Small Places is an Amnesty music/arts/film festival that’s happening across Canada (and around the world) to promote human rights leading up to the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In Canada, we’re supporting a wide range of grassroots events, plus touring concerts from well-known music artists like David Usher and Alanis Morrisette and we’re relying heavily on our online presence to promote the event and generate buzz.
Right from the start we identified that we needed to have a social media strategy at the heart of the campaign - but with limited resources and a lot of ground to cover, what’s the best approach?
It’s one thing thing to say “we need to cover all of the major social networks”, but with every new node that you add to the mix there’s an increase in the maintenance costs, and also an extra draw on your available promotion and mobilization energy. Just how thin can you spread yourself before you completely lose focus, and end up miring your campaign in the mud?
We’ve had to focus on being as efficient as possible in our use of resources — it doesn’t make sense to be uploading videos into three or four different places, or cross-posting blog posts just to supply the different online streams. Our solution has been to set up a framework for feeding different types of content from one “home” location into the other streams via RSS feeds and widgets.
Here’s how we’ve arranged our social media architecture:
1. Blog on the Small Places website:
http://www.amnesty.ca/smallplaces/?cat=3
The web hub is our our Small Places micro site - built on Wordpress, allowing us to easily generate feeds and incorporate various widgets for youtube, flickr, other feeds, etc. This is where we post our blog entries, (tagged with ShareThis to allow for easy social bookmarking). We also direct traffic to our social media properties with large prominent buttons leading to Facebook, MySpace and Youtube. On the sidebar of the blog, we have set up a feed of Youtube videos in a mini-player - they are being fed from our Small Places Canada youtube channel.
2. Facebook fan page:
http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Small-Places-Tour-Canada/11885864986
Got quite a bit happening here … including favorites pages linking to the artists, latest blog posts are automatically displayed via an RSS reader, a feed of photos from Flickr, plus our video feed from YouTube. This helps to ensure that here, and a list of upcoming events (concerts) are posted here as Facebook events (individual events may be shared with facebook friends)
3. MySpace page:
http://www.myspace.com/smallplacescanada
This is the main location where we’re connecting with the musicians and artists and fans who support small places. We’re adding bands and performers as friends, and encouraging them to post amnesty-support messages on their own MySpace profiles. We’re feeding videos here from our Youtube channel.
4. YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/smallplacescanada
This is where we post our videos - mostly PSAs with supporting artists at the moment, but we will be mixing it up with more user-submitted video as we go along. These videos are automatically be fed into our blog and also onto our facebook page and MySpace page. This channel is where we tell our members/volunteers to upload their own videos of small places events, or send them to us to be posted.
5. Flickr
I don’t have the url handy at the moment, but we have a flickr channel set up to feed photos into various locations, including our blog and facebook pages, and posslby also MySpace.
6. Widget for blogs/facebook/myspace
This is still in development — the idea is for a widget that we can pass to our supporting artists and our activists/members to put on their own blogs and profile pages. The Small Places widget will be a channel where we can feature updated content, new videos, announcements, and timely news that will draw traffic in through our various social network promotions.
That pretty much covers the plumbing .. the challenge now is to make it all run.
