Going viral – is social media an effective campaigning tool?

Going viral – is social media an effective campaigning tool?

by | May 7, 2012 | mental health | 0 comments

What are your views about the effectiveness of social media as a campaign tool? Read the final part of my three part interview with One in Four editor and Social Spider development director, Mark Brown, to get his take on where we’re at with social media and what the future holds. Social media suicide reporting guidelines are a great example of influencing a live debate on Twitter.  I remember re-tweeting them when Gary Speed died but hadn’t realised you developed them. I’m interested in how this came about When Alexander McQueen killed himself, Chris O’Sullivan (@mentalcapital) thought that it would be good to do some Twitter suicide reporting guidelines in the manner of the Samaritan’s excellent press ones.  We spent an hour knocking something up over email, got it online and then injected it into the various hashtagged conversations, asking people to read them and retweet them. Given an event that people were discussing that couldn’t have been foreseen, we moved our arses quickly to do something useful and helpful.  There’s amazing scope for this kind of reactive agenda altering on Twitter.  You can directly affect how people think of something as it’s happening.  Tell me a bit about campaigns using social media which have impressed you I think one of the greatest examples of boundary fu**ing is the Broken of Britain campaign and its Responsible Reform #spartacusreport. Disabled people and supporters have come together entirely through social media and developed an effect way of responding to government plans.  I think this is the first truly social media age government and it’s been noticeable how susceptible they have been...

Social media learning curve – 10 tips for NHS Trusts

by | Apr 5, 2012 | NHS stuff | 0 comments

In our NHS trust we’re on a steep social media learning curve when it comes to connecting online with people who have an interest in our organisation. On Twitter we are @LeedsandYorkPFT and on Facebook we have a fan page for Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. We have a Youtube site and are in the process of setting up Pinterest for our campaigning work. So here are ten things we’ve learnt so far: Getting the basics in place – we have a section on our website with guidelines for members of the public about how we use social media.  We have also developed guidelines for our staff and are busy setting up a section of our intranet site to have useful information (such as guidance from professional bodies) in one place.  We find ourselves amending and adding to them as new issues and possibilities arise. Connecting Twitter to Facebook – in the early days we connected our tweets to Facebook but quickly removed this link. As we began tweeting more we worried we risked spamming people with the volume of tweets popping up on Facebook. Secondly, we wanted to use Facebook a bit differently – less frequently but with longer content and photos. We’re about to start experimenting with opinion polls and event invites and generally encourage people to interact with us more on Facebook so separating them made sense. To friend or not to friend – the steer in all the NHS related guidance that we’ve seen is for members of staff to not ‘friend’ anyone on their personal Facebook who is using services provided by...