A 'Refreshing' Take on Social Media

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The Pepsi Refresh Project has really opened my eyes to the effectiveness of social media and networking. Even though my classes attempt at winning the grant wasn't successful, I am still proud and happy that we were able to stay in the 80-90 range throughout the whole month. How did we achieve this? It most certainly couldn't have been an accident. After much planning, we had intentions of utilizing the major social media tools throughout the month. 

Facebook was definitely the most beneficial tool. I found it addicting to see how many of my "friends" were going to attend to event created as well as how many "liked" Safe Harbor. It was funny that I never had a conversation about the project with my friends before the Facebook event was created, but after the invitations were sent, many of my friends brought it up in conversation claiming, "I voted for your class!"

I also heard several circumstances where people saw the event/link/status update on friends walls and decided to pass the news on to other outside parties because they thought they would be interested. Social networking at it's finest!

Aside from Twitter and Facebook, we made use of emails. While a more ancient form, it's still social networking nonetheless. Contacts are endless when sending emails are it is sent directly to your audience, so you can be almost certain they will see it (unless they are rude and delete unread mail!) Anyhow, we sent out numerous batches of emails: some formal, some casual, some brief, some lengthy. It's important to tailor your message to the specific audience. Some people don't have time to read a detailed message, whereas others may not consider helping you out unless they know exactly what they are dealing with. 

Had we not spent significant class time planning and crafting the most strategic messages and avenues, I don't think we would have seen as much success was we did. While the outcome was not ideal, we were still in the top half of entries-that's pretty impressive! In this day and age, little can be tackles successfully without the help of social media.