Three Days on the Farm – Social Media and Bringing Your Farm to the World – by Dean DeLisle

We provide coaching and services on the Business Accelerator Program for American Family Insurance. A great program, which is free for small business leaders and has a ton of coaching and training like we provide in all areas of running a business.

They asked me to do the Farm Progress show and I thought it would be like the 4H building at the county fair or a large farmers market, you can imagine my visual thoughts here. Now I grew up on a farm so I remember working on my grandparent’s farm and my uncle’s farm but today it is very different for farmers and families of farms.  Things are high-tech, communication is on the net and it’s a brave new world! Now this show had over 120,000 people, it was held in Decatur, Illinois and spanned check out this cool interactive show map – I think this spanned a mile in radius – and we walked the whole thing. My role in this was talk to farmers for three days and give a one hour talk per day. Which links to the presentation and pictures are listed at the end of this post.

Interactive Map – Farm Progress Show 2013:

http://www.mapyourshow.com/shows/index.cfm?show_id=fps13&norepeat=true

I was asked to talk to the farming community about Social Media. So thinking back about the farming days my grandparents would have me network with all the local people so that they would connect to us, stop at our store and think about us for produce and eggs. This was done the old fashioned way, word of mouth driven relationships. Very cool, right? Well I get this now. Farmers can now express visual pictures and the same conversations and share those on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and many others. It was a very cool experience to do the research on all the successful farms using social media. We even spoke to the folks at John Deer about using Twitter to send out GPS updates and weather reports to farmers – Twitter to farmers!

I also spoke to a family farm in Australia, who sells hogs to auction. They have one of the largest online communities on the net related to farm auctions and are now moving to social media. And also Farm to Table restaurants and working together to partner on Facebook! What a crazy cool time!

I now have a whole new appreciation for farms and the use of Social Media – thank you American Family for reconnecting me to my roots in farming and typing to my present life in social media and social networking.  Love the experience!