utilising social media educate, engage and empower young...
TRANSCRIPT
Utilising Social media to educate, engage and empower young people
Karalee Evans
What is headspace?
headspace is Australia’s National Youth Mental Health Foundation and was established in 2006 by the then Howard Government. The Rudd Government has committed to a further three years of funding for headspace.
The aim of headspace is to reduce the burden of disease amongst young people aged 12–25 caused by mental health and related substance use problems.
• 30 headspace centres across Australia
• www.headspace.org.au
• headspace National Priorities:
• Social Marketing Strategy
• Centre for Excellence
• Education and Training
What is Social Media?
At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many).
Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video.
Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs (video logs), wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.
Social media applications include communication (facebook, myspace, twitter, blogs), collaboration (wiki, delicious), multi-media (youtube, flickr) and entertainment (secondlife, world of warcraft).
Why is headspace using social media?
headspace has been established for 12-25 year old Australians (Generation Y)
Generation Y are using social media, and to date have been the biggest adopters of new technology - they are truly the tech generation.
Social media allows headspace to engage with young Australians in an exclusive and meaningful way, appealing to their need for information and contributing to their connectedness online.
Specifically for headspace, we know that one in five young people access the Internet for help, with a greater percentage of young males seeking assistance online.
How did we get social?
Steps to getting headspace social:
-Identify goals and objectives
-Conduct SWOT and risk analysis
-Consult with youth reference group
-Confirm policy and risk management strategy
-Develop key organisational messaging: not PUSH
-Develop strategy and implement
… start small, learn from feedback and get social!
What are the risks?
SWOT Analysis Social Media Strategy - headspace
Strengths
Direct channel to target audience
Reach of numbers of target audience
Low cost to implement and manage Viral nature of communities
Strong understanding of medium internally
Willingness to adopt new medium Youth ambassadors are virtual guardians
Weaknesses
Time intensive to manage and moderate
Training required to operate functionality Low profile to key influencers (Board, Government)
Brand dilut ion through headspace operations across multiple
platfo rms
Opportunities
Opportunity to engage and empower Opportunity to make brand relevant
Manage message directly
Organically grow supporters of brand Direct audience to headspace website
Increa se access to help
Increa se help-seeking behaviour
Threats
Loss of cont rol of brand and messaging
Third party dispute in public onl ine env ironment
Threatening behaviour in public online environment Third part harm from negative/defamatory commentary
High risk contact outs ide of business hours
headspace’s YouTube
YouTube:
You can
brand your
channel
You can
optimise
links
between
your social
media
strategy
YouTube:
People can
comment on
your videos
Key words
optimise
people
finding your
videos
Evaluation:
YouTube
Insights
Viewer stats
Demographics
Frequency
Reach
Retainment
What happens on facebook?
facebook:
You can
brand your
channels
Group
Cause
Fan page
Page
Application
headspace’s Facebook
facebook:
You can brand your
channel
headspace currently
has 4529 members of
our cause.
This is currently
growing by one new
member each hour.
facebook:
People comment on walls
and discussion boards
Organic conversation
Peer to peer interaction
headspace to audience
interaction
facebook:
You can create an
application
People can then display
this on their pages and
forward/interact
organically with their peer
networks
facebook:
headspace created an
application to launch
our major advertising
campaign
‘gifts’ featured
elements of our
campaign and proved
to be popular
headspace’s MySpace
headspace’s MySpace
MySpace:
You can brand your
page
You can optimise
links between your
social media
strategy
You can feature
videos, pictures
and static content
What happens on Twitter?
headspace’s Twitter
You can brand your page
Very much a conversationalist channel which needs to be two-way, not
‘push’
headspace is growing this channel organically, and does not seek out
people, they come to us.
What do you need in a policy?
headspace operates within a sensitive area - youth mental health
Clear social media policies are required to guide our interaction online with
our audience, including the distinction on when to ‘moderate’ and when not
to.
Recently high profile organisational social media policies have been
launched such as Telstra’s 3 R’s of Social Media Engagement.
The key to ensuring your social media strategies are to be successful is the
understanding that it is a mechanism to engage, not ‘push’ information.
Here is a link to a ready-made social media policy for your staff:
http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/socialmediaguidelines.pdf
Fundamentals of Social Media Policies - http://laurelpapworth.com
How do we know it’s working?
• From June 1, 2008 to date, facebook is headspace’s 4th top referrer to
the website
• headspace’s facebook cause has new member join every hour
• Through promoting a survey on facebook and MySpace pages,
headspace received 1259 responses in a period of 2 weeks
• In March 2009, headspace had over 60,000 visitors to the website
• 64% of headspace’s YouTube video’s are being viewed by the target
audience (13 – 24 year olds)
• Since implementation, headspace can count on one hand the number
of ‘risk’ incidents.
Organic growth – not
manufactured. Majority of
‘top recruiters’ not
headspace affiliated
Monthly website visits
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
Oct-
06
Nov-0
6
Dec-0
6
Jan-0
7
Feb-0
7
Mar-
07
Apr-
07
May-0
7
Jun-0
7
Jul-07
Aug-0
7
Sep-0
7
Oct-
07
Nov-0
7
Dec-0
7
Jan-0
8
Feb-0
8
Mar-
08
Apr-
08
May-0
8
Jun-0
8
Jul-08
Aug-0
8
Sep-0
8
Oct-
08
Nov-0
8
Dec-0
8
Jan-0
9
Feb-0
9
Mar-
09
month
Vis
its
Keeping up-to-date
Krysten is completely exhausted and cant wait for
Friday.
Amanda is busy rushing round packing the house up
ready to start moving house at the end of this wk and this
wkend :) - well not at the present time as im on FB lol, but
is going back to it v.shortly. Sign up tomro!!! :) Yay....
Boxes and random items everywhere lol, ARG!!! So dnt
mind if I seem to drop off the planet, will be changing
everything over. So no random shit sending after tomro or
thurs k peeps!!! lol.....
Andrea when the internet sucks it sucks big time.
What else is there?
If Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace weren’t enough for you, then I’m going to quickly show you some other functions which can be incorporated into your day-to-day operations.
But first, it’s important to communicate that going ‘social’ doesn’t have to be only for marketing purposes! You can leverage and utilise existing tools for:
•Internal communications
•Internal training and education
•File storage
•Video conferencing
•Customer feedback
•Fundraising
•… and many more!
Internal communications
on a shoestring:
Did you know you can use Twitter as an internal communications channel simply by using locked accounts and only allowing staff to access the updates?
Or what about setting up a Facebook group (closed) to use for distribution of company updates, and staff consultation?
Even look at creating a community for your employees via Ning.com which allows you to create your own ‘facebook’ and set who has access to it.
All you need is internet access. No intranets, not newsletter costs, no printing updates for the staff bulletin board. Same goes for internal training for staff. Do you have video skype? It’s free and all you need is a webcam and internet.
Got a storage issue?
Working across multiple locations? Do you have staff who are
time poor?
If you have a need for easy and quick access to files - such as
organisational presentations, policy documents etc - why not
put them in the cloud?
There are free hosting sites which allow you to create closed
groups for sharing and hosting your files.
Customer Feedback:
One of the best practical applications of social media is sourcing customer feedback via crowd-sourcing opinion.
What does this mean? Why not tap into an online community, and use this community to source their thoughts and opinions on your products or services? This is called ‘service (co)-design’. The essential ingredient? Collaboration.
A great case study is headshift’s work on the UK health patient opinion website.
Patient Opinion is a revolutionary new online system that lets anyone share experiences of receiving specialist treatment on the NHS.
http://www.headshift.com/projects/2008/06/patient-opinion.php
Create a community:
What if you could tap into people who had common interests or
what if you wanted to be seen as an advocate in your little
corner of the world?
Then why not create your own community, sharing and
encouraging collaboration around anything from policy
development to professional development.
A FREE tool you can use is Ning.com
What’s next?
Social media is an evolving ‘beast’, and there are always
new functions, new channels, new audiences and new
‘rules’.
The key for headspace is to identify our core social media
applications and stick with them. ‘Quality, not quantity’.
With our core strategy we know we are reaching our wide
age group (12-25), and reaching different interest groups.