SOCIAL MEDIA

Tuesday 14^th August was the first-ever Rotary Moment Tweet Day, where Rotarians who were familiar with Twitter were encouraged to tweet about their favourite Rotary memory or event, to talk about their club’s activities, or share their community service project using hashtag   #RotaryMoment.

Did I tweet?  Don’t worry if you are unfamiliar with such social media jargon, you don’t have to be wearing budgie smugglers to tweet.  

To tweet is to post a short, snappy (hopefully) item on Twitter.  Yes, I did tweet.  Not wanting to miss out, as soon as it struck midnight on 13^th/14^th August, I tweeted.

My favourite #RotaryMoment was Hucknall Rotarians completing a charity firewalk in 2009.  Not all the club took part (though they supported in other ways.  And a few who said they would walk over burning, hot coals bare footed got cold feet.

Our president that year, Rtn. Ivan Manning wore his chain of office as he hot-stepped.   I  was the Junior Vice President of the Club then and also wore my badge.  After the firewalk, I was consistently asked about the state of my feet.  My answer? My feet were the best part of me totally uninjured.  I felt absolutely mentally drained and I had lost my voice due to the high-adrenaline shouting we were encouraged to do, but my feet were fine.   In fact the only person to receive  a foot injury was President Ivan.  Not from the firewalk I hasten to add, but after completing the firewalk, Ivan decided to not to put his footwear back on and walked barefooted over the tarmac car park to the debriefing area.  The car park was far more dangerous than the burning, hot coals!

It was quite appropriate that Tuesday 14^th August was the Rotary Tweet Day as I was also involved in two activities to promote the use of Social Media platforms with our District (District 1220) of Rotary.

I had been asked to address the District Training Team about Social Media and its usage.  DG Dave Ashley  kindly said  (on his blog) : 

“The session went very well and by lunch time we all had a much clearer understanding of what exactly is meant by the term, what we in Rotary want to get out of it and how we intend to do so Ian has now gone away with the task of moving this project forward to the next stage by producing some simple documentation that can be used by Clubs to introduce themselves to the concept of Social Media.”

As a consequence of my interest in using Social Media to promote and publicise Rotary, I have been invited to join the District Marketing, PR and Communications Committee and the first meeting I attended was later that evening.  A most fitting way to end the first-ever Rotary Tweet Day.

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