In addition to the traditional social media channels we’ve
described below, there were others that we posted to in the hopes that we could
drive just “that much” extra traffic.
Scribd.com
Scribd
is a document sharing website that allows for both commenting, social sharing
and self-publication for sale of personal works. On the site you are able to
label the category of your document, “Research”, as well as tag it for
discovery. Our team chose to not only post our poster, but also our description
in order to fill in the requirement that the piece be a document. While we did
get 35 reads, and a number of click-throughs, but again it didn’t lead to any
submissions. In the future, we would most likely add something more robust to
give the impression that our research was more extensive and examine the best
use cases for Scribd to ensure we’re using effective categories and tags.
Various Blogs
Our
team found a number of valuable blogs on which we tried to post, but were
unable without prior permission. For example, the Red Cross blog/forum would’ve
been an ideal place to solicit advice, however, they are the only ones approved
to do so. With more time, we would’ve attempted to reach out to Red Cross ahead
of time with a blog request and worked directly with them to be posted. This
would’ve attracted passionate individuals and those with experience in disaster
relief. There were other opportunities such as this that we didn’t spend enough
time researching and therefore their success was minor even if we were
allowed/able to submit posts.
Yahoo! Groups
Yahoo!
Groups at the beginning was VERY exciting for us. Not only did we believe that
we could easily post to these pages, but that the individuals had opted-in to
receive and comment on information related to disasters. In our Advocacy class
we learn that statistics and change are more effective to those who are highly
involved and have personal experience with the topic. The problem we ran into
with these groups was two-fold, first, only some of them were open and the
others required approval to join the group. This took time and we didn’t have
any! Second, some of the groups hadn’t been posted to in a couple of years, and
in one case, four years. All we could assume is that the group was developed
after a specific disaster and faded over time, meaning the members are no
longer highly involved. I don’t know that we wouldn’t post to these going
forward, but only with enough time to ensure we were successful through other
channels.
Yahoo groups -
Disaster Survivors (64 members)
|
Yahoo Groups -
California Disasters (1,400)
|
Yahoo Groups -
Disaster Communicator’s Forum (419)
|
Yahoo Groups -
Disaster Watch (329)
|
SUDDEN Response Yahoo
Groups (452)
|
We’d love to gather your thoughts on other forums we could’ve utilized!