On May 12 and 13, 2011, Euforic Services facilitated a social media masterclass organised by EADI in Bonn. This workshop built on previous introductory and basic web2.0 trainings we had co-organized with EADI in 2008 and 2009, as well as on the one day advanced session with the NEDS network in Switzerland in 2010.
The session was designed to be participatory, more of a peer exchange than a formal training. We knew that participants had a lot of experience already in social media, with most of them having using it for several years in their daily lives and work. We wanted to tap into their experiences and make sure they had space to share knowledge amongst themselves as well as hear our ideas.
A pre-workshop survey helped us to assess participants’ level of knowledge and understand more of their expectations. Once we met face to face, we started off with a new (to us) icebreaker, adopting from Beth Kanter the ‘twitter on paper’ exercise.
The main focus of the first day was on what it means to be online today, what has changed in the past two years in terms of the social media toolkit and approaches to using the tools. We brought in examples of how other organisations are leveraging social media to strengthen their online presence, showing which channels they use to communicate and converse online. In particular, we looked at how to set up your social media management centre. We use the term to describe a simple but effective listening dashboard which can be used to tap into conversations on the social web; to select, share and archive relevant content; and to aggregate, curate and republish to reach and engage with your different audiences.
On the second day, we started with a discussion on tools and approaches to measuring online activity, on your website as well as on other social media channels you might use. Among others, we discussed the concept of Crowdmarketeers that our former colleague Chris Addison (now at IFPRI) had presented just one week before during the KM Impact Challenge unConference.
Last but not least, a discussion on social media strategy and policy gave participants all the elements to define their own social media projects. Participants then split into 3 groups and worked on a fictional scenario. Their task was to define a social media strategy to support a specific business process. A plenary discussion of the working groups closed the workshop.
The format, design and content of the workshop worked well. Participants were actively engaged throughout the two days and they all felt they had either learned something new or seen different aspects of using social media that they were not aware of or hadn't paid enough attention to. They all went home with clear, actionable ideas and it will interesting to keep track of how these develop, and what useful lessons can be shared back again with the rest of the group.
From our side, the feedback received was very valuable and we’ll use it in the design of future sessions.