A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Cynthia Thayer, a local author who hired me to train her on how to use her WordPress blog and also happens to run an organic farm. (This is a very Maine thing: to have two seemingly completely separate careers going at one time but often artfully combining them.) I also knew her through my friends Tom and Beth Walsh who happen to be a next door neighbor and farm share recipient of Darthia Farm.
Sunday, tragedy struck the farm when the barn burned and the animals inside died.
Tom called me up Tuesday morning and wanted to have a website set up right away. Wanting to turn this around quickly without any up front costs to Tom, Cynthia, or anyone else, I threw up a donation page on Give Forward and shared it to my Facebook profile. It was interesting to spend relatively little time on something (besides researching First Giving and other sites like it to narrow down the service I’d use) completely blow up online.
Here’s a screenshot of just how my Facebook friends and business pages I follow shared the news:
The true power of sharing… and beyond the people I regularly keep in touch with, I can’t even track the shares through Facebook anymore!
If I click for further sharing information, here’s some even deeper data:
Social media sharing acts kind of like compound interest: one share could result in many more over time.
Now I can see this data because I’m on Facebook and happen to be friends with hundreds of people. The true test of if a campaign is working is ‘Is it driving traffic to the website?’ and ‘Once people get to the site, are they acting on your call to action?’
The results as of 11:30 this morning:
It’s nice to see how social media is helping to spread the word about this farm. Small businesses and individuals do have power to get messages across and these online channels and can help the word spread faster.
Thanks to all who donated so far and will donate. I’ll update this blog entry periodically with results of the campaign.