Phase 2: Announce Availability

Phase 2 of Namaste India! comprises the General Recruitment and Awareness Stage.

PHASE 2:

1. Create a Facebook Events Page
2. Facebook and Twitter Awareness
3. Email Blast

And I'm happy to say that...we're live, ticking, and well on our way to gaining traction!


Preliminary Goals for Social
Social is all about awareness. But seeing as I'm in the business of advertising, I'm always thinking in the back of my mind, how can we increase likes? How can we ensure click throughs? How can we bring our users on a journey to keep them within the proper track-lines so that they're not just interested in Namaste India, but remain engaged with our Room to Read NYC Chapter page and eventually go external to seek more information about RTR via the main website?

My preliminary goals for building our exposure on Facebook were:

• Increase likes 
• Increase engagement and conversation
• Establish credibility for FB page as primary source of information on local efforts

While I would rather live within a designated, differentiated space, I did omit the thought of launching a separate Namaste India tab on the main page so as not to detract from the larger chapter effort as a whole, as well as to not detract from the "official" global blog that was launched by the Zurich chapter (www.namasteindiaroomtoread.blogspot.com). 

Create a Facebook Event Page
The purpose of the Event Page is obviously to track participating studios, registration information and any additional updates leading up to the event. The challenge has been to get people to actually join the event to follow the news, hence why I originally would have liked to have a separate landing page in lieu of an events page...because the constant "declines" are slightly discouraging and constantly makes me rethink how to keep people engaged.

 

Facebook and Twitter Awareness
With that said, the page is up and running and tweets are flying!

Visit us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/239171872860187/

Follow us on Twitter: (BRB on this one...Twitter page is being weird and won't register the URL)

Send out an Email Blast

Okay, so the one problem with this event is that there was very little time to set things up. Ideally, we should have engaged the NY corporate office much earlier to help do pre-event press. Though the NY office normally does not get too involved with the marketing efforts of local chapter events, this being our first global launch of a worldwide fundraiser has legs and an obvious potential to be a really great big deal. Nevertheless, we will be doing heavy post-event press with the office.

In the meantime, we satisfied ourselves with a chapter email blast to our Room to Read List-Serve. 

Phase 2: We're Live on Facebook!

...And we're live on Facebook!

Part one of Phase 2 consists of creating a Facebook Events Page and beginning Facebook awareness to help direct attention towards participating studios, registration information, volunteer opportunities...and just simply to begin conversation surrounding the event.

This is the General Recruitment and Awareness Stage. At the most basic level I've created an events page for the event, and invited fellow New Yorkers and people who might know dedicated yogis, from my Facebook friends list. My one criticism I have about this is that people tend to decline events on Facebook.

What I really wanted to create was a separate landing page within the RTR NY Chapter Facebook page, but a team member brought up a good point, that for events like this, to take away from the main chapter landing page may be detrimental to the brand. And in speaking to studios during the recruitment phase, some have even been confused as to whether Namaste India was the organization or the product/brand. So, point taken. I'm still a fan of keeping things separated, but even I'm finding that there is truth in what was suggested; it's definitely easier to generate excitement on the main page and direct to an Events page since the dedicated following is on the main page, and people seem to decline the events page. Good learnings.

So how do I get people's attention and get them to "Join" my event even though they might not be attending classes? How do I create a following so that I have a database of Namaste India -specific folks so I can utilize them as a listserve to blast updates and news to?

I take over the main landing page.

Muahaha.

No really..actually, I think this might be slightly obnoxious and maybe frowned upon for trumping other posts or events with my takeover, but it was some what of an accidental find. I have not yet converted to Timeline on Facebook and in poking around trying to figure out how to post more information about the event on the main wall, I discovered a delightful little button called "highlight."

Hence what started as a decent, forgivable small square box to the left of the timeline turned into....this:

.......Win!