Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Scouting and Social Media

Seems like I've been promoted to Cubmaster for Pack 3094 (whole nother story there).  Since I don't know much about nothin but digital media, I figured I'd ask about setting up a Facebook page for the pack.

We've already got a website (http://pack3094.scoutlander.com) and that's done OK, but no one uses the web anymore.  Everyone is on Facebook.  So I asked the Council about social media and scouting and they directed me to the National site where you can find the following guidelines about Scouting and Social Media.

In a nutshell?

  • It must be public.
  • It must be run by at least one trained leader.
  • You must have two people run it.
  • It cannot identify kids by full name or address -- first names only.

So, I spent a couple hours and whipped up a Facebook Page for Pack 3094:
https://www.facebook.com/Pack3094

We turned off the 'messaging' feature -- no private messages allowed.
We turned off 'tagging' of photos to avoid any kids getting tagged by accident (except by admins)
We posted our big public events (Pack Meetings, District Campouts).  We keep the den meetings and internal events private - only shared on the private site.
And my wife posted a few dozen photos of past events.

Shoot - we're a 70 year old pack, we should have some kind of public presence out there on the Social Internet.  So for the 3 people that read this, feel free to click into the site and 'like' it.

If you have other questions about scouting and social media, go ahead and leave a comment.  I'm sure other Boy Scout and Cub Scout organizations have questions about doing this . . .

Will


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