What’s your social media personality How it helps or hinders networking implementation and success in early education settings

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Fran Simon is the Chief Engagement Officer of Engagement Strategies, LLC, her own national marketing, social media and early education publishing consulting company. She has been a professional Early Childhood educator and a passionate technologist

since 1981. Early in her career as a multi-site child care administrator, she learned that her ability to use technology to accomplish her goals was one of the most powerful skills in her administrative toolkit. Fran also used those skills in her positions at Teaching Strategies, Inc., the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, and as a Board Member and Vice President of the Technology and Young Children Interest Forum of NAEYC.

Chip Donohue, PhD, is the Director of Dis-tance Learning at Erikson Institute in Chicago and a Senior Fellow of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media. He is a leader in the innovative use of technology and distance

learning methods to increase access, create pathways, enhance learning, and improve teaching practices in early childhood education. He spends lots of time playing with new technology tools to enable relationships and build learning communities online.

What’s your social media personality?How it helps or hinders networking implementation and success

byFranSimonandChipDonohue

Social media is all the rage. Your board members and front office staff are all atwitter about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The parents want an online group to connect with other parents and hear about classroom news. Your staff members want new ways to connect with each other and the parents. And, all of your stakeholders want you to produce a blog or an email newsletter instead of a print newsletter. Expecta-tions are high. What are you doing about all of this interest?

In my role as a social media consultant, and Chip’s work in online learning, we have identified five personalities at play

when it comes to social media adoption in early childhood (or any field, for that matter!). What is your social media per-sonality, and how does it impact your program’s use of social media? Find your personality in the list below:

n The Resistor: You are dead set against the idea of using computers to com-municate when good, old-fashioned face-to-face networking and promo-tion has worked all of these years. Your core challenge: How do you respond to the pressure you feel from others who are sure social media is the best development since Froebel?

n The Intimidated: You want to use social networking, but you don’t know how to get started. It’s all very foreign, confusing, and scary. You would rather keep your head low and hope the excitement dies down. Your core challenge: How do you move forward without admitting you have no idea what ‘social networking’ means? How do you handle your technology anxiety?

n The Personal User: You have a per-sonal Facebook page or LinkedIn pro-file. You use it to connect with friends, family, colleagues, and classmates. Your core challenge: You can’t envision how anything called ‘social network-ing’ can possibly be used in your

professional work, or how it can help your program. You are stymied about how to apply what you know about social media to your challenges as an administrator.

n The Tester: You ‘get it!’ You’ve been watching and interacting with other programs and organizations that have Facebook business pages and groups or LinkedIn groups. You set up a pres-ence for your program on Facebook, but nothing happened! Now what? Your core challenge: You don’t know how to get people to join in and inter-act with your social media pages, and you are worried about how much time it will take to manage the additional work of maintaining these presences.

n The Expert: Your organization has a Facebook page with hundreds of ‘fans’ who are using the page for everything from play dates to com-municating about developmentally appropriate practice. You use Twitter to broadcast news and learn the latest developments in the field, and you use LinkedIn to recruit and communicate with staff. Your core challenge: You want to make sure your staff, board, and parents understand and apply best practice in social media, and you want to continue to use it to raise money, hire staff, advocate in your community, and increase enrollment.

Reprinted with permission from Exchange magazine.Visit us at www.ChildCareExchange.com or call (800) 221-2864.Multiple use copy agreement available for educators by request.

Why “The Resistor” plays an important role in social media adoption

It’s counterintuitive: People who resist change can actually be good for the process of implementing change. Think about it: Resistance slows momentum down. While that’s not always good, when a freight train is running amok, resistance is great. And, the frenzy about social media sometimes causes people and organizations to gain too much momentum too quickly. Far too many organizations rushed to put up a Twit-ter presence or Facebook page without ever considering why they were doing it, what they hoped to achieve, and how it would be maintained. Social media resis-tors cause excitement and hoopla to die down, so there’s time to contemplate the tough questions. They force the advo-cates among us to make a case for why we want to implement this new, time-consuming initiative, think through our goals, and question if the medium is right for our organization. Convincing resistors

daily life as brushing your teeth:

• Facebook has more than 400 million active users, and 50% of them log on to Facebook on any given day. That’s 175 million users every 24 hours.

• People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

• More than 700,000 local businesses have active pages on Facebook.

• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans.

• Mothers have become a target audience for ads on Facebook.

Clearly, a lot of eyes are on Facebook, but that’s just part of the social media story.

• LinkedIn has over 70 million members.

• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second.

• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

LinkedIn and Facebook are just the tip of the social media iceberg. For

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is a good exercise. It can be the roadmap to careful planning that we all need.

Facing your core challenge: How to respond to the hype, use your good judgment, and accept the inevitable

We wish we could say that it would be okay for you to just say “no” to social media, but in fact, we can’t. It’s time to con-sider that you must ‘deal’ with social me-dia. A simple search on Google will reveal millions of articles about why businesses (and that includes early childhood pro-grams) and non-profit organizations need to use social media to achieve their goals. We could write for days on the topic, but instead, we’ll focus on four critical points:

1) Social media is pervasive. In fact, it is so pervasive, and so mainstream, that even traditional media organizations like television and radio stations and newspapers use social networking to connect with their audiences. Here are a few statistics that illustrate how social media has become as much of a part of

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it. You need to be on social networking sites, if for no other reason, to know what is being said about your organization. People are going to post positive and negative comments about your program or organization on social media. Whether you like it or not, social networking forces transparency. Even if you are not online, you are exposed. You can let it happen without ever knowing, or you can be there to redirect the commenter or diffuse the situation. Don’t you think it’s better to at least know what’s being said?

It’s time to put down your dukes: Make way for a little acceptance and a lot of planning!

With the facts and figures as a backdrop, balance your healthy skepticism with good judgment and acceptance. Use your arguments against social media as the ba-sis for questions to guide your planning. Form a small group of trusted social me-

cally for your stakeholders. They write reviews that appeal to prospective par-ents, the parents of children enrolled in your program, prospective employees, and your current staff. AND, trust us, they ARE talking about and comparing child care programs. . . . Maybe even yours. Think about these facts:

• 53.3% of the total blogging popula-tion is 21-35 years old. Bloggers aged 20 and under came in second, with 20.2%, followed by 36-50-year-olds (at 19.4%), and 51-year-olds and older (7.1%).

• 70% of bloggers are organically talk-ing about brands on their blog.

• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews. (They do talk about child care, and parents read and respond to these posts!)

Social media is how people communicate in the 21st century. It’s time to accept

more eye-popping information and great guidance on social media, visit the Social Networking section of the Pew Internet and American Life Project website at www.pewinternet.org/topics/Social-Networking.aspx. The fact is, the data tells an important story: Social media and social networking are just impossible to ignore.

2) Your core constituency — parents, donors, board members, grant makers, colleagues, and staff members — are also core social media users! In fact, 62% of social media users are between the ages of 25 and 54 — the very face of all of the adult stakeholders in your organization. Besides connecting with friends and posting photos, what are they doing on these social networking sites? They are researching and becom-ing educated consumers of child care, donors, and advocates for their children and their communities. They are mak-ing important decisions based on what they hear from other people online. You have to be there. You cannot afford to be missed online. When it comes to marketing and communication, there’s an old adage that says, “Be where the people are,” and clearly, your people are on social media. They are the people you need for your organization. It’s time to be present.

3) Surprise! Your colleagues are on social media! More are joining every day.

If you find that hard to believe, check out the results of the Exchange InstaPoll on social media: www.childcareexchange.com/survey/poll_results.php?survey_id=219 If you are looking to connect with some of those folks, visit Fran’s ECE Social Media Directory at: www.esbyfs.com/socialece. If you would like to be added to the directory, complete the form at: www.surveymonkey.com/s/C7WR8HZ

4) There are thousands of bloggers focused on writing content specifi-

Top Social Media Sites for ECE

Facebook: http://Facebook.comWhat is it? A very social social networking siteWhy: EVERYONE is on Facebook, easy to use, high-interactivityBest for: Connecting with prospective parents, parents, staff, donorsMost important tool: ‘Organization Pages’

LinkedIn: http://LinkedIn.comWhat is it? A business-oriented networking siteWhy: Best for more serious business use, great for connecting with other profes-sionals for professional discussions and idea sharing, and great for recruiting staff. Most important tool: ‘LinkedIn Groups’

Twitter: http://Twitter.comWhat is it? A ‘Microblogging site’ in which users share links to great information and their thoughts in 140 characters or less Why: A very tight ECE community has grown on Twitter; best for getting the word out quickly Most important tool: ‘Hashtags’ make them your best friend!Caution: Learn about hashtags or Twitter won’t make sense to you

YouTube: http://YouTube.comWhat is it: A social networking site where video takes center stageWhy: Nothing tells a story as well as video; great for demonstrating DAP, convincing donors and policy- makers Most important tool: ‘Channels’

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• Watch your Facebook Wall News Feed to see the posts that other people and organizations make.

• Finally, make the Facebook Getting Started Guide your new BFF (Best Friend Forever): www.facebook.com/#!/help/?guide.

Making the leap from personal to professional use

After you’ve become acclimated as a per-sonal user, it will be time to start a page for your organization. You’ll want to take a look at a few resources as you begin to ease into building and managing Pages. Essentially, the techniques for for-profit businesses and non-profits are the same, but here are a few resources for both to get you started:

• Facebook Best Practices for Non-profits by Heather Mansfield, Diosa Commu-nications: www.diosacommunications.com/facebookbestpractices.htm

• Facebook Advice on Squidoo: www.squidoo.com/Facebookadvice

• Facebook On Mashable: http://mash-able.com/social-media/facebook/

You still may have questions about how all of this works, specifically for early care and education. It can be hard to cross over to the ability to apply social media to our field. Fortunately, we have some great examples for you. Let’s go on a brief social-media safari:

Children’s Defense Fund is one of the best examples for those of you who oper-ate non-profit membership, public policy, or advocacy organizations. CDF expertly intertwines Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media sites with their Email Marketing and website. It’s a social media marketing, outreach, fundraising, and advocacy bonanza! Website: www.ChildrensDefenseFund.org (Sign up for their email newsletter to see how it is integrated with their social media campaigns.)Facebook: www.facebook.com/

not mind having your grandmother read. And, you need to learn about your privacy settings on all of the social networking sites, and adjust them to the level that makes you comfortable. Next you’ll need to form a basic under-standing of Social Networking, and for that, we always recommend this brief and witty, but very informative video from CommonCraft, Social Networking in Plain English (www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking). While you’re at the CommonCraft site, take a look at the videos about Social Media, Social Bookmarking, Twitter, Wikis, Blogs, Podcasting, Online Photo Shar-ing, and RSS to round out your view of all social media has to offer. Spending a little time on the CommonCraft site will be fun, and will make you more comfortable forging ahead.

For more guidance and ideas, cull through the Resources for Newbie’s on Fran’s Engagement Strategies site at: www.esbyfs.com/socialmediaresources and www.esbyfs.com/web20ece.

Once you have the basic idea, you will want to focus on the sites that are easiest to manage and have the biggest impact. We recommend starting with just one social media site at a time, so let’s start with Facebook.

Facebook (http://Facebook.com) is de-signed to walk you through the first steps of setting up a personal profile and con-necting with others. You will want to get accustomed to the climate with a personal profile before you develop a page for your organization. The best ways to orient yourself is to:

• Connect with (or ‘Friend’) your per-sonal contacts and friends.

• Search for some organizations (like Exchange Press, World Forum Founda-tion, NAEYC, and NACCRRA, etc., for example) and ‘like’ their pages (which is the same as ‘friending’ your personal contacts).

dia savvy advisors to work through your concerns, develop a social media policy, and a high-level plan for getting involved in social media at a sane and rational pace that makes sense for your organization. Build in time for ample professional devel-opment, so you are well-informed about the tools you or your staff will use. Most of all, relax into the process with the knowl-edge that, as always, you will be leading the way for your program to get to the next level with new tools and techniques. Your leadership is nothing new, but the objec-tives and tactics have changed.

How to move from ‘Intimidated’ to confident social media user

So, we’ve convinced you that social media is important enough for you to take the first steps! We’re happy you’ve decided to join us! We know it can be overwhelm-ing, baffling, and maybe even a little bit anxiety-provoking, so here are a few resources that will make your exploration a little bit easier.

The first step is to banish the words “I’ll never get this” from your lexicon! Just as you mastered all you need to know to be a confident educator and administrator, you will master this, too. If children can ‘get it,’ so can you! If technophobia and social media anxiety are holding you back, just remember these key points:

• Social media (and computers for that matter) are relatively new in the history of the world. We were all ‘newbies’ once, and it wasn’t that long ago. Social networking, in the true sense of the concept, is less than a decade old. We all started with the same questions, fears, and concerns.

• You will not ‘break’ anything. Neither the Internet nor your computer will be broken by exploring social media.

• There are only two cautions: First, know that nothing on the Internet is truly private. Embrace this and learn to use it to your advantage. You should be care-ful to post only information you would

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ChildrensDefensedFundYouTube: www.youtube.com/user/childrensdefense (Video is central to CDF’s campaigns)Twitter: http://twitter.com/ChildDefenderLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=99638

The InvestiGator Club Page on Face-book is a page developed and hosted by Judith Coffey from Robert-Leslie Publishing. The page currently has around 9,000 ‘fans’ who are passionately engaged parents, ECE professionals, and other professionals. The page is an incredible example of interactivity and engagement on Facebook. This is a classic case study for how active and in-teractive you want your Facebook page to become. Take a look at The Investi- Gator Club page at www.facebook.com/InvestiGatorClub?ref=ts.

Teach Preschool by Deborah J. Stewart offers an incredible resource for teach-ers and other early childhood profes-sionals on her blogs, Twitter presence, and Facebook Pages. Deborah draws on her experiences as a teacher, direc-tor, curriculum writer, music director, and consultant for staff training and professional development to provide a steady stream of predictably exciting and interesting activities and resources for the field. Website: http://deborahjstewart.com/Blog: http://deborahjstewart.com/blog/Facebook: www.facebook.com/TeachpreschoolTwitter: http://twitter.com/teach_preschool There are many more outstanding ex-amples, but it can be hard to find them. Fran has compiled a list of Early Child-hood Educators on Social Media for her website. Engagement Strategies by Fran Simon, www.esbyfs.com/socialece. It’s a good place to start your personal ECE Social Media safari. You might also want

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27, 2010, from http://press.linkedin.com/

Donohue, C. (2010, September). There’s an app for (almost) everything: New technology tools for early childhood professionals — Part 2. Exchange, 195, 78-82.

Donohue, C. (2010, May). What’s in your toolbox? New technology tools for early childhood professionals — Part 1. Exchange, 194, 74-80.

Ehrlich, B. (n.d.). Look who’s blogging [STATS]. Social Media News and Web Tips — Mashable — The Social Media Guide. Retrieved July 27, 2010, from http://mashable.com/2010/06/04/look-whos-blogging-stats/

Hird, J. (2010, January 29). 20+ mind-blowing social media statistics revisited | Econsultancy. Econsultancy | Com-munity of Digital Marketing and Ecom-merce Professionals. Retrieved July 27, 2010, from http://econsultancy.com/blog/5324-20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited

Social Networking | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. (n.d.). Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved July 27, 2010, from www.pewinternet.org/ topics/Social-Networking.aspx

Warren, C. (n.d.). Moms on Facebook are savvy to marketers [STATS]. Social Media News and Web Tips — Mash-able — The Social Media Guide. Retrieved July 27, 2010, from http://mashable.com/2010/02/05/moms-on-facebook/

Wee, W. (2010, March 19). The social media age distribution [STATS] | Penn Olson. Penn Olson. Retrieved July 27, 2010, from www.penn-olson.com/2010/02/19/the-social-media-age-distribution-stats/

on a social media field trip to visit some of the best examples that demonstrate what you hope to achieve using social networking. Identify supporters and work with them to draft a social media policy that will help ease the fears of those who are reluctant.

b. Identify the people who can help you. Remember, you will need to maintain your presences, so you will need help from others for that task!

c. Use your committee to market the presences, and get others to con-nect and engage.

Approach Social Media Implementa-tion as you might approach curriculum implementation. Provide time for train-ing. Carve out time for staff to use your social media presences. Make resources available. Inform parents and board members. Develop achievable and measurable goals. Follow up, assess, and adjust as needed.

See you soon on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn . . .

References

About Us | LinkedIn — Public Rela-tions. (n.d.). LinkedIn. Retrieved July

to join the Internet4ECE Group (http://ow.ly/1EEYR) on LinkedIn for more tips and advice.

The most important thing you can do to extend your social media knowledge beyond personal use is to immerse your-self in the experience. Join online groups, ‘like’ Facebook Pages, visit the websites of similar organizations, and sign up for email newsletters. You have to experi-ence social media first hand to ‘get it.’ In order to cross over from personal user to professional user, it is even more critical to observe how businesses and organizations that are similar to yours use social media. What it takes to go from ‘You get it!’ to getting others to get ‘it’

Congratulations! You’ve mastered yet another critical and powerful skill to add to your administrative toolkit. Now’s it’s time to adopt the familiar role of passion-ate leader and evangelist to get people on the same page with you. Here are three final tips to help you move into the role of Social Media Maven for your program:

1) Take your organization’s social media temperature. Informally assess your stakeholders by talking about your experiences on social media and what you have learned. If all goes well, you also might conduct a survey to get more detailed information.

2) Sit down and establish your vision. Determine what you want to achieve, and set goals and objectives for your program’s use of social media. Prepare yourself with an ‘elevator speech’ about why social media will help your pro-gram, and arm yourself with persuasive counterpoints for naysayers.

3) Form a Social Media Committee of staff members, board members, influencers, advisors, and, of course, parents. a. Set up a projector, plug in the com-

puter, and take your new advisors

Connect with FranUsing Social Media

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