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2016-04-24 Social Media Meeting

 


This was one of the most hilarious meetings in the history of my life. TNKR (now FSI) wasn't an official organization at that point. I had many people telling me in 2013 and 2014 that we needed a website. Of course, none of the people suggesting it tried to set up a Website.

So I made a Website. Then people were constantly analyzing it, mainly asking the question, "What kind of Website is that?"

The same kind of thing was happening with Social Media. I joined Facebook in July 2012 after years of avoiding it. Once I got involved with North Korean refugees, it seemed that Facebook could be a place to recruit volunteers, so I joined. Then people were telling me about many other various social media sites that I needed to use.

Of course, when I set them up, people were criticizing me for not understanding how to run social media campaigns. As usual, the world is full of talkers and critics, so social media remained something for me to do after finishing work.

In early 2016, I called a meeting to see if I could find people to take over our social media. We had been getting media coverage without a communications team, but perhaps others could be more effective at it. I'm not exactly Mr. Customer Service when it comes to dealing with the public, and I see that my lack of etiquette extends to when I am dealing with the People of the Internet. 

When People of the Internet were whining about things I said or posted, I taught them how to turn off their notifications or suggested they might want to leave the group and find something more suitable for themselves.

Of course, Guys of the Internet later remarked how lucky I was to be having a meeting with so many beauties.

HAHAHAHA!!!

It seemed that I must have missed a previous planning meeting at which they agreed they would tell me everything that I was doing wrong with social media. For the first hour, the discussion was about all of the things I was doing wrong. If the meeting had gone much longer, I might have resigned from TNKR to save myself from destroying the organization.

Finally, they got around to tasks and other things to improve our social media. The only time I got irritated and laughed out loud was when they compared us to much larger organizations and how they handled social media. At that point, I am sure their social media people had larger salaries than our entire organization budget. 

I told them that I wouldn't change, that they would have to work around me (which is what I still tell people whenever they show up saying how I should do things differently). I will even sometimes point out that, as incompetent as I allegedly am at social media, they still somehow found me.

Some of those nice ladies from the meeting still remain in contact, even saying nice things about our social media (which is still mainly me posting stuff after I finish work).

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