Team Work - A Proposal Including some Guidelines Insights and…
Team Work - A Proposal, Including some Guidelines, Insights and Experiences
Social Media Experience and Insights
I’ve been studying social media quite extensively, in the theoretical and practical sense,
also from a psychological perspective in my research,
( my background in research includes also social psychology,
and I’ve been studying online collaboration issues )
and I (co)manage many different pages and groups on social media ( mostly facebook )
for different initiatives and organisations.
And what I’ve noticed is that every page and every community is very different,
and it’s hard to find a set to toolkit in the box of practices and styles that would be
‘one size fits all’ . One advice that is good and works in one place
can be “not very proper” in another place.
Obviously it’s also about knowing the community, and what energy brings them together.
It is also about what practices and styles are common in the community.
So I would say, the engagement is more about quality than quantity.
That’s why, we have to keep being attentive, listen, and learn as we go. We can also constantly learn and improve and adjust our practices.
Diversity
I think the strong point of Edgeryders is it’s community diversity.
We have a lot of different people in the community and it makes it unique.
I would propose making it a team work,
like I was proposing for making Lote3,
so instead of just taking a lead,
I proposed making a social media team
(with coordination)
We could encourage the community members
to propose the content they would like to be featured
and in this way we would keep the diversity
in the way we present edgeryders to the world.
It could make it much more interesting and involving.
Focus on the people
In the social media it’s important to give impression
that the community is made of people
that contribute in unique ways.
Also, as I was emphasizing in our social media campaigns for lote3
acknowledging everyone’s unique contributions is important.
Engaging on social media
As part of the policy for social media campaign for lote3
we wanted to bring all the discussions to the platform
and the facebook page updates created a form of a newsletter.
The aim was not to create more engagement on the facebook platform,
but people were encouraged to continue discussions on the platform.
It also has benefits of keeping the conversations, and not losing them in the crowd of facebook posts. This way we can actually develop projects from the discussions much more easily and build more engagement in making something happen, instead of just liking and commenting.
In other words the policy was “we did not like facebook” and spreading facebook links around,
( https://edgeryders.eu/lote-social-media-team/task-1392-1400 )
and as not all the community members had even used facebook ( for obvious reasons )
This policy can be easily changed if we decide that we do want to develop the facebook presence and engagement on the facebook platform.
But this might not directly lead to increasing engagement on the platform.
So we have to be careful how we do it, to get the best results.
Posting a lot
If we want to focus on engagement and encouraging to participate in projects
it’s better to focus on quality than quantity.
When a page is posting a lot, posts are displayed to much less users of the social network news feed, and much less engaging. So it’s not likely that people will notice all the content or that it will create engagement.
( People can even unsubscribe because the page is ‘spamming them’ with too much posts in their feed, so they don’t have the balance to keep up with other news feed )
Another thing is if one person commits to make posts many times a day and every day, it’s quite likely that he/she will have a burn out very soon, and also the posts will not be as interesting as if someone with a lot of motivation was posting them.
That’s another reason for a team work.
Team Work
Teamwork is also more in the spirit of edgeryders, and encouraging the diversity and inclusion.
We could also possibly apply the economy app and mozilla open badges to reward the team for their contributions.
It could also include financial rewards if there was ressources available.
And we could also possibly experiment with the budgets for some additional content.
But maybe the main strength and attraction would be involvement and participation, and the financial aspects would not play the primary role.
This would probably need coordination, as an extended version of the social media team.
So in this case I could volunteer for example to coordinate the contributions and encourage the community to make their contributions.
Again it would promote inclusiveness, diversity, participation and engagement.
Maybe if we had just one social media content creator we would ourselves get bored quickly having lots of posts per day in the same style, and even the most engaged people would not have the time and attention span to read it all 
not to mention the community (busy with catching up with lots of other pages and initiatives) and even less the potential new audience.
The benefits of teamwork is that we can also use the diversity of our skills and styles and learn from each other. It could also contribute to making it a creative experience and a project in itself, collaborative inclusive making things happen and making an impact together.
We could combine all our projects proposals, styles and experiences,
combining professional approaches with more personal approaches,
focusing on productivity, making things happen with the community,
and the professional “packaging”.
An experiment in distributed social media management ( with coordination)
but focused on the community,
Exercising the distributed Think Tank qualities in practice.
and our ability to work together in a collaborative ways.
Experimenting, creating and implementing different content types, and different forms of campaigns can also get much more attention and participation, than monotonous ways of posting. Teamwork and collaborative approach can make it happen.
“People are here for the people”
Engagement is stronger if we are making something together in a participatory inclusive ways, and if we can all meetup in real life. I think Lote is a strong aspect of building engagement, and the perspective of meeting in real life with the community is a strong motivation for getting involved. That’s why I could encourage a lot of engagement while making lote4.
Platform tours and connecting to people and projects
For encouraging people to create new content on the platform it’s good to know the platform well and know the specifics of it. Very often people ‘from the edge’ like challenges and they prefer to use ‘non obvious’ tools made by community such as the edgeryders platform might appear for some people. This is why we have the welcome calls to give first ‘tutorials’ and ‘tours’ to the newcomers, and try to engage them in a more personalised ways.
Sign ups
As we know from welcome calls, the number of sign ups does not indicate the measure of engagement. I think it’s more important to encourage engagement, instead of just sign ups in big quantities, as then everything is “spread thin”. We have many non active members already.
Many people sign up, but then they do not follow up with the platform and the community.
This is why it’s more important to encourage new members to actually engage. This is what I could ( keep on) volunteer for as well.
Building things together in a collaborative and inclusive ways
While taking a lead on something we should remember to keep the openness and inclusiveness. This is also the case for social media strategies. When committing to coordinate the social media content creation and engagement, we should remember to make it inclusive and inviting. Also welcoming the diversity.
We should show the strong points of edgeryders, also in the ways of social media expressions, image and PR.
Thats why showing diversity and being inclusive in the well coordinated team work could work best.
Twitterstorms
If we want to give some news more publicity, we could engage the social media team and the community to join twitterstorms, and tools like thunderclap, and measure the social media engagement with the appropriate tools. This can create a big social media impact if we’ll make it a team work and if we’ll have the inclusive participation, so that the community feels that they are not only supporting something, but they are included in building something together.
Newsletters
I would also use the community newsletter to encourage everyone to participate in our activities and building projects together, and also to keep contributing to creating social media content. Of course also to build engagement and participation in making lote4 and encourage the social media buzz in the “usual” ways.
Social Media Engagement Agenda
Like in the lote3 campaigns, in the social media team we would post the Agenda of important events and news to spread in appropriate time frames, with links to the content we want to share, and appropriate hashtags, this would help to create a bigger impact and “trending” in the social media. Again it’s important that community is not only supporting something but in included in building something together. So again inclusion and participation.
Time frame
I plan to implement these ‘strategies’ in the coming weeks and months while building engagement for making lote, but also “lote as a process” . So over the next few months I’m planning to encourage such engagement.
Measurements
Except obvious quantitative metrics of engagement, the most important metrics is how much interesting things and projects we have to present on our social channels, this means focusing on being productive together and then sharing what impact we have made.
So I would say, Let’s all work together
)