By: Maria Matarelli, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSP

Leveraging social media can really help an organization expand their presence. You can reach new potential members and also reach out to existing members to engage them in new ways. Maria Matarelli presented on Leveraging Social Networks to Benefit Your Chapter at the recent PMI Leadership Institute Meeting in New Orleans. As former VP of Operations for the PMI Central Illinois Chapter, Maria has set up their chapter social media and shared these resources with many other chapters. Maria has presented on social media and leveraging Agile  techniques to get results at several Regional Leadership, Leadership Institute Meetings, and chapter meetings. Along with many PMI chapter Professional Development Day conferences.

After her presentation in New Orleans, Maria met with Steven Shapiro, VP of Communications for the PMI Atlanta Chapter, who manages all of the chapter’s weekly Newsletters and Social Media with an audience of 4800 members, the third largest PMI Chapter. It can definitely be a job to keep their audience of members engaged with regular content. Maria and Steven had a chance to discuss some of the challenges associated with using social media along with several tips for using it effectively.

Maria: What do you see as the biggest challenges you’ve seen with social media at your chapter?

Steven: Getting people to understand the value proposition that social media brings, not only to the membership, but also to the board and the leadership of the chapter. Explaining why we need to do this, how it is going to help us, and how it is going to drive us toward our goals. Once you can answer those questions and present the value on how you’re reaching a wider audience. For us, it is also a financial proposition because we pay per email and we sent over 800,000 emails last year. If we can reduce the number of emails and leverage social media to augment the emails we do send, it helps our chapter financially.

Maria: The value proposition of using social media is definitely important. A lot of companies may not be using as much advertising on television as they begin to leverage social media and other free methods of reaching their target audiences online. As we talked about earlier, social media provides a means of instantly connecting with people, helps you expand your online presence, and reach new audiences. As well as engage existing members of your chapter in new ways.

Steven: In many cases, you can have more of a two-way dialogue, too. Both through comments on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere on other social media platforms.

Maria: Yes, the two-way dialogue is definitely important. When you look at how many people are using social media, it is hard to imagine not getting involved since you can tailor your message to meet your target audience.
    • For LinkedIn, a business related social networking site, there were more than 225 million members as of June 2013 with nearly 4.2 billion searches in a year.
    • For Twitter, a microblogging service that utilizes 140 character messages, there were over 200 million users as of September 2013 and more than 1.6 billion search queries per day.
    • For Facebook, a site where users can create a profile, update their information, exchange messages with friends, join common interest groups, and post events, there were more than 1.15 billion active users as of March 2013.
    • For YouTube, a video sharing website where users can upload, view, and share videos. There are more than 1 billion unique users each month and over 4 billion videos viewed a day.
    • Slideshare, a slide hosting service where you can upload PowerPoint and pdf files that can be viewed on the site. There are more than 58 million unique visitors a month. The numbers of the user base for these social media platforms provide huge opportunity for chapters to reach out to target people local to their area that are interested in Project Management. And the best part about it is that these platforms are free to use. Which of these platforms is your chapter using now?

Steven: We’re mainly focused on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, we’ve talked about implementing a strategy of using Facebook, which we’ll probably look at more in 2014. Right now, we’re mostly focused on using automation tools. Right now we’re using “If this then that” Any time an action takes place, it does another action automatically. So we took the RSS feed from our website and any time anything updates on that, it tweets out. Any time any content is updated on our YouTube channel, it tweets out. We’re looking at more ways to use that and also implementing Hootsuite, which allows us to schedule tweets in advance. We have 11 events a month at least, so there’s no reason to individually send out that content, we can use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule in advance.

Maria: That is great - it is good to focus on setting up a few platforms and using them actively, then adding more social media platforms as you have become consistent in using the others. The two most essential elements to effectively using social media are 1) Content – having valuable content that you share, and 2) Consistency – establishing a regular cadence for sharing information on your social media platforms. You are taking it one step further by automating some of your updates. Utilizing applications like Hootsuite and “If this then that” help with establishing and maintaining a regular social media presence. You can plan your messages for the week or month and schedule them to go out at regular intervals, will be a big help.  Especially with so many chapter activities that happen each month, if you know you will be having workshops, presentations or other events already scheduled, you can set up the reminders or registrations links to automatically send out.

Maria: Some people have concerns with social media and the risk some things could be said that may not properly represent the organization. We talked about the importance of having a social media policy and social media strategy in place for volunteers assisting in managing social media. What do you do for checks and balances to ensure the organization is being represented properly?

Steven: As VP of Communications, every tweet that goes out is shown on my phone, so I can constantly keep track of what content is being shared. Should something be questionable, I can track it down and research it. The concern we had was not  someone would knowingly do something to undermine our goals or our vision for our chapter but, it’s so easy from a phone to accidentally click the wrong account. If I have a radical view on any issue, which is perfectly within my right from my personal account to tweet out, but I accidentally hit the PMI Atlanta instead of my personal account.

Maria: That is a great way to monitor and control what is being communicated. Keeping an eye on what is being said along with having set the expectations in your social media policy and strategy will provide the guidance up front and quality checks on the other end. As an administrator for the account, if something was inadvertently posted, you can delete the comment or message or in some applications, you can screen comments or posts before they go live.

Maria: One of the biggest keys is just getting started. Getting out there, getting involved in the social media community, being able to reach out to your members get them involved, and as you start to get more familiar with it, start to look at specific goals. How many new followers, how many links are clicked on or how much more traffic to your website, and you can start to track and look on a monthly basis, has this been helping. Maybe run some campaigns. Whoever follows or likes a post within the next month or shares with the most people, perhaps have a raffle at a chapter meeting. Some kind of campaign and then measure, Was there an impact? Did we have increased engagement?

Steven: One of the things I heard during your presentation today really stuck out to me was a gentleman  talked about sending questions in advance about project management. If we could then take one and answer at a dinner meeting, or answer at an event. Or even answer something on youtube where we take a great question and interview someone about that area. That type of thing could really drive engagement and drive conversation.

Maria: Absolutely, while aiming to provide valuable content and maintain a consistent presence with those two things – valuable content and a consistent presence – will help provide value to your members. Crowdsourcing questions from your membership and responding or providing expert feedback on that topic would be a great value.

Steven: Thanks for taking the time to talk more after your presentation. There are definitely several things we can incorporate to enhance the way we use social media at our chapter.  

About Maria: Maria is passionate about helping individuals and organizations be more efficient and get results. As an Agile Coach and Trainer, she works with management and executive teams, individual project teams, and consulting large enterprise environments in Agile adoption. Maria enjoys traveling to consult organizations and speak at both national and international conferences. Maria has built an online brand using social media and has consulted many organizations on their use of social media including providing social media resources for many PMI chapters. You can connect with Maria through links to her social media or contact her directly at www.mariamatarelli.com.