As anyone in class knows, I am very interested in the role that social media plays in the communications strategy for Texas Parks and Wildlife. We launched several TPWD social media sites last summer and our facebook page now has more than 31,000 fans. It appears this is a very effective tool for us, and I am interested in learning more about how are fans are responding to our posts, how much they interact with our facebook page and what they like (and don’t like) about it. This information will assist us in utilizing this new tool as effectively as possible.
I am also interested in knowing whether our facebook page is having an impact on outdoor recreation behaviors. This is an important question for us, because that is one major goal for all of our comunication efforts – encouraging outdoor recreation, which we believe ultimately has a direct link to the development of a conservation ethic. Many people don’t realize this, but it’s outdoor recreation opportunities such as hunting, fishing and state park visitation which fund natural resource conservation and management which benefits us all, whether we hunt, fish or camp, or not. So there’s a very important role these social media sites can play in encouraging outdoor recreation and supporting conservation efforts.
I will be looking at this question through the theoretical framework of social cognitive theory (SCT). SCT basically is a social learning theory that posits at it’s simplest level that we learn from each other. In the era of mass media, this social learning is now taking place on TV, in newspapers, magazines and other modern communication channels. Now, or course, there are social media channels at play and I believe these social media channels might play an even bigger role than traditional mass media because these outdoor recreation behaviors will be modelled and shared by a powerful social network.
The way I will operationalize these questions is through a survey which we fielded last week. (The link is below). We are posting links to the survey periodically on our Fbook page. I will have two weeks worth of responses to sort though…I will pull the report this Friday so I have time to complile results, analyze them and write the paper. As of this morning we had about 750 responses, I am hoping we’ll top 1,000 by Friday morning when the report is pulled.
I am really looking forward to having a snapshot of what our fans think of our site and whether it is impacting outdoor recreation behaviors. There are some significant weaknessed in this methodology which I will explain in the paper, but this approach will at least provide some indicator data which will be good.
http://204.64.0.121/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=96LHmo9
