How can social media possibly help a model maker?
   
Read on and find out...
As the new VP of Social Media, I have been tasked with helping usher the APMM and its members into the exciting world of online social media, something you may know as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The APMM is in a unique position to be the leading source for information about model making and fabrication techniques to amateur builders and professionals alike thanks to your combined years of expertise and the ease of sharing information through social media. The goals of using social media as an organization and as individuals should be to help promote our own companies and the APMM as a whole, and to show that making things is a career choice that many could do right now.
At our conference in Greenville in March, we had a large discussion about ways we can expand our reach and strengthen the image of the APMM which eventually resulted in a lot of good ideas. One of those ideas was to fully embrace the Maker movement and another was to dive into social media, which will go hand-in-hand with the current pulse of the Maker movement. Since we are always limited in time, budget, and manpower, social media represents the best bang for our buck in regards to advertising and exposure. Once we have even a few members using social media in the ways I am going to outline, our potential reach can become huge and the next generation, the ones using social media for all of their communication, will be introduced to the profession of model making and the opportunities it affords.
The reason social media is a worthwhile avenue to explore is because it isn’t only about telling the world what you are doing or interested in, it’s also about creating a conversation that will be taken offline and into the real world. Best of all, that conversation is free for all and accessible anywhere. Social media is a way for all of the individual members of the APMM to keep in touch with friends and colleagues while sharing what they are working on, be it personal or professional. Further, we can all share our projects and passions with the world and become a trusted organization in the field of professional making.
For this reason I am writing to you, our members, to introduce anyone not familiar with social media to the tools we are going to be using to build our organization, our memberships, and our value to makers everywhere. But first I am going to ask for your help in this adventure!
CALLING ALL APMM MEMBERS!! SHARE & UNITE!
The APMM requests any and every member to share content with the Social Media VP (ooh, that’s me) to help build our online presence and highlight model making as a career!
What do we want?
- Quick photos of what is on your workbench, what project or technique are you working with right now? Send us a photo or two, or even a video showing what it is you are working on and we will share it with the world.
- Pictures of your shop space, machinery, tools, materials; basically anything that interests you could interest the world of makers, and maybe even teach them something.
- Tips or tricks of the trade - share photos or a video describing how to do something. It can be anything, even down to the best way to sharpen a pencil for use as a marking instrument. How-to’s are incredibly useful and we would like to share any that you have.
- Photos, videos, descriptions of any making event you go to, be it a Maker Faire, STEM event, Hackerspace jam, or even interesting community things with a making slant.
- Failures - pictures, videos, descriptions of something that went wrong. Sometimes the best way to learn is to fail and then share that failure with others so they can learn what you learned.
- Obscure processes, random bits of knowledge, a description of the different kind of driver bits for screwdrivers, anything interesting and related to making.
- Any content you find online that would be interesting for the APMM to spread around as well. Cross-promotion benefits those sharing the links just as much as the people for which the links are directed.
If even ten percent of our members send one thing a month we would have enough content to post twice a day every single day of the week. This would dramatically increase our presence in the world of making and might eventually make the APMM a leader and resource for makers around the world.
So whenever you are doing something that might be interesting to share, snap a photo and send it over to us so we can share it with others who might benefit from it. And if anyone is interested in creating instructional content as well, maybe even longer how-to videos that become sought after resources on YouTube and the internet in general please have at it! Make it, share it, spread the word!
Also feel free to send in links to things you have found online as well, so we can share those too. Any maker-related video, informational site, or cool new thing can be shared. It’s all about learning and sharing!
Send your content to the Social Media VP at Modelmakersorg@gmail.com. Send it soon and send it often. There is no deadline because this is an ongoing thing, so send whatever you can whenever you can, and turn it into a way to give back to the next generation of model makers that will be inspired by what we do.
And now if I have gotten you excited about sharing, and you want to know more about what specifically we are doing, where we are doing it, and how you can do it too, click below to go to a quick social media tutorial that should help you get started!
I look forward to hearing from many of you as we begin an exciting new chapter in the APMM saga! Model makers unite!
Joshua Munchow
VP of Social Media
socialmedia@modelmakers.org
modelmakersorg@gmail.com
Join the model making community and see for yourself what "belonging to the APMM" is all about. Experience the sharing of resources and make some alliances within our rapidly expanding industry. If finances are keeping you from joining, contact our office for more information on payment plans!
|
