BritMums Live! Reporters- 360 Media with Cherry Healey

360 Media – Cherry Healey

Reporter: Cat Dean

By the time Cherry Healey’s session rolled around at teatime on Saturday, I was suffering from Information Overload after two wonderfully stimulating days at Britmums. Fortunately, Cherry had a lovely upbeat presence and was talking about something dear to my heart – making it all work. I’m still amazed that she managed to cover such a lot of useful information in a mere twenty minutes!

Cherry’s introduction clearly struck a chord with the audience when she spoke about the need to make time spent on social media as efficient as possible. In her introduction, she spoke about her tv series, How to Get a Life, and the importance of her blog and social media on the direction of the show. Twitter has apparently been absolutely essential in creating the programme – in terms of research and for taking straw polls, something which, she noted, marketing companies charge an arm and an leg for.

Cherry’s key advice

• Be realistic about your online activities and do not to expect more of yourself than you can actually do.

 

• If a form of social media isn’t working for you or isn’t nurturing you, stop doing it (I liked that – I’ve always struggled with Facebook so I’m just going to, well, not bother with it).

 

• Choose a medium and stick to it – don’t spread yourself too thinly. I found that particularly helpful because I often suffer from a feeling of overwhelm regarding social media and feel I ‘ought’ to be doing it all.

 

• Streamlining doesn’t always work – Cherry gave the example of having a twitter feed on facebook as something which doesn’t work for her, because the tweets are out of context and are only part of the conversation.

 

• Create a mini schedule before you release something – for example, lead up to it by having  around 3 tweets the week before, so that some people are already looking out for it.

 

• Have a Day Two plan – very sensible and something I hadn’t thought about – plan in some time on the day after release something, so you are available to field comments and responses. Cunning.

 

• Have confidence –  bloggers are taken more seriously now – and can carry real weight.

 

• Be bold – don’t be afraid of asking celebrities, journalists or established bloggers who you think would be interested in your project, and ask them to tweet about it.

 

• If you’re interested in pitching ideas to tv development companies, proceed with a little caution, and don’t give away too much too soon – a short paragraph outlining the idea is fine.

 

All About Cat:

I blog on writing and creating amidst the chaos of family life at www.catdean.com and I’m working on my first novel, sadly only between the hours of 5am and 7am before the children wake up! As well as struggling with effortlessly balancing family life with creative pursuits, I have something of an obsessive-compulsive disorder regarding stationery. I also make a mean batch of scones and am equally at home fiddling with words, wool and pixels.

I did an MSc in multimedia way back when people still said ‘the world wide web’ and I’ve freelanced and/or lectured in new media since then. I love writing and this year I was delighted win the National Galleries of Scotland ‘Inspired? Get Writing! Creative Writing Competition’; to have a short story published in Gutter & The Scotsman. I’ve also run workshops at Aye Write! and Write Now 2012 been shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and read at Edinburgh International Book Festival.