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 dilution through headspace operations across multiple

platforms

Opportunities

Opportunity to engage and empower Opportunity to make brand relevant Manage message directly Organically grow supporters of brand Direct audience to headspace website Increase access to help Increase help-seeking behaviour

Threats

Loss of control of brand and messaging Third party dispute in public online environment Threatening behaviour in public online environment Third part harm from negative/defamatory commentary High risk contact outside 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

What are the local applications?

headspace’s website

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

-06

Dec

-06

Jan-

07

Feb

-07

Mar

-07

Apr

-07

May

-07

Jun-

07

Jul-0

7

Aug

-07

Sep

-07

Oct

-07

Nov

-07

Dec

-07

Jan-

08

Feb

-08

Mar

-08

Apr

-08

May

-08

Jun-

08

Jul-0

8

Aug

-08

Sep

-08

Oct

-08

Nov

-08

Dec

-08

Jan-

09

Feb

-09

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.