Social media in an NHS Trust –10 priorities for 2013

Social media in an NHS Trust –10 priorities for 2013

by | Dec 31, 2012 | mental health, NHS stuff | 6 comments

We’ve spent a lot of energy in our NHS Trust this year getting to grips with social media. It’s been a lot of fun and we’ve had a few hair-raising moments along the way. Below are 10 key learning points from 2012 along with 10 key priorities for 2013: Finding our voice – in our communications team we’ve gone beyond the basics and found our voice on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve reduced the amount we broadcast and got better at sharing useful information and engaging in conversation. In 2013 we’ll continue this trend and I’m keen that we extend this tone to more aspects of our communications, becoming more sociable in every aspect of what we do. Measuring our sociability – we’ve gone beyond using Klout and are experimenting with a variety of free and simple metric tools which are out there such as tweetstats.com, sentiment140.com and socialmention.com. Then there are open source network analysis tools out there such as nodexl which take a bit more work to use.  We will develop our use of more sophisticated tools in 2013 so we can clearly articulate the benefits of social media to any sceptics (even though we intuitively know the value ourselves of course!) Automated tweets – we’ve pretty much ditched automated tweets as it became clear that people found them annoying. In 2013 we’ll continue on this path. #Hashtags – we tweet from a wide range of events and activities using various hashtags and get some interaction but not as much as I’d like. We put out calls for interaction a few days before live tweeting from our Board...
Forging a digital identity for learning disability campaigning

Forging a digital identity for learning disability campaigning

by | Dec 5, 2012 | activism, NHS stuff | 2 comments

How can healthcare workers and people with a learning disability best collaborate to co-produce an online presence, for the purpose of campaigning to reduce stigma and discrimination?  Well I’m not entirely sure. But we’re going to have a go at it. Our Get Me? campaign was developed when people with a learning disability joined forces with statutory and voluntary sector partners and in a shared mission to try and shift public attitudes. We had a simple idea – create a short film with people with a learning disability talking about stuff they like and enjoy – sport, food, socialising, reading the paper, listening to the radio and so on. Get Me?-  get a better understanding of learning disabilities is our message. We’ve created posters, postcards and a website which will include stories from people who participated in the film. But all this is a bit static. So we started thinking about how we might use social media to get conversations going about the campaign and expand our engagement. We recently had a great workshop with Abhay Adhikari, who is @gopaldass on Twitter, about digital identities onlin,e and we are using his formula to help us work through our ideas. We plan to create an online eco-system of people we can engage and influence who will be interested in our campaign sharing the messages more widely (for example campaigners, parents, family members, teachers etc.). Our digital solution is a Facebook fan page. Firstly, we want to go where most people are. Secondly, we want to be able to post lots of photos and pictures (for example, photographs of stuff which is good in...
The World of Mentalists – my guest post

The World of Mentalists – my guest post

by | Dec 5, 2012 | mental health | 0 comments

I was recently delighted to be asked to be a judge by The World of Mentalists (TWOM) for their annual blog awards. They describe themselves in the following way: The World of Mentalists is a e-zine of news, commentary and blog digests in the arena of mental health. Our blog digests are known as This Week in Mentalists (TWIM), a feature which been a fixture of the mental health blogosphere for several years. It was initially hosted at the late Mental Nurse blog, and latterly at The Madosphere, which is also dearly departed. TWIM is a weekly digest of selected writings from blogs across the Madosphere, our affectionate name for the mental health blogosphere. It is published on Saturday or Sunday, along with relevant news stories from that week. Although this blog is based in the UK, we try to keep the focus as international as possible. A group of volunteer authors take it in turns to write the digests, which enables a wide base of mental health blogs to be reviewed. We cover blogs from professionals and patients alike, although they should not be commercial in nature (ads are fine; a blog that has the primary function of promoting a business is not). Now and again you may even find writings from people who fall into both brackets We also, at the suggestion of a site user, cover a range of relevant issues for the purposes of news, commentary, debate and even just for a laugh. Anything related to mental health is fair game – welfare, diagnosis, therapy, professional frameworks, stigma, you name it. As a judge, I had...