 And I am the communications coordinator for the locally led project and SDACD. A little bit about me really. Am I muted? Okay. Yep. Okay, sounds good. All right. So, um, so though we live in the digital age and print media maybe isn't as prominent and, and, and use as much anymore but it's, it still is incredibly important part of the marketing mix. You know, in print media, it can help your organization extend its exposure, reach potential clients that you might not be able to reach some people not everyone uses digital. So print is still a good tool to use. You can gain exposure with it engage in your target audiences with certain campaigns and it's still a very credible source of marketing. Um, so the different types of marketing we can use the different materials are business cards of course brochures, rat cards, flyers and posters, postcards, newsletters, labels and stickers door hangers. I mean it goes on. There's so many different print resources that you can utilize and to reach different people and to spread your message in a certain way. So you could even do fridge magnets if you wanted to table tents at restaurants. I mean it kind of just depends on what your message is. So first thing we're going to talk about today is business cards. And so I'm sure many of you have business cards but if you don't, I highly recommend you get some. They are incredible they represent your company at a first glance and first impressions are super important and it's essential to make that first impression really rememberable. So business cards they convey important personal information such as your name, your job title your email your website your address and phone number. Oftentimes it is also the first exposure to the overall image of your business and the fonts use the text the paper stock and also convey a message about the type of industry you're representing. So images everything so having a business card on hand gives the appearance of professionalism and shows that you're ready to go. And also with business cards. They're quicker than passing digital. I mean when you have to get your phone out and bring out an app, you know so someone can type in their contact information, just easier to slip them the business card. You can always have some on hand you never know when you're going to need to give that out or when you're going to need to promote your business. So if you don't have any I highly recommend you get some. So, some tips when you are designing a business card. So business cards are about 3.5 by two inch standard little small piece of paper. And when it comes to business cards I always recommend using colors that match your brand. And so if you're a conservation district our colors are usually green and blue. So, with that business card use those maybe different shades of green and blue or keep them the same as your logo that way it shows like your brand identity and that helps people put a like an image to your whole brand. Impact use back and front. Usually one side would be your contact information who you are. And then the back page can be a place where you can put in your services and describe maybe a slogan to or just what you can help with and why you're beneficial, but it's important to utilize most if you want to get the best impression. When it comes to business cards to I usually prefer to do like one to three fonts they work tremendously and but I usually stick with Sam Sarah fonts which is cleaner look. Again with the business card you only want to use the most relevant information so that is your logo, your name, your job title, phone, email and contact any contact information, and then your services. And then also another thing is to consider a call to action, whether that be including a QR code to your website or maybe your tree order form, even possibly as well and add social media icons to let people know like where you that you have social media and that they can follow you. Next we'll talk about brochures brochures are great tools to utilize I can't say that's enough there are incredible to use because they let people know about your services and your goods, what you're all about and it allows you to have a more in depth conversation with people and really get to the point of what you're looking and what you want to promote. Um, so with brochures it's important to have info, important information and interesting information to include, but also backing that up with visuals and maybe including infographics. They are perfect for trade shows events meetings and walk ins. They're great to have with you. So some design tips when it comes to brochures on brochures the standard size is about 8.5 by 11 inch so a standard piece of paper is what you're going to want to do, fold it into or fold it just in three usually is how you do it on when it comes to brochures. I usually limit it to about four colors, and these colors you want to use consistently throughout the brochure, but one thing to note is you want to keep it with your brand so I tend to stick with green and blue when it comes to conservation districts and things like that, because what allows us to continue our brand identity and be able to help people identify like what our business is all about and what services we provide and yeah, but also you want to break up paragraphs with bullet points or spacing, get adding some spaces in there. So brochures easy to skim with headers and sub headers and bold those out or make them bigger so they stand out a little bit so when people are skimming through they can just immediately find which section they want to read. Use high quality graphics or infographics again they give readers a visual break and allows people's eyes to kind of wander and find. Oh yeah it gives a visual break from text blocks basically. When it comes to choosing a font choose an easy to read font, and so I've provided some examples of ones that you should have in your programs. Times are for Sarah if there's times in Roman Garamond Palatino are good fonts to use, and then for sans Sarah aerial to Homer and Madonna are good ones. For instance to fonts though I want to also say like I tend to use sans seraph the most for me sans seraph shows that things are casual they're modern, but also sans seraph is a lot easier to read than seraph and seraph is good to use as well. They're actually really good to use for headers. So then that sans seraph can be the one that you use for long bodies of text. So it shows that you're professional and it's more formal, and that's kind of why I like to use sans seraph because it's more casual modern laid back kind of a feel to it. But yeah, those fonts listed are some great ones to use highly recommend thinking about that with your next brochure, or any print material that you use. These are great because they convey information at a glance, and you'll normally see these and have seen these at visitor centers or right when you walk into a restaurant you'll see all those. That stack of cards there that promoting Wildwater West in the black Hills and all that stuff. Well this is another print material that we could use ourselves to promote our services, whether that be for tree planting, or expressing why you were needed why conservation is so important, or even just giving tips about certain things. So you can use rack cards to promote meetings or events, you're hosting your services, helpful links feature any projects, you're working on, they're great for so many things. But with rack cards you're going to want to use some very high quality visuals and colors because you want that attention to be fast. Also include your benefits features, incentives, a call to action, whether that maybe be using a QR code, or just call now, list your number, big and bold, and always include any contact information and your logo. So rack cards are another good one for trade shows events and walk ins. Not much for rack cards on design tips they're basically the same as a brochure but just convinced so, but rack cards are usually sized at four by nine inch. So if you're doing a rack card use the maximum amount of color you can. Again, to be more consistent with your brand, I tend to use like brighter shades of green and blue. If it were to come to designing any rack cards and photographs, add photographs and for graphics, make it appealing to the eye. Focus on the visual. Again, color photos. Call to action on top because the way we read things is we always start at the top and then go down so whatever you want to convey whatever message put it right at the top. Next we'll talk about flyers. Everyone knows about flyers is probably use them quite a bit. It's great to promote your services, if you have any special offers, events, and more. When it comes to flyers you're going to want to include a clear and enticing message and design that grabs customers attention. So these are great to distribute direct mail, you can send them through the mail, do door to door, put them in newspapers but you'll probably want to condense that down to maybe an ad and that's something you'll have to talk with your local newspaper about. Hand out at events of course, use them at trade shows, bring them and put them on the bulletin boards of restaurants gas stations and schools even depending on what it is you are promoting with the flyer. And then have some laying around at your office, put it in the window of the door before they come in. But flyers are so great because you can use them really anywhere and they are such a good space to use to promote anything that you're having. Flyers tend to be about the standard paper size again, but you can always switch that up but that standard size of 8.5 by 11 is a great. So when it comes to flyers you're going to want to be creative with your fonts and don't use any more than three. Otherwise it kind of just gets too crazy. And so I tend to use sans serif fonts like Ariel to Homa and Verdana. When it comes to flyers because it's easier to read in a really again keeps a casual. So when it comes to flyers you're also going to want to use visuals that can be images that can be graphics, but whatever it is, make sure it's something that conveys your message or what you're promoting. When it comes to long information break it up some way by adding some space or put some bullet points there. So where the viewers I will bounce around when they look at a at the flyer and usually we start of course to read things from left to right so I usually put the most important information or something that's going to grab the attention on the left side of the flyer. And then the right side would be more about the information to backup whatever it is you're talking about on the left. Another thing with any of these materials take a break and come back I can't tell you how many times I've been staring at something that I've been designing for a few hours, you know, and your eyes get used to staring at something. Walked away for a little bit, and then came back and notice some mistakes that have been made so if you're working on some take a break, come back and hopefully you'll be able to catch any mistakes and also let people proofread. Another big one, always let people proofread. So next is postcards postcards gets your message into the right hands. It's great because it quickly conveys any key messages that you have and it offers right up to your prospects or customers right it makes a high impact and gets right to the point that's what makes them so great because people don't really like to read maybe all that much so postcards are like the way to go with that. They're great tools to pair with different marketing activities so say if you're going to be making some emails or some calls to people. Postcards could be a great way to be like hey I'm going to be calling you I'm going to be sending in this email be on the lookout for it. Or if you have an event you could be a follow up like thanks for coming. Hope to see you again soon and if you have a survey postcards are great to utilize with sending those out, whether that be including a QR code or link to where they can take the survey. So when to use postcards, they're good for event invites, they are service promotion outreach for potential CIS projects. We've been using postcards for that quite a bit these past few months. Follow ups to any events that you had or again if you want to promote surveys you can use it for that as well. Postcards, their standard size is 4.2555.5 inch so they're a little small, but they're cheap that's what makes postcards also great to use as they don't their cost effective. So postcards we use striking imagery, imagery and graphics for it, keep your tech short simple to the point, whatever the most prominent information is make sure that is easily legible to read. Postcards you're going to want to use white space. Otherwise, it gets to look too cluttered so keep stuff spacious. Don't want it to clutter too much otherwise it gets to be too much. Another thing is consider increasing your postcard size. So again, usually use about that four, four by five around that area. But if you really want to grab attention, a six by nine, which would be a lot bigger would be the way to go. But again, it's going to cost you probably a little bit more. But if you do it in house. Again, it's going to cost you a little bit more as well because you can't put multiple on the same sheet of paper so it kind of gets to be a lot but if you really want to grab attention. That's the one to go with. Lastly, we're going to talk about newsletters really quick. If you don't have a newsletter I highly recommend you get one. These are great because it gets your name and your face and everything you're about out into the public. And it keeps your name in front of people. It helps build regular communications with your customers and prospects. It builds relationships with customers through regular communication with high value information. It allows you to show off your expertise and it's a great way to let people know all about you, what your services are, how you've been helping the community this past year, this past week or depending on how much you send out a newsletter, you send it out yearly, monthly, weekly even but even just yearly would be great just to let people know what you've been up to and why you're so essential to the community. You could send newsletters out physically or send emails to people, whichever way. It's just a trial and error thing when it comes to that because some people like to get it physically some people like to read newsletters online. So it's something you'd have to play with. So with newsletters, so newsletters like sizes they vary a lot. I mean, the standard size usually is like a regular piece of paper but you could fold it up and make a like a mini booklet for your newsletter just depends. When it comes to newsletters, you're going to always want to at the top of the page on that first page is include your logo, the newsletters name, the date and the volume and the issue of that newsletter gives it a more professional feel, and let people know that this isn't the first one you're going to keep sending them. You'll want to include table of contents, make sure that it stands out but it doesn't have to be, doesn't have to take up a lot of room that lets people know like what's inside the issue and where they can find specific articles that they want to read about include a call box an area that lists your staff your board who you are what you do, maybe your mission statement as well. And then on every page you're going to want to have a running head, and that can be put up at the top, or at the bottom of the newsletter, and that's basically can shows like what the newsletter name is it includes page number volume issue. Consistency and professionalism throughout the whole newsletter. And then of course the body it's the meat of the newsletter it's organized by columns headlines layout subheads. But the most important thing about any of that and with the layout is remain consistent because otherwise it just, you don't remain consistent throughout with the layout it can look a little cheesy and weird and like, you're kind of like okay. Trying to figure out how it looks and stuff. Use big headlines to grab attention, especially if there's any specific articles that you were talking about. Make it big. You stick to three to four fonts. And I usually stick with that sans serif font because it's easier to read, especially if you have long bodies of text, you'll want to stick with that sans serif font. Take photos and graphics freely. Keep it visual, keep it interesting. And if you have any important points or maybe quotes or anything, maybe stick those out as well on the side, have a sidebar with that quote or that visual or include infographics if you are using a lot if you have a lot of statistics or graphs that you're mentioning in your article, infographics are great, great to use. All right, so um, now you will a couple things we'll talk about here is make your prints material a little bit more active interactive so QR codes are great because they're a great way to draw attention to your web page or website and you learn more about your products and services they're just an easier way to convey that and they're easy to use and can be customized to fit your needs and your company branding. And so the website that I provided there is a free website there where you just have to have the link, and then you just insert it in and they will develop and create a QR code for you take seconds. It's great I use it all the time for when people need to use QR codes or want to use QR codes with their materials. Infographics infographics infographics statistics and graphs can be dull, but formatting them as an infographic allows you to reach your target audience in a visually appealing and memorable way include a digital copy of your infographics online you can use those for social media, you know, keep it visual, and it keeps people's attention a lot more with that and makes things interesting and spices up any text that you may have. And then lastly social media and on any of your print materials, I highly recommend you include your social media icons and tags in your printed material to take the conversation online post engaging contact content online and forces reinforces your printed material, it's a great way to keep a campaign going through all avenues and shows people all the ways that you're kind of flowing in your material and stuff but always include that if you have it if you can. Yeah. So what colors should I use. This is so cool I love the chart. So cool to look at and see how colors convey and how there's such a psychology behind it. And so with conservation districts and our industry in general green is basically the color we use for most because it's the easiest color humans can identify with actually the color green is the color that our eyes can discern the shades of. So that's why green is the international color of relaxation, nature and peace. It's a universally associated with environmental things so it's great for conservation related materials that's why I use green for pretty much any everything for our things. But just changing the shade is what I do. Blue is another favorite color for marketers and brands all over the world it's the color of calm, control logic, honesty, intelligence, security, purity, I mean it goes on. It's soothing tones help establish trust based relations. And that's why a lot of social media use uses blue it's because it's so it convey security and intelligence. But we also use blue because water, water and air and sky so it's another way to convey that message as well. But yeah consider if you're ever designing anything, think about your message and how you want it to come across. Using yellow if you really want to grab attention, especially with like rack cards for example using yellow can really like grab attention. And so yeah, um, this website that I included is a website I use quite a bit when it comes to picking out shades of colors that I want to use for different materials. It's a, it allows you to combine and check out what other colors would look good and it finds colors that would look good with certain colors that you want to choose, but it's a great resource to use when you're developing your own materials. Okay, and then lastly what I'll mention is Microsoft publisher. If you have Microsoft Office Suite then you have Microsoft publisher, almost anything you need design, whether it be flyers posters postcards newsletters business cards and more can be done in this program. It comes with hundreds, hundreds of pre made layouts and templates that you can use for guidance for ideas and inspiration. So, if you would ever want to learn more or would like a tutorial on how to work with publisher please let me know. I could help you do a tutorial or maybe create a video that goes into more depth of how to use publisher and how to access any of those pre made layouts and templates. Um, I think, I think that's it. Yeah, thank you. Um, I guess I'm going to plug myself in a little bit here do a little plug. Um, if you have any materials that you would like design whether that be postcards for potential CIS projects, or maybe you have some old pamphlets or brochures that you'd like updated and like redesigned or if you'd like some infographics made for certain articles or for social media. Please don't hesitate to reach out I'd love to help with that. Um, and especially with anything. Anything that you have, I mean, I love graphic design it's one of my passions and I would love to help out in any way that I can so thank you have any questions please put them out right now. Do we have any I can't see the screen but Yeah, we had one. We guess we have a few coming in here. Can you touch on how you keep this information accessible to everyone like for example. I've noticed a lot of social media using descriptors for the visually impaired under photo captions have you done much with the accessibility side. Personally for me know I haven't. Um, especially when it comes to social media that is something that's a feature on there. I guess I haven't really yeah I haven't really done anything with that but that'd be something that I personally would love to look into though to do a little bit more research about it, especially when it comes to print materials would be very good to have for that so thank you I'm going to make a note of that. We've got a few notes on a tutorial on publisher so that's something we can look into. Okay. And event was wondering what is the best item to use to spread the word that customers will keep and not toss in the trash or get lost in the mail pile. Silver bullet. It's so tough. I mean, again, I think the best thing it really depends on what it is you're trying to promote what I would normally use would probably like it kind of just depends it's all about trial and error. Firstly, I would try out a postcard and maybe especially I would try out that six by nine size make it big make it informative because you're going to want to display what information is the most important. And so that could be that and it's quick it's not long so people don't have to read much into it people don't like to read much our attention spans are kind of shot. So we like our information to be quick, easy accessible and get right to the point and postcards can do that and postcards can bring attention and their cost effective they won't cost as much. You can do it easily in house, or you can outsource it, but I think postcard I think I would do a postcard would be my go to first, first thing. And pair that with social media to. Yeah, anything you do, always pair it with that always. And as, as, as Katie mentioned we've been doing quite a bit of work with with postcards and kind of just seeing what's getting more and more traction so trial and error like she said. So, yeah, we can definitely work with you to on. I say we Katie, definitely help and kind of explain some of the different things that we've tried. And as is there any other questions. And see we have one more here. Michelle, we will, we will reach out to you. Excuse me to help get a postcard started. Awesome. Yeah. So we will. I'm excited now. Yep, we will do that. Okay, sweet. You've also had a quick question what are your thoughts on swag. swag is great if you got it. Yeah, any swag would be great I mean any of any materials to send out shirts T shirts. T shirts are big magnets. I don't know why I always think of magnets for swag for some reason, I think it's because they're always such a hit and any marketing thing I've been at people always go crazy about pens and magnets. It's crazy. I don't know why but I'm in the same boat where I see a pen I'll pick it up. Do I need it. No, but I'll pick it up and magnets. Same thing. I, it's some things to consider. Potentially if you want to keep like putting your face out there would be using some materials like that, especially like if you have like a table tent at a restaurant, like having those at restaurants is great way to spread because people go sit down. They're kind of get bored maybe talking to each other they'll look around and having that right there on the table would be great. It's, there's so many different things you can do door hangers to if it's tree season you're like hey we've got trees and come on down. Put those on some doors of people. It just, yeah, there's so many things. Yes. Sorry, I'm rambling. No, that's, it's all good. It's good. So I guess before we will move on to stand here if there are any other questions. Let us know or if you have something else that pops up. Feel free to type away and we will, we will get to it. So with that, thank you, Katie, lots of information in there. We will have these up again. These recordings up online so we will, and we'll also send out links to these or these presentations to so you can have them on hand. And with that, we have Stan wise from the soil health coalition, who's going to talk about social media. He's also got some information on newspaper and print materials also. So we will let Stan get going. Hi everyone. My name is Stan wise and the communications coordinator for the South Dakota soil health coalition. I'm also our I used to be the editor for the farm forum. I've got just a few tips and practices for you to follow with social media and maybe in your communications with your local journalists. Certainly can't follow as good a presentation as Katie's there but I'll do my best. So, first of all, why should you social media and the reason is that younger audiences consume us much less traditional media they're not watching TV they're not looking at newspapers, they're getting their news online and primarily through social media. So that's want to be where they are. And it offers a great way to make the exchange of information interactive. So, they're not just not just talking at them they can ask questions and respond to what you put out there. And sharing your information on social media makes it easier for your audience to share that information with their own social circle circles I can just click the share button and share your information wall with all their friends, and also building a social media following build your reputation as a provider of trusted information. And you've seen that. I'm sure if you've been online somebody's like I've got 500,000 Twitter followers people pay attention to what they say. So if you build your own audience. You carry a greater reputation for providing trust information. So which platform should you use at the soil health coalition we use Facebook groups Facebook pages. Twitter and Instagram Facebook page is good for sharing your events, your articles your videos your news releases your available programs. Users can post their questions and but a good thing you can do is you know create event pages in Facebook and share them. Facebook group is good for letting other people interact. So you can start conversations share photos and allow people to share their own photos information about practices, what's happening in the field. It's good to encourage your audience to interact there. And some of you may be members of Facebook groups already like ad groups I'm a member of one that has like 30,000 people it's very active, and people go there for all kinds of reasons to from here's what's happening in my field to. So they can be a great way to have a back and forth with the people that you're trying to reach. Twitter has much fewer users than Facebook, but the people who are there tend to be very engaged. And so it's good for sharing all types of information links out photos, getting people engaged, cutting your legs out from under yourself. And if the article that you link doesn't have a preview image you need to add one of your own. So, make sure that you have permission to use any photo that you or video that you include with your posts. And also one last tip is a be aware of how the social media platform may crop any image you share. So you might be like alright I'm adding this great image and it cuts a guy's face in half. So you just want to make sure you look at that preview image and edited so that it shows up there. So posting something someone else is already created. Number one you want to thoroughly vet both the creator and the content of the post you are they reliable. And does it represent the mission and vision of your organization does it contain offensive information or controversial topics or buzzwords. This is just protecting yourself and also making sure that you don't put any inaccurate information out there because you don't want to damage your reputation as a provider of information. You don't want to endorse any products or favoring any company or organization, even when liking or repeating or sharing other people's posts. And if you're sharing somebody else's content does the photo video or article preview photo correctly represent your organization's mission or vision, you know I have to watch out when I'm posting for the soil health coalition. I might be sharing an article about soil health tips but the preview image might be something else from the magazine or the outlook and I'm sharing and it might be, you know somebody out there tilling a field, and that's not the image that we want to portray as soil health coalition so I might add my own photo in there, instead of using their preview image. One of the best practices for your individual platforms, Facebook's best time supposed in six, eight, six and eight AM most people check Facebook first thing they do when they wake up. And also at the end of the day into their workday I should say people are starting to check out and they'll switch over to Facebook and that's two to five PM. When you're posting try to keep your text to five sentences or less. Don't use hashtags on Facebook. What you can do on Facebook though is you can create a, if you've got a page, a Facebook page you can create a slideshow video using up to 10 photos so you can take those photos and add them in and it'll give you an option to create a slideshow and you can add music if you want to and it creates your own little video from those photos. That's a cool way to tell a story about an event or something that's going on in the field. The best time to post is one to three PM. You can tag other Twitter users to boost engagement but don't tag a billion people hashtags can increase your engagement if used correctly but don't use more than two per post. Those get shown to less people. Make sure that your hashtags are spelled correctly and don't make them overly complicated and a good way that good thing to do is to see if others are using them before you use them. Make sure your post is readable. If you've got a bunch of hashtags and you're tagging other people in there it can get to be a little difficult to read. Instagram the best times to post between 11am 11am so people on it, you know, the lunch hours and then they're on it right before bedtime seven to 9pm. It's photo based. So make sure the image contains all the information that you want to convey. Not a ton of people read the descriptions of your photos. And also in the description you can't link out to another website. But one thing that it is really cool to do with Instagram stories that we've had some success with is using the stories feature on Instagram and I'll show you kind of an example of that. But you can use it to drive traffic to another Instagram post or product page. You can engage with your audience by letting them ask you anything on the stories post or you can conduct a poll that way so it gives you a way to make Instagram a little bit more interactive and I'll show you how we use it in just a minute. So here's some example posts that we've done recently with the soil health coalition. This first post is from Twitter, and it is just three images, you know, and reason we posted that was nothing more than to engage our audience to get them thinking about soil health of course what's coming up. So we wanted to build engagement we wanted them to share we wanted to share and we wanted to get more followers because of it. It's a good way to build your brand. Just by sharing photos of what's happening right now and getting them thinking about, you know, for us getting them thinking about how they can use soil health, even if they don't have a big farm or just as they're planning their garden in the backyard. So it accomplishes multiple purposes at once. The next post the next post is from Facebook. And this is one that I wanted to point out to you is this image is both fantastic. This is one in one sense, and really bad in another, like this is bad photography, this is really bad photography but it is a slide that was shared by Jimmy Evans and our soil health conference, and it is fantastic in the story that it can base. You know, you see the water infiltration on the left side on the field on the left side of the road, and, you know, water run off on the right side of the road from the same rainfall event I mean that tells you a ton about soil health practices. It violates all the rules that I know about photography but yet it gets tons of engagement, and people really respond to it. So this is the I wanted to share with this with you that you don't have to have the best photo as long as you're sharing something interesting. And I sort of violated rules about them how much text to put in front of this photo because I wanted to let people know what was happening in this photo so this I kind of broke the rules there a little bit. And Instagram here's another example we got a lot of engagement on this photo over to the to the left there that's a photo none of our staff members took a bail grazing. Not a great photo from photography photography standpoint but producers and people in the agro can see this tells a story about what bail grazing is and how you set it up. And I did include more information here for people who do read the description to find out what exactly is going on in this photo and how to, and how they might do something similar. And over here on the right is an example of one of our Instagram stories. What we did this year was we set up a different Instagram story category for each of our research plots and then as we visited the plots throughout the summer we would take photos. And we could give you kind of an update on how that plot is going throughout the year so all you got to do is go to our Instagram page and click on one of our plots and you'll see a succession of photos almost kind of like a slide show. That'll show you how that plot progressed over the course of the summer so if you've got a story that's taking place over time and Instagram stories a great way to share photo tips. All right, have the post that you're going to make in mind before taking your photos know what you want to convey, and then you want to shoot at least three different photos from three different angles, so that you're sure you've got the photos that you need to accurately portray your story. And unless you're shooting for Instagram hold your phone or your camera sideways horizontally you don't want to use vertical photos unless you're shooting for Instagram which has a more vertical aspect ratio but Facebook and Twitter all have a horizontal aspect ratio. And this especially goes when shooting videos always always always for videos shoot horizontally. So the perfect photo is less important than shooting something interesting if it's interesting to you, it will likely be interesting to your audience field activities, you know visual comparisons soil tests livestock management whatever you're doing in in the field, you know your audience is probably doing and they're going to be interested in that. Shoot high resolution photos and don't degrade your quality by texting on your phone make sure your photos are taking the highest resolution possible and when you let's say you're not the one going to be posting it or sharing that image to social media others. Don't text it to the person who is using email or a cloud sharing service to send the photo because texting degrades the resolution and that's not quite as important though it sometimes can be for social media it is big it's big time important if people want to use that image in print. Also, unless you're shooting a group of five or more people make sure you can identify the people appearing in the photo. And don't use the zoom feature on your phone when shooting just get closer. And don't be afraid to shoot and share short video clips under a minute long those do really well. You know from the seat of the tractor from or you're doing a test in the field. People are going to be interested in and how that works. So the keys to success with social media are to be consistent. Decide how many posts you intend to post every day and then stick to that schedule the soil health coalition we try to post once a day. And we stick to that that includes weekends, holidays we set it all up to go once a day. Be engaged that means monitor your social media feeds don't just forget about it so if someone asks a question. Respond as soon as possible even it's to tell them that you're tracking down their information if you don't have the information they request find it. And if somebody posts something offensive to your channel a platform you need to remove it if you're if you're not engaged they're not going. You need to build your audience and that means posting items like photos and videos and interesting articles to grow the number of people who are watching your content and keep them engaged so that more people will see your posts about you know your upcoming event or your press release or your new program that you're trying to. And then make your life easier. Most of your social media platforms have tools that let you schedule your posts in advance. We also we use a third party tool called Hootsuite, and there are a lot of others that allow you to schedule all of your social media from one platform and you know I can schedule post days and in advance so that I'm not having to worry about it over the weekend over a holiday. That's all stuff I have on social media. I'm going to move over to traditional media if you're this is if you wanting to submit content to your local newspaper or radio station or TV station to have them. Send that out to their audiences because not all the people you want to reach are young and on social media. One thing you've got to remember is that media outlets have far fewer resources than they used to they have been hammered by social media fewer people are using them and their add dollars have gone down and they have far fewer journalists. They have far fewer producers editors who have the time to devote to getting your information in front of their audience so you want to. That's the number one thing you want to keep in mind is that they don't have many resources. So you want to make it as easy for them as possible. So the basics. The first thing you want to do is build a relationship. So introduce yourself to your local media before you ever need them to publish something. Introduce them to social media to social events but whatever you do don't give them gifts or pay for their food or drinks that violates the rules of journalism ethics. But it's harder. Even as a journalist there's still people as an editor you're still a person and so it's harder to say no to someone you know. So let them get to know you and they'll take your phone calls and they'll make your content a priority. It's easy to say yes so you want to submit your content in a way that makes it easy for them to use with as little work as possible remember they have very few resources. Make it easy to read if you want them to simply reprint something that you've already written which is a huge bonus for you and it's easy for them. Just make sure it isn't boring because if it's boring they're going to say no I'm going to lose an audience's attention with this and they're not going to do it. So whatever you're putting out there write it like an article not like a news release. If you're hoping for something more than just like a here's an upcoming event announcement frame your content in a way that makes it clear that it is new interesting and something that people should care about. Alright so making it easy to say yes. First thing you got to do is use correct grammar and as Katie said you want to let somebody proofread you on your post on your articles and things that you're sitting out there. But this includes spelling your names correct don't capitalize words just because you think they're important so ag education is important but it's not capitalized because those are two common nouns so only capitalize titles and proper nouns avoid the ampersand symbol these are just some quick tips. We like to use the word utilize a lot in a news release that that's like you know think fingernails on a chalkboard for an editor just use the one silver word use. Learn the basics of AP style for abbreviation job titles when they're capitalized when they're not. Make sure it's accurate. This is a big one double check your facts dates times phone numbers email addresses web addresses, whatever it is for submitting your content can tell you I hated nothing more than relaying information that was provided to me in the news release only to have readers. Call me up and say hey that's not right and then I have to publish a retraction. That's a that's a real good way to make the editor look sideways at you the next time you submit information for them. When you submit information make sure they can copy and paste it every editor whether it's in radio or TV or newspaper has their own editorial system and they got a copy and paste your content into it and PDFs and flyers are really really bad for this for whatever reason PDFs do really weird things with text and gets rid of word wrapping it just really makes a lot of work for somebody to try to put it into their editorial system so even those really cool documents that Katie showed us those aren't what you send to the press because they're really hard for them to copy the information out of it. It's better to put your text in the body of an email so they can quickly copy quickly copy and paste it into their editorial system and edit it. And whatever you do don't send it in a Word document and especially avoid sending photos in Word document. And the reason for this is, is that you, it's almost impossible to get high resolution photos out of a Word document. Send your images as attachments or provide links for downloading if they're too big to email. More on photos, make sure that you have permission from the copyright of the folder from the photo to send it out from publication. Otherwise, if they print somebody else's photo that you didn't have permission to share, you've exposed them to liability because they just violated that person's copyright. Usually the person who took the photo is the copyright holder unless they took the photo in the course of their work for their employer. In that case, the employer owns the copyright. Include a caption and a photo credit with every photo you send that's a huge headache for any outlet to get this photo and they don't know what's being portrayed. If there are people in the photo, you need to identify them in the caption unless it's a big crowd of people. Some outlets have policies that require any pictured person to be identified and this will save it must save them from having to call you send high resolution photos and I've been talking about this. The reason for that is is that screen resolution is 72 dpi but print resolution depending on the paper or you know the quality of publication that they're sending out is anywhere from 160 to 300 dpi and that so they need higher resolution photos for print. So finally don't send to the press out of focus grainy dark poor quality photos. Make sure your photos are crisp and sharp. Don't have the little date thing in the bottom right hand corner that some cameras let you do. Just send them a nice professional quality photo. So making your content easy to read. This is just a quick rundown on how to write it so that people pay attention to your article. What you want to do is let them know the crux of your news release in the first couple of sentences. The most important information and this is called the inverted pyramid. It's a thing that journalists get hammered into them but basically the most important information goes at the top of the article which is where you've got people's attention who what when where how and why. Then you can narrow down the details, you know, getting to important details and then the background information. This is a good way to at least let somebody know what's going to be happening in your article right in the beginning and then they can keep reading for more information. People's attention spans are short these days. So you at least want to make sure that they get the gist of what you're trying to tell them. Another tip is to don't lead off with long organization names or obscure program names. If, if I've got an article that starts off the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition in conjunction with the National Natural Resources Conservation Service and South Dakota Association of Conservation Districts and South Dakota Department of Natural Environment Natural Resources. I've already lost a bunch of readers. So I would say a new program is available for farmers who want to address salinity issues in the field and then down farther down the pyramid I would explain who's put it who's putting on the program and why. Quotes are great. They're wonderful ways to punch up your article and make them readable but make sure that the quotes are from the sources in their own words if you take a bunch of committee approved PR approved language and you stick it between quotes and assign it to somebody it's going to it's just going to be boring and it's going to turn people off. Also vary your sentence length. Avoid overly long sentences and give preference to shorter sentences. Remember, if you're writing for the media, you're basically writing for an eighth grade reading level. Making news for your calendar entries event announcements news briefs these are a little news items that are less than 200 words. It doesn't have to be breaking news. You can say we've got a event coming up people are invited. You know, it's going to be free or it's going to be at this time that's fine doesn't have to be the next big thing. But otherwise, you need to let the media know why it's a big deal. Remember, you can't spell news without new. So if you're telling them about something new going on a journalist is automatically their ears picked up and say yes I'm interested I want to tell the story. But if it isn't new you need to tell them why it's still a big deal and why they should care about it. So many publications have audiences beyond agriculture and they need a reason for the city folks to care about a story. For instance, at the farm forum, we shared a newsroom with the daily of Aberdeen American news. I couldn't get an article written unless I could convince the American news editor to let me use their reporter. And in order to use their reporter. I had to convince them that the article that the reporter would write would be of interest to people living in town, not just out in the rural areas. So don't just say we're having a field day to explain our conservation research plots, instead say, run off from fields reduces water quality, however with improved soil health runoff can be controlled and we're holding a field day to explain how agriculture can be part of the solution. Suddenly you've got people in town saying yeah those farming guys can maybe help solve climate change and, you know, yeah I want to know more about this. If a media outlet wants to do an interview, don't don't request questions ahead of time. Journalists just cannot stand these can PR approved responses. Let them get you in your own words and it'll make for a more interesting article and your read and the people you're trying to reach will be more likely to pay attention. If you have an interview, don't ask to see an approved story before it is published you don't as a source you don't have approval rights and the stories that they publish however it's really good idea. Let them know with the end of the interview that they can call you at any time and verify any of the facts or quotes before they publish the story. And that's something that journalists appreciate, especially. There's still people they're worried about bothering you if they have to call you a second time to get something right and you don't want them to publish something wrong. If you want your content in a particular outlet, don't be afraid to call them the day after you send your news release and just ask them if they got it and ask them if they have any questions about it because sometimes it gets buried in their inboxes because journalists inboxes like a fire hose. If you're trying to get them to write a story. If you want to send out the news release recall them up and say they might be interested in something have the names and contact information of good sources they can call and speak to and you're going to want to verify with your sources that it's okay for you to give their phone numbers and contact information to a journalist, you want to have that done ahead of time before you call them. That makes it really easy for them just to pick up the phone and get their quotes and start writing an article. Don't be upset if they edit your news release before publishing. One thing we learned in newspapers everybody gets edited, but however, if they got any facts wrong when they published it. Call them up and let them know even if it's just a misspelled name journalists believe they're writing the first draft of history and they do not like to be wrong. So, if they do get something wrong they'd like to know about it so that they can publish a correction to set the record straight. And if they, if they mess something up by all means, give them a call. Now here's my contact information. You can feel free to call me if you have questions about any of this and I'll be happy to do my best to help you out. And if you have any questions I'm happy to take them. Alright, thanks Dan. I have a comment about seeing proofs. If they've had problems with being misquoted that's still okay to, or how would you approach that. That's a very good question. And if you have been misquoted in the past. Thank you less likely to want to speak to a journalist. So again I would stress that they can feel free to call you and verify the quotes before the, before they publish the article and make sure they've got all the facts straight. If I had a choice if I were in your shoes. I would try to find, if I could as diplomatically as possible to a different journalist to work with. And then completely, if somebody has messed up your quotes before but you, you also want to identify whether or not that was done. If you felt like that was done maliciously on purpose or if it were just to just an accident because journalists are people and they made mistakes too. So, you're going to use your own judgment about how much of a second chance you're going to give them. I had a quick, I had a question on the social media side of it. Is there a platform that you've had. Which platform have you had most success with, as far as engagements, and I guess in the egg side of things. I would say it's probably equal equal amount of engagement. The most we get the most engagements on our Facebook page as opposed to our Facebook group on our Facebook page we we get the most information but I would say that people on Twitter tend to be very active as well. So even though there's a smaller number of people engaging they, they tend to engage a little bit more, but overall total engagement we get a higher engagement on our Facebook page. Cool. We're quick, a question on PDF verse word submissions. My printer wants the PDF. But we struggle with layout all the time what do you suggest, if we don't use either of these. Well, that might be a question for Katie, more than me I'm not certain if they're talking about submitting it to the press, I would say copy and paste the information in your PDF into the body of an email before you send it to a journalist. Don't just send them the PDF or whatever else you're using just put it all in the body of the email and send the photos you want to send as attachments if they're, if they're small enough to send. So under 10 megs, keeping your whole email under 10 megabytes is a good rule. Otherwise, you can put them on some cloud hosting service like box or draw box and put a link in your email for them to download a higher resolution version of the photo. Okay, it was just noted here is for newsletter printing. Yes, that's probably for Kate. Yeah, with the newsletters that your PDF and your word isn't working. I'd have to think about that, because that's usually the programs that I use or save a mass. Anyway, so yeah, give me, let me think about that and I'll get back to you. Because yeah, when it comes to newsletters I always usually save them as PDFs and print them that like that I don't usually ever use them with the word Microsoft word. And I'm not entirely sure if, if even like changing that to Microsoft publisher would change it I don't know if you have been designing your newsletter. With any of that, or where you have been designing it I guess they're having it being made so far anyway. So yeah, it didn't really answer your question but Let me think about it. Okay. Yeah, you that we can reach out to you. 80 can reach out to you and see if we can help in any way. Perfect. Thanks you that. Is it I guess with that is there any other questions before we wrap up today's webinar, and just want to thank Stan there's a lot of really good information about traditional media in there. I know I learned a lot. It's nice to hear from the side of someone who has worked on that side of things. Yeah, I like it better on this side. I will with that we will we will wrap up for today if anybody else has any questions. After we're done feel free to reach out to me Katie or Stan. And we will send out both presentations from today. Hopefully later today and then a link to the recording. And so you can share it with anybody that you that you think of. You can use or use at a later date but with that we will wrap it up so thank you Katie and Stan. And thanks for everybody that the join today. And next week, next Tuesday we'll have another webinar. Shoot, can't remember which one we're doing next. Oh, great. But you got it. So the next two following Tuesdays will have two more. So thanks again everybody. Thanks Stan and Katie, and be on the lookout for the materials from today. Thank you. All right, thank you guys. Bye everyone.