Briefly, a poetic Tweet-of-truth brought to us by NetSquared family member Joe Solomon:

"Everybody's a social media strategist; the web needs social media soldiers too."

Now! Onto the meat.

As part of the Millennials Changing America tour, I had the great pleasure of shooting the breeze with Robin Parker, Communications Specialist at the Oregon Red Cross. As we drank beers in the early evening of Halloween, she dropped on me a bit of knowledge regarding social media strategy and her hopes to somehow be a part of the construction of an emerging geek army. From her and her experiences with social media strategy, I learned (and offer) the following:

Flickr: It's not the most interactively-technical ingrained use of the service, but don't forget that when putting a presentation together, there is a good, good chance that someone else has taken better, first-person shots of whatever you're presenting about. Robin recalled running into several occasions in which she had to put together a presentation, didn't have the right pictures of whatever disaster they were talking about, and she found and used them from Flickr.

Twitter: Robin does a [self-described] ton of listening via the Red Cross's Twitter channel. It is by sorting through and reading as many related-Twitter feeds (and other RSS feeds as well) that she is able to continuously make the blog content on the Red Cross blog interesting. "It is important to keep things relevant," she explains. "Listening to these channels is important because it keeps them from being too self-serving."

Blog: The Red Cross Blog blog is totally non-artificially hip (its Portland-roots likely have something to do with that). It's beautifully designed, they've got a Sprout widget at the top of the page that functions as a fundraiser (also beautifully designed), and awesome pictures of the staff member designed in a Brady Bunch motif that make you feel personally related to the organizational representatives. It is the best-designed simple blog I've seen in quite some time. 

Robin explained that she tries to keep the blog as interesting as possible by constantly challenging herself in an interesting way. Very recently, they had a blog-off with the water bureau and that it was covered by an alt-weekly, which was a great way for them to get exposure that they otherwise might been unable to rely on.

[Note: Robin frames a lot of this work by keeping a guiding question in mind: How do we provide a space for people to be good digital citizens?]

Facebook: Somewhat simply, the Red Cross offers a gift that visually articulates what the donated money will buy (in this case, a blanket). This is a fantastic way to convey the importance of each denomination of donation. 

Geek army: In addition to all of this, Robin is trying to keep in mind how to constructively innovate and get things done in the future. She recently attended a Portland-based un-conference, which tackled ideas like city sustainability, reduction of oil consumption, and mapping. She's trying to figure out how to use social media to bring the local community's attention to the issue of the potential collapse of the bridge that connects Portland across river. She's trying to bring people together by NING.

Further, acknowledging the tendency of the geek community to talk, talk, talk about issues, she's called her NING "Now What?" in an attempt to convey that at this step, it's time to solve problems.