Who can relate?

Y’all, this week has been a mess! Bronchitis hit hard early on and with all the steroids, antibiotics and cough syrup (let us not forget the joys of halloween mixed in there as well) I have been running on fumes. With that being said, let’s see what we’ve discovered in this weeks studies of social media, viral videos and personal brands.

Recently, I was asked to join the Board of the ‘Northwest Alabama Reading Aides’, a local non-profit agency that assists adults who have little to no reading skills. I was honored to be offered this seat at the table after a couple years of off and on referrals to the organization. At the first board meeting, I learned that their social media accounts had a total of 109 ‘likes’, they were surviving on a budget that was less than my annual salary and the entire board was a group of baby boomers.
Is there anything wrong with a group of baby boomers? No, not at all. They are a lovely group of people who deeply care about others and want to serve the community as much as anyone I’ve ever met. Each one of them have so much to teach me and I’m thrilled to be working beside them. However, in this day and age, there is no way for the organization to grow, raise more awareness and find supports without the use of some social media. This sweet group of folks barely use their own facebook accounts (if they even have one of those). By my second board meeting, we had blended a lovely group of baby-boomers with millenials, added some social media sav and more than doubled the online traffic. All this took, was a few ‘like’ requests and a couple cute photo posts with catchy phrases and hashtags. When the director asked me what our next step should be, I smiled and told him “it’s time to go viral.” If you could have seen this man’s face! “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Amanda, but that doesn’t sound too good.”
In one of this weeks Ted Talks, Kevin Alloca discusses how videos go viral and explains that the first thing one needs to have a video go viral, is a tastemaker. This is the person who introduces us to something new. One of his examples includes a video that had been online for months, but it wasn’t until after Jimmy Kimmel tweeted about it one night, that the video went viral. Jimmy acted as the tastemaker with this specific video. Was the video already funny? Yes. Had people seen it and shared it and laughed at it? Yes. Was it reaching millions of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’? No.
In step Jimmy Kimmell.
Now, for a small organization here in my small town community, do we need it to go to that extreme? Probably not. We do however need a local tastemaker for sure though. Someone well connected in the area (with a lot of followers) to see our video, find some humor in it and share it. We need publicity in the community we are serving so that we can reach more people to serve, find more volunteers and hopefully access more funding to run the program. We need people to know we are here and tha we offer these services free of charge.
Adam Sadowsky (in his Ted Talk) explains how to engineer a viral music video. Let’s get real folks, who doesn’t love a homemade music video? We like and share them all the time. Can you imagine a sweet little comedic music video with baby boomers and millennials alike? The pictures are already dancing in my head. Can you see it?
The thing that I struggle with the most is the “know your audience” aspect of social media. Many articles present this as the most obvious step. Steve Olenski with Forbes magazine wrote an article titled ‘7 Ways To Up Your Chances Of Going Viral On Social Media’. Under step 2. Know your audience, he adds a note that states “The following text can easily be classified under Blatantly Obvious”. But, with social media, isn’t everyone your audience? Specifically working with this new board, we are reaching out to ages 18 and up. That’s a huge audience. An 18 year old who is struggling with their reading skills is actually quite different than a 65 year old who has been struggling their entire life. We work with fiercely intelligent people who have suffered from a stroke and are trying to re-learn how to read as well as people who never made it out of middle school.
How do we determine what audience we are looking for? Olenski goes on to say how important it is to tell a relatable story through your content and I think that’s where the golden nugget sits. Every single person has struggled with something in their life. So, we start with that and bring it back to the struggle of reading. When you think about it, couldn’t we make anything relatable? Aren’t we all actually compatible in some fashion?
I believe this is definitely the key to success. What if, through social media, we were able to bring that simple awareness to the public? We all struggle, we all need help with something that matters, something that’s important to us. If we can tap into that, the “why” this is so important than we can succeed at all the things we are attempting. But, we have to tap into that and we need help through all social media outlets.
It still blows my mind how fast we can get a message out there. How many people we can reach with one post, one video, and one simple hashtag.
See you all next week as we delve into something new!