A couple weeks ago I posted a blog post about the CLIR CCEPS culminating presentation that I was getting ready for. Well, last week I gave my presentation along side my fellow CLIR CCEPS student workers. The presentations all went really well and I enjoyed sharing my thoughts with the folks in the audience.
For this blog post I wanted to share briefly what my presentation was about. Given my experience and interest in developing the CLIRWater project’s social media presence, my presentation was about social media. More specifically, I talked about how social media might be able to support the mission statements of the stakeholders involved in the project.
First, I talked about the successes and failures we’ve experienced over the last semester in terms of what works and what doesn’t for our followers on different social media platforms. I believe that success and failure are both important to recognize so that we can learn and adapt accordingly. This process is about trying new things without the fear of failure, because failure is just another kind of learning opportunity. Likewise, recognizing success offers important lessons about what we can continue to do well.
I used Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as my case studies. I examined posts across all three social media platforms featuring the images seen in this slide, and noticed what was popular and what was not. From there I established guidelines about how we can proceed in future social media posts based on the lessons I learned from these case studies.
I then looked at the mission statements for the organizations involved in the CLIRWater Project. My goal was to connect the online content we create with the goals and values of the organizations involved. I wanted to make sure that posting online content to social media platforms was a worthwhile aspect of this project outside of the normal activities that this project entails (and that we post about here on the blog).
Finally, I connected some of the key ideas found in the mission statements listed above to the online content we create. I sincerely think that social media is a great resource for sharing archival and special collections material and engaging a larger audience. Hopefully this abridged version of my culminating presentation has convinced you too!