What Do You Celebrate Online?

Flickr image from user Furryscaly

This week, I experienced two things that many online tend to celebrate. The first is that I crossed the 1,000 follower mark on Twitter and the second is that I achieved the goal of my personal communications plan. If you have been reading my blog for long, you may have a guess as to which one I celebrated more.

If you’ve been online for more than a week, you’ve seen some businesses or nonprofits either giving huge shout-outs to their Xth follower/fan or you’ve seen a well-meaning organization/business holding a contest for the Xth person to like or follow them. While these activities celebrate raising numbers, what do these numbers actually do for them? What will they achieve with 1,000 followers than they couldn’t with 999?

I used to have fun marking Twitter milestones, but I quit a while back after a slew of real estate spam bots pushed me over one of them. Since they were never my target audience, I felt awfully silly about celebrating their presence.

Now that it’s obvious that my celebration this week was the achievement of my key communications goal, I bet you’re asking what that was. As I wrote before, I set up this site and my social network presences with the primary goal of finding a full-time communications position in a nonprofit in the Twin Cities. I am proud to say that I have accepted the position as the Web Editor and Social Media Specialist with the Girl Scouts River Valleys this week.

I’ve written before about the importance of building a strategic communications plan for your nonprofit, rather than getting hooked on comparatively meaningless metrics like your number of Twitter followers. Yes, it takes time and effort to go through that process, but, if you do, you’ll have truly meaningful celebrations like mine this week.

I will be easing off of my blogging and social networking as I come up to speed with my new position, so make sure to subscribe to my feed via RSS or email to catch my new posts. Thank you for reading and for your support during my job search. I will be back soon.