In the process of creating and launching the Coop Kids Facebook page, there were a lot of questions about how to let people know about events that were happening.

In the process of creating an event on a Facebook page, you’ll be asked whether you want to publish the event to your wall. When you publish it to the wall, it appears on the Page’s wall, and your fans will see it in their news feeds – ie their “home page” feeds, and it will come from the page itself – not from your personal profile.

The third and final step when creating an event is to “Invite Friends”

Administrators suddenly find that, although everything else they do on the page publishes in the name of the page (not their personal profiles), this prompt brings up their personal friends, and the invitation goes out from their personal profiles. It’s confusing, and I’m not sure why the last step isn’t “Update Fans,” which would appear in fans’ “Updates” queue.

It’s not quite logical, and it may well change – as so many things do with the Facebook interface.

In the meantime, what should administrators do?

Invite your friends – but with caution.

When people connect with you personally on Facebook, they’re probably not signing up to receive all your work- and cause-related marketing. Don’t send these kinds of invitations indiscriminantly to all of your friends. And don’t use this as a way to show your colleagues/business prospects/other clients what you’re doing. That’s what LinkedIn is for.

Invite only people who will be interested in the event itself.

Update Fans

You can send an update to all fans of the page by going to the Events tab, clicking on the name of the event, and then clicking “Update Fans” in the menu under the event image.

This update won’t appear in your fans’ Messages (like a personal invitation from your profile will), but it will appear in their Updates tab, which is in the Messages submenu.

It’s important to go beyond just creating the event and update the page fans and invite friends (responsibly), because otherwise fans will miss the initial publication of the event, unless they take the time to go to the page itself and look up the events.

It’s also alright to send more than one update to fans about an event. Send one when the event is created, and then send more as the event draws closer. Just be sure that the updates aren’t spammy. Give more information about the event. Provide links about performers or pertinent subject matter.

Like all social marketing, it will work best if you keep it relevant, expected and interactive.

Cooper the Fox, Mascot for Coop Kids

We are lucky enough to be part of a group of local organizations who have come together to create a community calendar hub called Coop Kids.

The page quietly launched last night after a few months of preparation and meetings and response was pretty swift. Within half an hour, we had enough fans to secure a user name for the page, so that we could give out an address that looks like this: www.facebook.com/coopkids rather than like this: http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Cooperstown-NY/Paperkite-Creative-Workshops/183742475331. (PS – if you’re reading this, why don’t you slip over to the Creative Workshops page and fan us up so we can get our custom user name).

Today, it has twice that number, and I expect it will continue to grow as we begin publicizing it in earnest.

This is one of those grassroots projects that grew organically out of a sincere desire to do something useful for the community: Namely to provide a place where families could find comprehensive listings of kid-oriented events, and where all the various organizations in town who offer children’s programming can communicate to find greater strength in collaboration.

Paperkite was involved on two fronts, both as a programming provider (because of our creative workshops) and as a communications facilitator.

Representatives from the initial organizations met last fall to begin the dialogue. Everyone was enthusiastic about the project, although there were reservations about getting involved in something that would add another layer of responsibility on already busy schedules.

After collecting notes, ideas, concerns and other thoughts from the group, we explored different directions the project could go.

Should it be a print calendar? A combination print and online calendar? How would we handle costs and responsibilities? Could the whole thing live online? If so, who would administer the site? How would we build it? Who would pay for hosting and design and day-to-day maintenance of the site?

We quickly dismissed the idea of a print-only piece as being both too costly and labor intensive to be sustainable. And since the goal was to create a truly comprehensive resource, we acknowledged that we could never do that in print.

Instead, we would use small printed promotional fliers (design donated by one affiliate and copying donated by another) to publicize the online space.

We explored different logistics for getting online, and ultimately decided that Facebook was a good way to start, since a Facebook fan page had all the functionality we wanted (multiple admins, events calendar, discussion forum, interactivity with the audience), it was free and – this is the best reason of all – people are there already. We don’t have the challenge of instilling a new habit of checking a new website.

I hope that this idea grows over time and eventually perhaps even outgrows Facebook. For now, it’s an excellent example of grassroots collaboration that benefits both the collaborators and their audiences.

We would like to thank all of the collaborators who have made this happen:

The Farmers’ Museum

Fenimore Art Museum

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

The Clark Sports Center

Cooperstown Art Association

Cooperstown PTO

The Brookwood School

The Smithy-Pioneer Gallery

Friends of the Village Library

Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival

Cooperstown Performing Arts

Paperkite Creative Workshops

Over the weekend, Paperkite was lucky enough to be part of an event in our community that brought together local arts and recreation groups who offer programming for children and families. Close to 200 people gathered at the Fenimore Art Museum to attend to a concert by Uncle Rock, listen to a reading of original ghost stories written by 3-6th-graders, do crafts and watch paintings in the Museum’s collection come to life with the help of some costumed interpreters.
We live in a small community that is blessed with a wide variety of cultural resources. With such a small population, competition is steep, not only for funds but for a basic share of attention. You can plan an event for a year, but if it happens to coincide with almost anything else, your attendance will suffer greatly.
Meanwhile, families who are looking for something to do often rely on word of mouth and a lot of happenstance to learn about events.
So when we heard about an initiative to bring those groups together to create a comprehensive events calendar, we couldn’t wait to join the effort.
As parents, we’ll be thrilled to have that resource for ourselves. As creative teachers, we’ll be glad to have another venue to promote our workshops. And as members of the community, we think this effort will make arts, culture and recreation more accessible to everyone in the community.
Paperkite is donating our services to help get this collaboration off the ground and online. We’re set to launch in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll give you a peek behind the scenes of all the hows and whys of what we did.

Brand Republic reports that, despite their frequent use of social media outlets online, most women say that those sites don’t influence their shoe buying decisions.

What? Clearly these women did not get the memo from the marketing community that these media were to be used for commercial purposes. Log in to Facebook, open your wallet and smile.

You can also chat with your friends and share photos, but only if you must.

I think there are two good lessons to think about here.

1. Social media doesn’t make women want to buy shoes. Shoes make women want to buy shoes.

If women aren’t buying your shoes, maybe you should make better shoes. Maybe you should find a way to ask them what a better shoe would look like.

2. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were some kind of technology that would even allow you to invite shoe design ideas and connect to women all over the world who love shoes?

I stumbled across this excellent presentation on the difference between using social media tools and developing a social media strategy.

Too often, people in business and non-profits jump into the tools because someone on their board said they should be on FacebookTwitterYouTubeFlickr. Or someone read int he New York Times that social media is the way to go.

Anyone can integrate the tools, but without a clear strategy – including goals and measures of success – most of those folks end up using these mew media to do the same old (ineffective or downright annoying) push marketing. That’s the worst thing you can do in this space.