Giving Up the Keys

Source: Dorothy Mangold

I am not a big fan of sitting in the passenger's seat. I'd rather drive.

When I started working as the new public relations director at the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in May of 2012, I was given the car keys to RMEF's social media channels. At the time, RMEF's Facebook page had somewhere in the neighborhood of 29,000 likes.

While I was a latecomer to the Facebook world (because my kids kept bugging me to get on board but I initially resisted), I eventually did have some success with it. Years ago when I worked in TV, we were urged as news anchors to create fan pages. Each of us were free to focus on whatever we wanted to. I chose to mostly avoid everyday news since our station, and so many other media outlets, did exactly that via social media. Instead. I chose to focus on the offbeat, quirky videos, fun photos and add a caption contests. You know, good upbeat news. But I also was hyper-focused on life-or-death happenings like wildfires and other events that threatened lives or property.

Marianne Solari Carroll

Back to RMEF, and what really helped my cause was the product. Who doesn't like a wild and majestic mammal like the elk? And what about where you find them? Elk live on some of the most stunningly beautiful landscapes of anywhere in the world. True, there were some social media marketing approaches that worked really well like posting daily "good morning" elk photos, add a caption contests with the winning comment receiving a knife or knife set, and of course publicizing RMEF projects to better further our conservation outreach.

Earlier in 2017, our Facebook page surpassed the half a million mark in "likes." We routinely reach more than one million people on a weekly basis. Our Instagram page, launched only a few years ago, now tops 90,000 followers and we now have more than one million page views on the RMEF YouTube Channel.

And then there's our blog, Elk Tracks, that we launched four months after my hiring date. It has more than 1.5 million page views. That number will continue to grow but the the number of posts will not. The 506th and final post explains why there won't be a 507th. RMEF just unveiled a new online, digital hub for all things elk and elk country. It's called the Elk Network and that's where I'll be focusing a great deal of my time alongside our new digital media director. Check it out!

So the bottom line is after more than four and a half years, I was asked to give up the keys to RMEF's social media outreach efforts. While I'm still intimately involved with everyday social media efforts, I'm now in the passenger's seat. And I gotta tell you that the view is still pretty good.