The Proper Media team supports the Listen Foundation with training and mentoring on Facebook reputation management
For us at Proper Media, it is a real pleasure to help various businesses and organizations present themselves and their activities better on social networks and online in general. Recently, the girls and boys from "Listen Up" approached us . They are a group of young people, some of whom are deaf. Their mission is to build a bridge between people with hearing impairments and all communication and information services. A bridge that will give them equal access to better education and professional development.
Someone had convinced Ashod and his colleagues that deaf people couldn't handle maintaining the organization's Facebook page, and they wanted us to help them. They came with a specific request that we donate a subscription to support the page.
We decided to have a meeting to find out what resources they had and how we could solve the problem together. At this meeting, we found that we all believe in the maxim that it is better to teach a hungry forex data man to fish than to catch him the fish . And because this principle guides their work at "Listen Up", they trusted us and we decided together that instead of subscription support for the Facebook page, Proper Media would give them training and mentorship.
Thus began our common tale with "Listen Up"! We continue to write it together, but below are some of the difficulties and solutions we went through, in the hope that they may help you do better on Facebook .
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Problem 1: We don't have a good copywriter. Deaf people write with mistakes.
One clarification. Very often deaf people make spelling mistakes, but not because they are illiterate, but because in their world the words joy, joyous, joy, joy we (for example) are the same word. They have a gesture for it and in their everyday life they do not distinguish between the different forms of this word. This makes their writing a little more special. I would not call it “wrong”, although it is indeed outside the rules of the Bulgarian language.
Solution: We agreed that their marketing manager (Ioana, who is not deaf) would post all the official announcements. She doesn’t have the time to dedicate herself to maintaining the page, but when there is something special that she has been working on anyway, she will post it. The rest of the posts will be made by Sasho and Yanka, who are deaf (and sometimes make mistakes). They will be more casual, everyday posts that don’t require complex language and tolerate slight inaccuracies. In addition, we decided that they would use the page to tell everyone about this peculiarity of deaf writing, so that more people will know that it is not illiteracy, but a charming characteristic
Problem 2: Everything is a big mess. We don't know what to post and what not to post .
They couldn't even explain what the problem was exactly – on the one hand they want their communication to be targeted at the deaf, on the other hand they need to reach the hearing as well to raise their awareness of the problems of the silent community. How do the two messages fit together?
Solution: We in business also have different audiences: customers, employees, partners, etc. We decided to define several topics that are aimed at the different audiences of “Listen Up”. This is how we outlined: 1. fundraising, 2. raising awareness of deaf issues, 3. inspiring and building role models for deaf people themselves, 4. informing deaf people about interesting and useful events/resources, 5. news and more from the “Listen Up” team. To make it easier for the team, we decided that every week we would publish at least one thing about each topic. This way we have 5 days with 5 diverse topics and we reach all audiences in a sustainable way.