I don’t like making rookie gaffs in anything and I especially don’t like doing it in social media for a client. But I don’t want to be seized with doubt about everything I post, either. So I’m practicing on my friends. And, amazingly enough, I still have some.

If you want to see what I’m practicing with, go to my Facebook page.  I have signed up for a charity run for youth and my goal is to make $1,000 from micro-donations of $2.

Supporters give me a twoonie (I’m Canadian. A “twoonie” is a $2 coin.) and then they sign my shirt. I then tell them to do something with the shirt — put it on, wrap it around their head, whatever moves them — and I take a picture for my page.

My actual fundraising is almost entirely an in-person micro-giving ($2) campaign. The social media part is trying to reward my supporters with fun, flattering, high quality photos of them on my page and on Twitter with captions and comments that show I value them  and I am grateful.

I put a printout of my Facebook page on my pledge book and, so far, at least one person grabbed it to find the page online.

So far, almost everyone seems to be having fun participating. It’s different. It’s personal. It’s a really yellow shirt (I call it double-yellow). The main lesson I’ve learned so far is that just because it’s online social media, doesn’t mean I can figure it out without connecting with people physically.

For me to have any confidence that my work isn’t just pissing people off, I need to look a good many of them in the eye before and after I post their photos. I need to know what it takes to get them to trust me and to be glad they did.

What I’m finding, though, is that in the process of all this caring, I’m getting supercharged by the connections. Coming home and seeing a couple more Like’s, a retweet or two, watching people smile while they try to do something imaginative with the yellowest shirt ever, that’s  what encourages me to keep going.