Online Seminar for Social Media for Agriculture
Check out this neat webinar from Maryland Extension for using Social Media with your Farm. I pasted this on from an email:
Who would be interested in viewing it?
Anyone who feels in the dark about Twitter, blogs, FaceBook,
YouTube, etc. and would like to see some real-life examples.
Anyone looking for new ways to drive traffic to their existing
websites or blogs.
Anyone who has content they want to deliver to their clientele
and wants to have a further reach than a static website or email
list.
The webinar had 5 presenters demonstrating their use of social
media. See if any of them are doing something that might help you
create more of an online presence. They are:
Will Gilmer – a farmer who wants to give people an idea of what
it is like to be a farmer. He has a website, uses a blog, tweets,
posts to FaceBook, and creates videos for YouTube.
Arlan Suderman – a market analyst who wants to provide
up-to-the-minute analysis on the commodity markets. His tweets
get people to find out more on his FarmFutures.
Farm Futures Magazine.
Carrie Oliver – a rancher who wants to educate people on her
specialty, Artisan Meat. She blogs, and found out that she could
get a lot more people to read her blog by tweeting. She is good
at it and has an interesting subject and shows how people retweet
her tweets so that her blog audience grows.
Dan Toland – a communications specialist at the Ohio Farm Bureau.
He talks about the successes his organization has had educating
and communicating agriculture issues using a variety of Social
Media tools to gain a bigger audience. The Farm Bureau is a big
enough organization that they have social media policy. I thought
this guy was very knowledgeable.
Andy Kleinschmidt – an Ohio State Ag Extension educator who
blogs, podcasts, and has a twitter following. This compliments
his more traditional county Extension web page.
If this kind of thing is interesting to you, don’t wait for a
class or for somebody to show you how, just google a couple of
the above people’s names and see what they are up to. Don’t know
how to get started with twitter? Type “how to set up a twitter
account” into google. Shy? You don’t have to send out tweets
right away (or ever), you can follow other people’s tweets before
you decide if it is the right medium for you to reach your
clientele.