Using Social Media in the D&D Community
NCDD’s director Sandy Heierbacher (my beautiful wife) just added the following to NCDD’s newsblog. Note: Here D&D stands for dialogue and deliberation not the RPG. 
Nonprofits and consultants in our field are still learning how best to harness increasingly popular social media outlets like FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The growth rates for such platforms is staggering, and since building a presence on such sites is free, we would be remiss not to get into the action.
Of course NCDD’s on FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But did you know we also have over 1,000 pictures posted at Flickr? And that we’ve created public playlists organizing dozens and dozens of D&D videos on YouTube?
Yet I know we could be doing so much more to take advantage of these platforms. Our FaceBook group has over 1,000 members at this point, which makes it considerably larger than most D&D organizations’ FaceBook groups. Yet our group members rarely add new posts or reply to one another. Mainly we post announcements from the NCDD blog, and send out periodic emails to everyone to encourage them to visit the group to look over said announcements and to start discussions of their own (which they generally don’t).
We have similar challenges with our LinkedIn group, although the group appears more active partly because our blog posts from the NCDD site automatically appear in the group.
I’d love to hear about how others in the D&D community use these and other social media platforms to increase visibility for their work, and get people involved in their projects. Please use the comments field below to share links to your own groups, twitter accounts, etc. — and to tell us about your successful (and not-so-successful) social media strategies!
Here are NCDD’s main social media links…
YouTube (public playlists of NCDD & D&D videos)
Flickr (over 400 photos from the 2008 NCDD conference; also search for “ncdd2006″)
[via thataway.org]
