If I could tweet with the animals: S.F. Zoo’s low-cost social media foray

How the menagerie made a splash with networking, podcasts, videos–and minimal staffing

It’s common to see a company’s social media “team” consisting of only one—or no—full-time staffer.

Count the San Francisco Zoo among them.

Like many, its one-person PR staff member doesn’t have much time to devote to social media. But rather than do nothing, the PR manager got help from an unlikely colleague—the penguin keeper—to tweet on the zoo’s popular Twitter feed.

“He’s the one that spends the time with the animals,” says Gwendolyn Tornatore, PR manager. “Rather than having a post of, ‘It’s a sunny day here at the zoo; come visit!’ (a problem unique to the Bay Area), most people would rather see a post of, ‘I just had coffee with our lion this morning’ coming from a keeper. People are more interested in the keepers; it’s not so exciting when it comes from PR.”

Armed with an iPhone, Brown spends most of the day performing his penguin keeping-duties, but manages to find time to log into TweetDeck on his iPhone and talk to followers.