What if we could turn social media into our secret weapon?
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David Butler Social Media and Web Manager Copyright ©, 2014
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Transcript of What if we could turn social media into our secret weapon?
David Butler Social Media and
Web Manager
Copyright ©, 2014
What if we could turn social media into our secret weapon?
Copyright ©, 2014
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What if we could turn social media into our secret weapon. This brings up more questions.
Why?
Copyright ©, 2014
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First you have to ask yourself, “Why do we need a secret weapon?” The main reason is that we have this huge gap between consumers and farmers. And in the developed world the gap is very large. Many people are two or three generations removed from the farm. This is a communication gap, a generational gap, it’s also a geographic gap as more and more people live in cities, but most importantly it’s a gap of experience. If you’ve never been on a farm, really spent any time on a farm, if you’ve never worked on a farm then you’re just not going to understand what goes into things. And when you don’t have an understanding then you are a sponge for information – good, bad, any type of information, because you don’t have a base of knowledge.
What are we fighting for?
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What are we fighting for? Well, we’re fighting for freedom. In any good fight that’s what you’re fighting for right? We’re fighting for the freedom for farmers and the agriculture industry to operate in a way that makes sense, in a way that’s based on sound science and good animal management practices and good crop management practices. We don’t want to run our businesses based on the whim of regulators or the press. And this doesn’t mean that we want the freedom to do anything we want and to mistreat our animals. It doesn’t mean that we want the freedom to damage the soil and the water. That doesn’t do us any good. It isn’t sustainable and it hurts us in the long run.
Perception is reality Copyright ©, 2014
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Perception is reality. If you don’t have any real knowledge of agriculture and what a farm is like and you see images on the internet of animals being mistreated it’s easy to believe those things. A picture tells a thousand words. On the other hand a lot of people that are not in agriculture have a perception of a very idyllic kind of farm with four chickens and a duck and one pig and that’s not right either. So we really need people to understand what agriculture really is and why it is that way.
What can we do about It? Copyright ©, 2014
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What can we do about this gap? How can we bridge the gap? We want to bridge the gap with communication but communication can mean a lot of things.
More communication! Copyright ©, 2014
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It can’t be more angry communication. We don’t want to be yelling at the other side and getting down in the trenches. It makes us look bad and it makes us look defensive. It lends credence to the other side.
More communication!
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We just need to educate people right? They just don’t understand what we are doing. If we explain it they will leave us alone. Of course it’s important to provide accurate information and let people know what we do and how we do it. But they will only learn when they are ready to learn. We can’t shove our message down people’s throats. It will just seem like an industry PR campaign. So we have to be transparent. We have to share our story about what we do and that’s part of it. That’s a good foundation.
More Communication!
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We can’t drown out the other side either. There are a lot of negative messages out there and we don’t want to attempt to outnumber those negative messages. For one thing it’s not possible. For another thing we’ll just fatigue our audience.
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They will get to the point that they are hearing so many messages from both sides that they won’t know what to believe any more. They will assume the worst. They will assume that everyone is lying to them and we don’t want to put consumers in that situation.
Better communication!
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So, we need better communication. It needs to be one to one and it needs to be based on experience. That’s how you really learn, with hands on experience, by talking to friends, by word of mouth communication and by building relationships.
Make some friends Copyright ©, 2014
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Social media is really all about friends. Social networks are primarily for friends to share photos, events and stories. Corporations and organizations spend a lot of time thinking about how they can approach that audience and take advantage of that audience being there but that audience is not there to be educated or absorb information. They are there to interact with their friends. And we need to make some friends, so… it’s really the ideal place for us.
But how can we compete?
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How can we compete with the negative messages? We have a positive message about feeding the world and taking care of your family. Can that really compete with shocking, sensational, negative messages. There will always be people that are drawn to those very negative messages and there is no shortage of those negative messages. At some point most people grow tired of those negative messages. They don’t want to hear it any more and they turn it off. If you’re communicating by building real relationships based on experience that is a much stronger form of communication than pelting people with bad news. It is much stronger in the long run.
So social media IS our secret weapon
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So, social media IS our secret weapon. It can be if we use it right.
Listen to other farmers
Facebook.com I am agriculture proud
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So please consider using social media to tell your farm story. But you have to start by listening to what other people are saying. You don’t want to go out and start posting stuff right away. You have to get a feel for the networks that you’re on and how people talk on those networks. A really good way to get started is to find a facebook group for farmers and see, what they talk about with each other. What sorts of things do they post? For example there is a facebook group called I am Agriculture Proud. It’s a group for farmer bloggers to share their blog posts. That’s a great way to see what sort of comments people post and what they are concerned with. If you’re not comfortable posting yet this is a good way to start.
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You can also follow bloggers that have built up some experience talking to people about farming. This is Dairy Carrie. You might be familiar with her blog, dairycarrie.com. This picture is from an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. So Carrie’s blog has gotten to the point where she is getting mainstream press and get exposure for her stories about agriculture. She doesn’t spin anything. She just tells people what she and her husband do on their farm and why. Everyday she has to deal with activists or critics and she is always very honest with them. She knows that not everyone is going to be won over but she just tells the truth about agriculture and it’s very effective.
Dairy Carrie won Social Media Farmer of the Year in 2014
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This year Carrie won Social Media Farmer of the year from the AgChat Foundation.
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Ryan Goodman is another great example. As of August 2014 Ryan posted his 1,000th blog post. He started in 2009 as a way to keep in touch with his family and friends after he moved from Arkansas to Wyoming to work on a ranch
Ryan Goodman
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Ryan’s posts have been picked up by CNN’s food blog, Eatocracy. This gives him the opportunity to reach lot’s of people with positive, factual messages about farming. He tells them why we do what we do. It starts to build understanding and fill that gap.
Derek Klingenberg
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You can also tell your farm story in a very humorous way. This is Derek Klingenberg who has done a lot of very funny videos on YouTube. You can find a lot of great farm oriented music parody videos on YouTube. Just search for Derek Klingenberg or the Petersen Brothers. If you’re more interested in shooting a video rather than writing a blog that can be a great way to tell your story.
Where to start? Copyright ©, 2014
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After you’ve listened to some of the people out there telling the story of farming, where do you start. There are so many platforms, there are so many ways to share your message. The most important thing is to pick the platform that you like and get started. See where it takes you.
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There is an organization called the AgChat Foundation that has a lot of excellent resources to tell you how to get started on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other social media platforms. It’s at agchat.org. They also have an annual conference in the US each year where farmers can go and learn how to use social media.
Why not invite them over? You’ve made new friends
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Now that you’ve made some friends online you might want to take the next step and make those relationships real. There’s nothing better than getting people out to the farm to see what you do. So when they see a YouTube video of horribly dirty animals or mistreated animals. They can say, “I’ve been to a farm and that is not what I saw there.”
For Ice Cream and a moovie
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This is Chaney’s Dairy Barn, a dairy farm in Western Kentucky. They decided they wanted to make their own ice cream. So, Carl Chaney went to school for a couple of weeks and learned how to make ice cream. He came back and they built their ice cream parlor and got started. They have school groups that come to the farm and get to see how the cows are milked and have ice cream. In the summer time they have ice cream and a moovie and they show a movie on the side of the barn and the kids run around and play and it’s a great experience for the whole family. So people that come to the Chaney’s farm have that solid experience of agriculture and they know what that farm is all about. If they see a YouTube video of some cows being mistreated they at least know that’s not happening on every farm. Even if they’re upset to see that video, just as we would be, they know that’s not what always happens.
Why not create Your own Amusement Park!
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So, why not create your own amusement park? There’s a farm in Fair Oaks Indiana called Fair Oaks Farm. They have turned their 30 square mile dairy farm into an amusement park and it’s amazing. They have 30,000 cows, so this is not a little tiny demonstration farm. This is a big farm. Groups of kids can go there every day. Families stop by. It’s right off the interstate. They have big billboards that tell you, you can go there. They have a restaurant. They make cheese. They make ice cream. And they have biosecure, sealed buses that take the tour groups through the farm so they don’t have to worry about endangering any of the cows. You can take your kids there and they can see a calf being born any day because they have so many cows. When you go there you would never guess that they have 30,000 cows. There really isn’t any issue with odor because they take all of the manure and run it through a methane digester. They are creating lots of renewable energy. They produce enough energy for the farm and then they sell some back to the grid. It’s a great story about sustainability and it would be really hard to turn that story around and make it a negative story. Thousands and thousands of people each year experience Fair Oaks, so they have a good solid understanding of what that farm is about.
Come experience a-mazing Moments and treasuted memories
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Visitors to Fair Oaks get to have an experience with their family that most people don’t get to have anymore. People that live in the city can find a lot of ways to spend time in the country. They can go to parks, they can hike, camp, canoe. But they don’t always have an opportunity to spend time on a farm. If you can bring your kids and go through the corn maze, that’s something they will remember.
Discover modern farming and How your food is produced.
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You can go and find out how your food is produced. People want to know more and more about where there food comes from so that fills a need too.
Fair Oaks Farms…where everything is as it should be…farm fresh.
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And of course all the food is fresh. It’s made right there on the farm.
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And they have a big Halloween festival each year.
Who would you trust?
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So who are you going to trust to tell you about farming? Farmers and agriculture or organizations posting shocking videos on YouTube. If you live in Indiana and you’ve been to Fair Oaks farm then you have had a good experience with agriculture and you will probably have a favorable opinion of agriculture. On the other hand, if you’re in a state that is trying to ban people from videotaping on farms, that is trying to keep the media out of farms then that is a perfect place for anti agriculture activists. If I was running an activist organization I would go to every state that had an ag-gag law and that’s where I would set up shop. Because, once you tell people you cannot come in and see my farm… well you’ve lost. It’s so obvious that you’re up to something wrong. It’s a complicated issue. There are reasons why you don’t want people videotaping animal abuse for a month and not turning the information over to the authorities. That’s the other side of that issue but we can’t be seen to be hiding behind the law. We need to be transparent and open. There’s nothing wrong with farming and raising food and let’s not act like there is.
Perception is reality Copyright ©, 2014
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So, perception is reality. The perception should be that agriculture is our first industry. It’s really our first science that we developed as a civilization and it’s our most important industry. It may be the only industry we have that’s actually life and death – feeding the world. So that’s the perception that we want people to have. Not that we are a polluting, abusive industry that needs to be saddled with lots of regulations because we can’t be trusted.
What do I need to do? Copyright ©, 2014
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What do you guys need to do? If only 2% of the people in developed countries are farmers that means that out of a hundred people only 2 are farmers. That leaves 98 non-farmers. If you divide 98 by those two farmers then you get 49 and that means that everyone in agriculture just needs to make 49 friends. That’s not that many friends. You don’t have to write a thousand blog posts to make 49 friends. You can do that with a cookout. So please think seriously how you can use social media to make your 49 friends and put an end to some of this gap that we have.
Make 49 friends
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Make 49 friends
Write it down • Share my Farm stories on…
– Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube • Start a blog • Invite a school group to tour my farm • Start a harvest festival with tours • Open a farm shop
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Here is your homework. Your goal is to make 49 friends. Just pick one thing that you are going to do to make those 49 friends. Will you share your farm stories and photos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Will you share videos on YouTube? Will you start a blog? Will you invite a school group to tour your farm? Will you start a harvest festival, or an ice cream shop or an amusement park? Just pick one thing.
