yard, you will
Danae Wolfe: Maybe have a yard filled with insects and I realized that might not be great for a lot of people, because typically pesticides, like you don't want insects.
Danae Wolfe: But for me, as a bug lover. I want to see beneficial bugs in my yard so you frame it as you'll have a lot of beneficial bugs in your yard and they'll take care of the past, that's a positive framing.
Danae Wolfe: Negative framing of that exact same thing would be if you're not using pesticides responsibly. If you're not using IP and practices, you're going to be maybe overloaded with
Danae Wolfe: Pests insects and you won't have any beneficial insects and maybe you won't have any birds because you don't have any bugs for the birds to eat.
Danae Wolfe: So positive and negative framing. Another topic that we could address with this would be healthy eating.
Danae Wolfe: If you eat healthy, if you eat a lot of healthy fruits and vegetables and whole grains, you're a less risk of getting cardiovascular diseases.
Danae Wolfe: If you don't eat healthy, and this is the negative framing, you will be at increased risk for cardiovascular disease.
Danae Wolfe: You're sending the same exact message, but some people will respond to the negative framing and other people will respond to the positive framing. You can do both. You can do both in different pieces of content again that comes back to sort of the strategy and the blueprint.
Danae Wolfe: Finally, it's time to start engaging your audiences. Now that you've thought through, who your audiences are. What do they care about. How are you going to frame the message.
Danae Wolfe: Now you get to decide what delivery platforms are we going to use. So Rachel. This kind of goes back to your question is do we use multiple platforms to engage the same people. It really depends on what your objectives are really depends on what you're trying to accomplish here.
Danae Wolfe: We do know that in terms of content types video is king of content, especially on social media platforms infographics tend to do really well.
Danae Wolfe: We know that posts with images do better than text based posts alone.
Danae Wolfe: But this is where you really start to identify my master gardeners are probably using Snapchat, so I'm not going to use Snapchat to reach them. I'm probably going to use Facebook to reach them.
Danae Wolfe: I might have a group of farmers who aren't using Facebook. So in that case, I might have to think about a face to face event or maybe a zoom webinar or something they'd be more formal. So it really just depends on who your audiences are
Danae Wolfe: So I told you we come back to this web of engagement here. So if we think about the level of engagement. Each wrong of that web represents a different
Danae Wolfe: Sort of stepping stone in that that path word to becoming an advocate of this topic to creating real impactful change.
Danae Wolfe: So we start first with awareness those outer rung sort of become awareness and I like thinking about this as a web
Danae Wolfe: As opposed to just like a linear path because people might become aware of this issue in a variety of ways. It might be social media.
Danae Wolfe: It might be a flyer that they see hanging at their local library. It might be word of mouth from a friend. So there's all these different points that people can enter into this broad educational topic.
Danae Wolfe: Next is the trial experience than the deep learning. And then finally, in the middle we have advocacy.
Danae Wolfe: So this is kind of what this looks like. We want to think strategically about each of these each of these rungs of the web.
Danae Wolfe: And then as you start to map out different content again what content are you going to create
Danae Wolfe: To help people become aware of this issue that you're trying to make them aware of. So in this case, we might start with a social media campaign.
Danae Wolfe: In order to do a trial experience. We might invite people to a face to face workshop
Danae Wolfe: For that more deeper learning to happen. We might invite them to take an online course and earn certification in this topic.
Danae Wolfe: And then finally for advocacy, we might say, hey, we'd love for you to join our volunteer program so that you can help us send this message to a broader audience.
Danae Wolfe: This is what we mean when we talk about building out a blueprint.
Danae Wolfe: So now the question becomes, are you going to do this for every single thing that you ever teach as an extension educator or program support staff and the answer is no.
Danae Wolfe: When you think about this level of sort of mapping your content out on delivery platforms and content types.
Danae Wolfe: You're really going to do this with some of that higher level like big impactful stuff right so this would be if you're thinking about how to address high level stuff like the opioid epidemic or healthy eating or
Danae Wolfe: Water quality issues across the state. This would be probably a lot of county level or even state level programming as opposed to like you as an individual educator doing this.
Danae Wolfe: That said you as an individual educator may find a lot of benefit into sort of thinking about this strategy, especially if you have like a campaign that you're trying to do in your county around a particular area.
Danae Wolfe: So sort of some final words here is we tend to have a very technology driven conversation when we talk about innovation and we talk about things like social media.
Danae Wolfe: I hear a lot of people like that that Twitter anecdote that I mentioned, like somebody saying, well, my, my supervisor told me that I should be on Twitter because other people are on Twitter to
Danae Wolfe: It's never about the technology. It's about what the technology can do for us.
Danae Wolfe: And if you don't think that that technology is going to be beneficial if you know that your clientele are not going to be using that technology, then don't use it right we use technology as a means to enhance our programming.
Danae Wolfe: So I'll leave you with these final words technology should always enhance it should engage and it should educate, it should never
Danae Wolfe: Next slide here, it should never confuse people. It should never clutter what you're trying to accomplish, and it should never complicate your programming technology is there to really help us.
Danae Wolfe: And if you get to a point where like this just doesn't make sense for what I'm doing. Then don't use it. It's as simple as that. Don't try to force it just because it seems like the right thing to do.
Danae Wolfe: So that was a lot of information in sort of a very short amount of time. I do have some resources here.
Danae Wolfe: This is basically my favorite STOCK IMAGE and stock video resources. Some of you have heard me say some of these before. My favorite one is raw pixel, which has
Danae Wolfe: It's my favorite, because it represents a huge diversity of people
Danae Wolfe: So, particularly for those people who are working highly diverse counties. If you're struggling to find stock images that are really representative of the demographics that you work with.
Danae Wolfe: raw pixel is one of the greatest I think imagery sources to pull pictures from you can sign up for a free account and you'll have access to a lot of free images.
Danae Wolfe: If you pay, it's a fairly inexpensive fee to buy like an individual like year license and it gives you access to all their premium photos as well. And it's just it's a beautiful, beautiful.
Danae Wolfe: Assortment of stock images and then for graphic design, you can use services like kanda to create social media graphics will do a canvas 101 course on Friday of this week to get just started with Canada.
Danae Wolfe: And then I picked a chart is really great for infographics.
Danae Wolfe: And I should have put some video resources on here too. We're recommending if you're trying to create like short videos you can either use Adobe spark, which is great. We had a session last Friday that was recorded and it's on our LED site.
Danae Wolfe: You can also use Adobe Premiere rush as a very simplified video editing program and we do have access to Adobe Premiere rush through our creative cloud license, so everybody can get access to that as well. So there's lots of great stuff out there.
Danae Wolfe: With that, I will open it up in the last 15 minutes or so that we have for questions, comments.
Danae Wolfe: Does this feel like something you might use does it seem overwhelming. Has anybody used programs or frameworks like this in the past to help you really strategize about programming.
Danae Wolfe: I see some thumbs up from some people
Danae Wolfe: People are quiet today.
Danae Wolfe: Must be all that that zoomed out everybody's just going back
Danae Wolfe: Well, we will stick around here for a little while. So if you have questions or comments, we will be on our LED team.
Danae Wolfe: And we can help you with some of that stuff. Otherwise, I would just like to say a huge thank you to everybody for being on today, don't hesitate to reach out if you need anything.
Danae Wolfe: Our session tomorrow at 1pm is going to be a design principles. So we have Cassie Dietrich on
Danae Wolfe: And she will be basically doing like a design one on one class, which I'm super thrilled about because she's going to dig into like some of the brain science about the importance of proper design and even like
Danae Wolfe: branding and things like that. So it's going to be a great session. I'm super excited about that one. So thanks, everybody, for being on I'm going to go ahead and stop recording now, but we will stick around for you.
