3. THE
PROBLEMS
• Our Sites were OLD and Out of Date
• Most of our faculty did not actively
participate in updating the program areas on
their sites
• No Content Management System – many of
our faculty didn’t feel comfortable updating
their sites
• No ability to update on mobile platforms
• Did not integrate with Social Media
4.
5.
6.
7. WAKULLA
COUNTY
Comparing Wakulla Hits January - May to Previous Year
250
200
150
100
50
0
2012 2011
HITS JAN-MAY 2011: 3,315 HITS JAN-MAY 2012: 10,529
8. Hits 2011:
972,673
Hits 2012:
2,018,942
Hits Compared from January – May on District Website
35,000
30,000
25,000
20,000
15,000
10,000
5,000
0
Hits 2012 (Wordpress) Hits 2011 (Static)
9. The Challenge of
Microblogging from the field:
Solution needs to be quick and simple with little
distraction to our clientele and programs
14. •Point
•Shoot
•Email
•Blog Post
•Tweet
•FB Post
15. Wordpress is a Home that
complements Social Media
• Prolongs the life of Tweets
and Facebook posts
• Provides a searchable index
blogs and information
• Not limited to 180 characters
19. Using Word-Press as Social Media to
Educate and Interact with Clientele
– A County Perspective
Les Harrison
Wakulla County (FL) Extension Director
May 29, 2012
22. We can no longer
depend solely on
paper and the post
office to reach
• Expensive clientele.
• Ignores Client Stratification
• Too Slow
• Too Easy to Miss
27. County Extension
Faculty can now
easily push
information as they
see it, video it,
teach it, study it.
http://x.co/kc5g
28. Results
•Speed, versatility, reduced distribution
costs and greater resource efficiencies.
•A comprehensive digital information and
clientele management system.
•Effective use of new, user-friendly
technologies.
•Searchable record of information
presented.
•MORE CLIENTS REACHED WITH MORE
INFORMATION
Show old Jefferson Sitehttp://jefferson.ifas.ufl.edu/index-old.shtmlMany sites were hardly ever updated. Most content was static, had endless loops of links…Agriculture > Crops > Agronomic Crops > links to EDIS…***The big one is integration with Social Media. How do we tap into Social Media, how do we do it without creating an enormous amount of work for our agents, and how do we tie it all together?
We have great social networking sites that our clients use every single day, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. What Wordpress offered us was a simple way to tie them all together automatically. *And we can do that through the RSS feeds. Through RSS feeds we can syndicate our posts, newsletters, and upcoming events out to all these social media sites automatically. To get the most bang for our buck on this, we decided to go with a Wordpress Multi-site installation. That way we could have separate RSS feeds for each individual program area. Many of our program areas have their own Facebook or Twitter sites. That way the local county 4-H Facebook site isn’t filled up with Agriculture articles, and vice versa. Keeping the RSS feeds separate also makes since, so we can push targeted, relevant information out other sites and our clients without pushing irrelevant data to them as well.The third leg of that stool that we developed is the UF/IFAS Subscription Management System. Here, clients can sign up to receive information on topics or newsletters they are interested in through email.
How do we push our RSS feeds out to the social media sites? We tried a few different options, but the one we settled on was Twitterfeed.com. It’s a free, third party service that allows you to pull from any RSS feed and publish that information on multiple social media sites automatically. Since we opted for the Multi-Site installations, we can push only the relevant program areas to our Social Media sites. Or in cases where a county may only have one Facebook or Twitter site, we can still push several RSS feeds to that site.
Not only did we want a way to share our feeds with social media sites, we wanted to be able to share them with each other.We turned to an Auto-blogging software called WP-Robot to help us with this.WP-Robot reads our RSS feeds and will copy the post onto another blog in the network. This is useful in several ways:Primarily we needed it to syndicate our newsletters across the district. We didn’t want every county to have to repost a newsletter article on their own site every time someone wrote one. WP-Robot allows all our agents to enter their articles in a central location on the District website, and then copies it out to all the county websites automatically.WP-Robot also allows us to share posts between neighboring counties or counties that lack expertise in a particular program area. a. For example, perhaps you have 2-3 nearby county offices that often do shared 4-H events. You could set up a 4-H site for that tri-county area that would push that feed out to all three of those counties every time a new post was made. b. Another example, suppose you have a smaller county that doesn’t have a Horticulture agent. …
The impact of all of this was dramatic. We launched a majority of our county’s Wordpress sites in January of this year.Comparing the hit data from January – May of this year (in the Green) verses last year (in the Gray), you can see even one of our smaller county offices like Wakulla had a dramatic increase.** They went from about 3,300 hits this time last year to about 10,500 this year.
Our District website saw huge improvement as well.We went from about 972k hits this time last year to over 2 million hits so far this year.Obviously this isn’t just because we changed the look or format of our site to Wordpress. The key is the integration and automation that Wordpress allows with Social Media. TRANSITION TO LES/SCOTT:I’ve brought with me two of our agents to share their experience with the new Wordpress system, and different ways they are using Wordpress with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the SMS system to help bring this all together.
Using JetPack Stats Plug-in – number one referring term “Artificial Reef”. Request from Advisory Members and Public. We are giving them a way to help. Utilizing their assets, resources, skills, and motivation. Anticipate this will be successful. Have to address how to handle public records requirements for Florida.