Big Social Media Results at Small Organizations

A session at SXSW Interactive 2012

If you're at a small organization, you might have more great ideas and willingness to serve your community than you do time, money, or help. Lots of small organizations in your shoes--associations, societies, coalitions, departments, units, health advocacy groups, community health centers, and non-profit start-ups--use social media for outreach, education, PR and promotion. Financial and human resource limitations make social media appealing for achieving organizational goals. But don't just assume that if you build it, they will come. And, don’t limit yourself to using the same strategies as larger organizations with more resources. If you want to do big things with social media at your small organization, you have to be creative and flexible, use what works, and know thyself. This presentation will help you think through developing, implementing, and measuring an effective campaign by sharing details of success stories from professional organizations and health advocacy groups.

About the speaker

This person is speaking at this event.

Aimee Roundtree

Assoc Professor, University of Houston-Downtown

Aimee Kendall Roundtree is an Associate Professor in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Houston-Downtown, where she teaches courses in medical and science writing, social media, hypermedia and technology, Web publishing and accessibility, visual design, and technical communication. She has helped oversee social media campaigns for organizations including the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and Connexions journal. She also serves as a medical writer and qualitative researcher in the Texas Medical Center, where she has participated on research teams at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine, and the Houston Center for Quality of Care and Utilization Studies. She has also been a communications specialist for the Texas Medical Foundation and an assistant editor at Ladies’ Home Journal magazine. She is currently working on several projects, including a book manuscript on the rhetorical nature of computer simulations, another on organizational uses of social media, and manuscripts on health-related uses of Facebook, Twitter and blogs.