Praktik week 6: Speaking up
This week has been a little different to normal as I’ve mostly been focusing on a single project: preparing a presentation on social media for non-profits. As you might know from my previous posts, I used to work at a UK charity called Refuge and had responsibility for their social media presence. On the 8th October I’ll be giving a talk here at Salgado about how the charity built up an engaged online community of 25,000 over three years. More details about the event will be coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
As I’ve started thinking about what to say, it’s led to a lot of reflection about my approach and strategies, why we had the success that we did, and where we could have done better. It’s something that I never really got to dwell on for too long at the time – with a whole host of other areas of work to handle, if you had asked me a year ago how we got to that audience of 25,000, I would have needed a minute to come up with anything more insightful than “well, I’m… quite good at my job?”
Luckily, after this period of self-analysis, I think I have something more interesting than that to say! I’m still working on the fine details but I’m feeling pretty confident that I’ll be ready by the time I have to get up in front of an audience.
Meanwhile, I’ve been testing the waters by putting myself in front of two different audiences this week.
On Wednesday I joined Daniel to help deliver a class for students on a Webbkommunikatör course at Medieinstitutet. The morning session was about social media for different kinds of organisations (B2C, B2B, public sector, non-profit sector), and the differences and similarities. I was invited along to drop in any nuggets of wisdom I might have.
Speaking to an audience of people who want to learn from you might be somehow even more nerve-wracking than speaking to peers – perhaps because we can all remember what it was like to sit and listen to a useless teacher! However, I hope I managed to give them some useful insight and tell them something they didn’t already know. In any case it was interesting to sit in and listen to the discussions in the group and the students’ questions.
In another venture outside of my comfort zone, earlier this afternoon I joined Daniel and Jocke for the first time on their weekly Periscope livecast, Salgado-TV. Unfortunately it seems like there were some technical problems so it’s possible no one heard what we were saying… but it looks like I might start to join the conversation more regularly, so tune in with us next Friday at 15.30 for the next episode! The link is always shared on Salgado’s Facebook and Twitter – don’t miss it.
Until next time,
Helen