With an internship in social media management, my community service is to put together a website that served as a hub for all the locally grown food resources – veggies, fruits, eggs, honey, milk, meat – everything that’s grown and produced locally in the tri-county area from Silver City, NM. It will be a resource that’s very valuable to the community and visitors to the area alike, and I know this is information that people want to know now by the hits the temporary site has been getting since I’ve started putting it together.
Welcome to Gila Home Grown. Complete with adorable Gila Monster mascot.
The best part of this is knowing the finished product is going to be fabulous. (Yay, Virgo-Perfectionist nature.) However, the most challenging aspect is getting farmers to get back in touch with me. Which the irony is ultimately this could help their business, but I am pretty sure they are busy picking the perfect produce to bring to the farmers market. (Judging how much time my own garden demands, I think there’s some plausibility to that theory.)
The other thing I know is they are more people in the area who grow and produce food that I haven’t met at the Silver City Farmers’ Market, but who are in the tri-county area and participate in the farmers’ market in Mimbres. Once the facebook page is set up and launched, I think the word will spread faster and I will have more to list on the Local Growers. I will be rolling out the content on facebook and new blog posts shortly, once it’s all launched.
First blog post will be “What is a Foodshed?” because no one out here had a clue what I was talking about. I was told directions to the food pantry about four different times, and recieved puzzled looks from the rest.
And on the side I threw in a Facebook 101 workshop for the local Ford dealership, and will be doing the same thing at the Toyota dealership next Saturday. They’re always giving back to the community (and I write their newsletter) so I gave them a lesson on how to make their Facebook page active and engaged and hopefully bring in more customers.
I learned a lot of information I knew but wasn’t really aware of how big of an impact it had. Like how a photo with zero likes, comments, or shares goes nowhere, but even if only the six people working sales like a photo it can reach up to 300 people thanks to facebook’s new algorithm. Crazy stuff. We also bounced around ideas on how to get engagement, different types of open-ended questions, and really emphasized how everyone in this company needs to be engaging on the page as often as possible.
