Laura's blog

I sat down today with Pam Larson, the Director of Mountview Christian Preschool, to talk Facebook. She wanted to set up a presence for the school on the site, and as the happy parent of a preschooler there, I volunteered to help.

Goals
The first step in any good Facebook strategy is to identify who you want to communicate with, and why.

"I know that many of our parents are using Facebook, even more than e-mail," Pam told me. "I want to set up a way to communicate with them there. I'd also like to use it as a way to recruit new students to the school."

Mountview has two goals:
1. To communicate with parents
2. To use the site as a recruiting tool for additional students

Off to a good start - two concise goals.

Group or Page?
As we moved on to implementation steps - actually setting up the Facebook presence - we started to notice that these goals are in conflict.

To communicate with parents, we want to give information. Tell the dates and times of field trips, share detailed curriculum information, give parents activities to try at home. I recommended a group for this. Why? We can make it private, so that only parents can see when the children's field trips will be. Most of the information we will give here is too detailed for non students to care about, not to mention privacy issues regarding giving the location of a class at any given time. Plus, with a group, we can send messages directly to parents' in-boxes.

To recruit, we want to showcase the school. Tell about the great things children are learning, the music they sing each day, the fabulous field trips. We also want to highlight the times for open registration before each session. I recommended a page for this. Why? It's public. Anyone can join and find it in search results. It has a viral effect, since friends of a person who "likes*" the page will be able to see the interactions of that person with the page in their Home Newsfeed. This sparks interest. A page also allows us to measure how people are engaging with our page.

In short, any specific information we want to tell parents, we don't want to open up for public viewing, but if we close the group, no potential parents will be able to see the great things the preschool is involved in.

We realized there was no way to achieve both goals using just a page or a group.

Page and Group
After weighing the pros and cons of focusing on one goal or the other, Pam decided to do both. The information on the two sites will be similar, but timed differently.

Group
We set up a group with membership at the "secret" level to protect privacy. This way, Pam can invite parents and staff to the group, but no one without an invitation will even know the group exists. We also set up a policy about who was allowed to be a member of the group, and added procedures to take people out of the group when they leave the school.

Things Pam can post to the group:

• Upcoming field trip information
• School closings
• Curriculum updates
• School events
• Pictures and videos
• New session registration information

Page
We set up a page to post public information. After the group gets the requisite 25 members, Pam can customize the page URL to post on school communications and the school website.

Things Pam can post to the page:

• Past field trip highlights
• Curriculum highlights
• Past school event highlights
• Pictures that contain no children (such as field trip locations and school facilities)
• New session registration information

Pam committed to spending 10-15 minutes each day updating the sites. Since the information she will be posting is already being created (in the form of flyers home to parents), she will not need to spend additional time coming up with items to post. Posting to Facebook is just an additional small step in an established process. She can put the information on the group, then dilute it for use on the page.

This is a great example of taking something that already exists (parent communications) and re-purposing it for easy online use. Looking for a good preschool? I recommend Mountview! :)

*Note that Facebook has recently changed the terminology on us here. It used to be "fan" a page.

Lots of people are talking about ways to use social media to market your business. You can create a Facebook fan page, start a LinkedIn group, or tell the world about your services on Twitter. These are all great things to do. But for me, the real value in social media is how it enhances my efforts to create meaningful relationships with new people. This is me and Joe Cortez, meeting at Stauf's in real time after connecting on Twitter.

Let's take a look at a before and after scenario.  

How networking used to work: I'd meet someone (let's call him Dave) at a meeting or networking function. Dave and I would chat about this and that, maybe talk about how much we loved the new Star Trek or what a giant disappointment the last Wolverine turned out to be. Then, we'd exchange business cards and move on to meet more people. A day or two later, I'd e-mail Dave and tell him how nice it was to meet him. If Dave was really interesting, I'd invite him out for a cup of coffee. Then we'd go our separate ways. Even though I wanted to stay in touch with Dave, calling him or inviting him out for more coffee seemed a little pushy, if not downright creepy. Dave and I might see each other again, a few months later, at another event. We'd politely say hi and engage in more small talk. But such an amount of time had passed that it was like we were meeting all over again.