Altos del Mar Sculpture Park

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Reflecting Back and Looking Forward…I find that I am standing right in the middle. It
makes me be in this moment, a moment that will become the past so quickly.
So now I come to the reflection of time. Almost one year ago ADMSP started on a
road to work
with volunteers. Almost all charities do and why not? The task is easier said
than done but more rewarding than said when done.

Since ADMSP is about an aesthetic experience beyond the traditional museum
audience, it was
thought why not work with volunteers who are students and see if they are able
to make out of the experience a platform they can cross over into a full time
paid position? The pilot program “ADMSP College to Work” was born and
started last year in September. It has been a real learning experience in that
the question became how to learn best using Web 2.0 technologies.

I really did not know how it would go and when you don’t know how it goes, what
do you do? You make a plan. So it began with a plan. The plan was to work with
mass communications students since ADMSP really needed to begin creating
awareness about its project beyond the small group of people who knew about it
in Miami Beach, Florida. Seamlessly, several of these students appeared and we were
off. It was really the time when Facebook overtook My Space and Twitter became
the talk and everyone said: don’t you have a Twitter account? No, we did not.
So the ideas started to drop out of the sky into the plan as small rain
droplets fall on a growing meadow and today we have more than the garden
variety Twitter account.

Since my husband and I wanted to go to Berlin, Germany to raise the funds for this
project, after my volunteer team was assembled, we decided that we would
communicate via e-mail. The volunteers would do their work from their homes and
their own computers 2-6 hours per week.

I wrote up the first public relations campaign for us and we were doing social media.
It’s pretty cute now that I look back on it.

http://www.slideshare.net/admsp/admsp-social-media-public-relations

The campaign went great as it was basically a trial run to learn the insides
and out of Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Stumbleupon and others.

But how do you teach inexperienced students the ins and outs of the social
media of Twitter. The myth that generation Y grew up with the internet and that
they automatically know how to work a Twitter account is just that, a myth.
There is so much more to Twitter than meets the birds-eye,
specially when you are using a Twitter account to create awareness for a community
project that no one knows about.

So it became clear that we are not doing social media, we are practicing social
media! How does it work? In order to know how it works, you just have to do it!
Since we have time until our opening, why not practice? We need to learn, so
why not learning by doing? By the time we open, our volunteers who have made it
to the finish line (that’s another story) will definitely know social media
inside out.

We started learning our 1st campaign with presentations. Some very general ones
like:

http://www.slideshare.net/admsp/admsp-intro-socialmedia

We also got into the details:

http://www.slideshare.net/admsp/admsp-social-mediacreationsiteflickr

We have come a long way. Presentations are great but they are also limited. I
had to email them
and it was hard to figure out who got what when and where but more importantly,
who read what and did they implement the instructions?

We moved onto mind-maps and google docs and still the limitations where
evident: who got what when and where but more importantly, who read what and
did they implement the instructions?

So after more reflecting the answer was so evident. We have been working with
web 2.0 all along. We needed our own working website and I made one. Today as I
stand and reflect back, I look forward. I am happy to see that we found an
answer. Our own working website is a secret of
course because it is our workplace but I can definitely tell you that it works
great.

As I stand here in the middle today, I look forward to seeing how this website
will evolve and make our practical learning at the “ADMSP College to Work
Program” very easy to manage so that the program becomes very successful.

Beyond a traditional museum audience!

Marlene Saile, Esq.
President/CEO ADMSP