I got to ham-and-egg it with Darren Davis today... and we were not on a golf course.
Instead, we scrambled our way through co-presenting a half-day seminar on "Communicating for Success" to a great group of superintendents and assistants from around the Carolinas. It was an awesome experience to tag-team as teachers, particularly when my partner is a master communicator like Darren. The hardest part for me was shutting up long enough to let Darren share the real-world talents and experience that made him our unanimous choice for GCI's Kaminski Award for Social Media Leadership two years ago.
Darren's primary focus was on social media (more on that in a bit) but my real emphasis was on thinking before tweeting. In other words, social media is just part of the overall communications program every good super should have. And that program has to begin with a plan and clear, simple goals about what you want to achieve in your position and career.
No superintendent would ever undertake a project like rebuilding tees or adding new irrigation lines without having a good, well-reasoned plan in place first. Yet many seem to struggle with having a strategy and plan for communications.
Here's a simple solution: pick your top three goals for the next five years, write them down and put that piece of paper somewhere in your office where you can see it every day. Then make sure that everything you do from a communications standpoint ties back to those goals. I actually did a webinar on this topic earlier this year that you can listen to by clicking right HERE.
So my contribution was to talk about why communication matters to your career plan. Darren's job was to talk about how to do it. Here are a few highlights:
- Blogging is the critical linchpin that can drive much of your communications program. It's a great way to reach your audience (members and golfers) in your own words. Setting up a blog via blogger.com or Wordpress is very easy and absolutely free.
- Update your blog at least monthly and focus on topics that support your communications goals like gaining a more professional image within your facility or getting funding for needed capital improvements. Use photos and anecdotes to make your posts more engaging. Keep them relatively short (300-600 words) so people can digest them quickly.
- Use multiple platforms (enewsletter, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) to share your blog posts. Different people prefer different platforms and it’s relatively easy to put your content on each of them.
- Darren and I agreed that as Facebook has become less useful as a social media outlet, Twitter and Instagram are now the most effective tools for superintendents to tell their stories.
- It helps if you enjoy communicating, but even if you aren't inclined that way you can institutionalize your communications by scheduling time in your calendar to do regular updates, share progress on projects and otherwise advance your goals at work.
The best part of the class was the open discussion where we got down to the nitty-gritty of how to manage social media within the political structure of a club and how to make it as valuable as possible to your overall club marketing efforts. Much was said privately, but the bottom line is that virtually everyone agreed that the benefits far outweigh the time commitment and occasional risk that being proactive can present.
I'm grateful that the Carolinas GCSA gave us this unique chance to work together, share a few ideas and have some fun. Hopefully we can do it again soon and y'all will sign up for Round 2. The pace of change in this area is so rapid it will probably be a completely different discussion even a year or two from now.
