Technology Plumbing: Social Networking and your Community Projects

One of the fun parts of this blog is keeping current on trends in the industry and passing them on the readers of this blog, who hopefully enjoy them and pass them on to their friends and associates and so on. Today I want to pass on how to use social networking to better promote your community projects.

In this case they are promoting a local farmers market and while they have done all of the normal promotions such as sandwich boards, flyers and even e-mail, they have also brought in Facebook, Twitter and Blogging (#ftb) as well as pictures via Flickr. The use of social networking, especially Twitter, made the communication interactive and viral and brought the community events to the attention of many more people than would have been aware of it had they relied solely on traditional means of communication.

The fact that some of the more esoteric items (e.g. zucchini flowers) sold out (that usually don't) after the social network started talking about a great recipe for them, is testament to the power of social networking and a good reason for you to leverage these tools in your community project.

Key points:

Take the same content you would use in traditional communication methods, as well as the kind of things you would talk about with your friends and neighbors, and push them out via Twitter in small chunks. This will take you from broadcasting to conversation.
Capture what people are doing as part of your community project (potato salad recipes using food bought at the farmers market) and blog about it, which can be pushed out to Twitter (as I have previously written about).
Use the interactiveness of social networking to evolve your community event and your communication on it. Post those pictures of that nice cherry pie!

For more details on how they promoted their local farmers market check out the video