@NHS

The power of social media in healthcare is inexhaustible - here are a few reasons why NHS organisations should be getting social on twitter and a few steps you can take towards your first tweet.

Twitter: Essential to your social media strategy

It was reported by TIME magazine in September of this year (2011) that Twitter has 100 million active users.
The daily average number of tweets was also reported to be in the realm of 230 million—up 110% since January 2011.
Using Twitter to implement your social media strategy is easy – the ability to share healthcare information is inexhaustible. Combine your online strategy and place/purpose in the NHS with honest conversation and relevant chatter – time to get social.

What’s happening while you are not tweeting?
Online conversation of patients, staff and nearby trusts occurs whether you are listening or not.
Twitter is a real time exchange of dialogue within a networked community – how can you contribute to your community when you are not engaging with them?
Tweets, trends and @mentions are something which on and offline organisations – including the NHS - can no longer afford to ignore.

Get started with Twitter
*Tweet – 140 characters. Keep it social, short and sharp.
*Retweet – regurgitate tweets that engage your followers and are relevant to your organisation/cause/campaign. Echo your organisations/campaigns, purpose and interests. Share it with your network.
*@mentions – tag your followers in a tweet. Direct tweets towards someone already listening. Ask questions. Manage conversation. Create Chatter. Build a network.
*#tags - create and follow trends on Twitter. #tags are meta data that connect tweets and birth trends across the Twitter platform #tags can brand a campaign and connect online champions – they can also be used for events and live twitter chats.
*#FF – Follow Friday. It’s nice to be liked. Build a network of like minded organisations and individuals with a digital salute.


Twitter is a tool which is savvy and an enabler of community, embrace this and your community will embrace you. So...

*Follow - check out those that follow you, provide timely responses, participate in conversations – what is going on locally?
*Keep it social – Has the Trust received an award? Have opening times to the clinic changed? Are staff administering flu jabs at a certain time and date? Talk about it. Let staff and patients know what is going on – even in real time.
*Keep it sweet – beware of language. Create a persona, be warm, be human.
*Build interest – promote with re-tweets of your followers. Invest time and effort to build a conversation and a relevant network.
*Plan - a content strategy will help focus your efforts on publishing content of value in a timely and relevant way.
*Location – add location data to tweets, push local healthcare information and news. Mobile usage of twitter means you can reach those listening for locations in real time. Location #tags can also be used in posts - #Leeds #London #Nottingham – this can be picked up by local press and individual users on twitter searching for these terms.
*Analytics– third party tools for your twitter strategy. Keep an eye on your metrics.
*Trends - Twitter is always on, make sure you have someone to monitor conversations, competitors and trends.

Entice your followers with relevant and local information, link to your website, release news and press releases, provide topics for conversation, get to know your network and execute searches. Dig in. Join in.

Third party tools for you and your twitter strategy:
Hootsuite
Tweetdeck

For more information about using social media within the NHS then follow @nhssm* – and check out their blog

*there is a live chat at 8pm UK time usually on a Wednesday using hastag #nhssm where discussion around the topic of social media and the NHS occurs – join in or hang back and learn more about social media in the NHS.

Malaria in the Digital Age.

Malaria is a global killer, yet totally preventable. The majority of child deaths under the age of five within Sub-Saharan Africa alone are truly astounding, there is hope with child mortality now on the decrease in Africa.

A TED roadshow presentation about countries in Africa and their progression with MDG Goal 4: Child Mortality, highlights these improvements yet there is worry this is coming to a plateau of progression. Malaria is a global factor in child mortality and with news of mosquito's are becoming immune to prevention drugs along with a 'super species' of mosquito being found in Burkina Faso is a tremendous worry.

Having volunteered in a remote Village in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana with Platform2 I worry for the children that I have seen affected directly by Malaria in the small community of Kasapin. Malaria affects the future of children in developing countries, who have little or no access to mosquito nets, causing not only deaths in children but causing the education of those most vunerable to suffer.




The digital-youth of today are the makers of tomorrow, outh culture has become some what diverse and takes on many shapes within todays ever evolving and changing society. Without a youth movement within politics and society then important and lasting messages will be lost. In order for change the young need to interact with their government and peers on global issues. Web 2.0 - the Digital Age provides an accessbile and free platform for youth culture and advocacy of global issues to occur, tweeting, blogging and the infamous Facebook: it all counts, it’s all making noise. A conglomerate of youth and standing up for the future.

Social media platforms and lo-fi production of promotional material are very important in today’s techno-savvy and topically indebted youth. Mass media coporations and production agencies have all the time and money in the world to gloablize brands and televise reality shows, but give what seems little time to global issues- this is then left to NGO’s and activists to fight that corner. The sheer volume of The Mass Media affect draws on the worrying potential that a high proportion of the westernised world are slowly loosing our humanity and the power to make change.

Young people feel that change is hard to come by, we need to understand that we have been led blindly by governments, corrupt politicians and people in high places that take liberties of the weak and vunerable. We need to form strong social bonds both on and offline and use the tools that we have available to us- free social spaces, art funds and of course social media.

Fight injustice and use social media to better the world.



Related posts:

Eradicating Malaria
Farming in Kasapin

Useful links:

New mosquito type raises concern
Malaria No More UK
DFiD - Millenium Development Goals

Twitter and it’s role in your SME’s online strategy

Twitter is a website which offers businesses a gateway to customers online, a social networking service which enables people to send and read messages - those 'tweets' you may have heard people chirping about. Twitter now has up to 175 million users, that's a growth rate of roughly 15 million users per month or about half a million users per day.

Time to invest. Increase your ROI by tweeting.

Using Twitter to implement your social media strategy is easy - business scope is borderless. Combine your online strategy with honest conversation and relevant chatter. Get social.

Twitter: Essential to your social media strategy

* Allows you to build and continue conversation with customers and stakeholders
* Provides a platform - direct customers towards your product/service (gain feedback too)
* Creates a hyperlocal sense to your business and online strategy
* Consumers and competitors both use Twitter
* Monitor behaviours and trends through easy accessible analytic tools.

Time to engage.

What’s happening while you are not tweeting?

Not on Twitter? Your business is being talked about. Online conversation of consumers occurs whether you are listening or not.

Twitter is a real time exchange of dialogue within a networked community. It’s all happening without you. Know what’s out there: make sure you know what’s currently being said about you.

Time spent reviewing or following brands that are using Twitter well is time well spent.

Tweets, trends and @mentions are something which on and offline businesses can no longer afford to ignore. Ignorance is bad for business.

Get started with Twitter

1)Tweet – 140 characters. Keep it social, short and sharp.
2)Retweet – regurgitate tweets that engage your followers and are relevant to your business. Echo your brand, purpose and interests. Share it with your network.
3)@mentions – tag your followers in a tweet. Direct tweets towards someone already listening. Ask questions. Manage conversation. Create Chatter.
4)#tags - create and follow trends on Twitter. #tags are meta data that connect tweets and birth trends across the Twitter platform.
5)#FF – Follow Friday. It’s nice to be liked. Build a network of like minded businesses and individuals with a digital salute.

Let’s talk shop

Twitter is a tool which is savvy and an enabler of community, embrace this and your community will embrace you. So...

* Follow - check out those that follow you, provide timely responses, participate in conversations keeping your business objectives in mind.
* Keep it social – got new stock this morning? Talk about it. Let customers know what is going on in real time.
* Keep it sweet – beware of language. Create a persona, be warm, be human.
* Build interest – promote with retweets of your followers. Invest time and effort to build a conversation.
* Plan - a content strategy will help focus your efforts on publishing content of value in a timely and relevant way.
* Location – add location data to tweets, push local business. Mobile usage of twitter means you can reach those listening for locations in real time.
* Analytics– third party tools for your twitter strategy. Keep an eye on your metrics.
* Trends - Twitter is always on, make sure you have someone to monitor conversations, competitors and trends.

Entice your followers with incentives and general conversation, get to know your market, execute searches. Dig in. Join in.


Want more?
Follow me @jessica_barlow


Useful links:
The @twitter blog
Twitter: On Track for 200 Million Users by Year End
Third party tools for you and your twitter strategy:
Hootsuite
Tweetdeck

Twitter @anywhere

Twitter announced their @anywhere service at SXSW which will aim to intergrate twitter with web sites.

Building on the early goals of twitter the @anywhere service will extract and connect information and people in real time from external websites.

The twitter platform has evolved to support conversation between netizens that are part of a strong social network. These networks have allowed individuals with similar interests to interact with each other in real time and share discourse, information and hypertext. This is something which twitter can go far beyond with the roll out of @anywhere.

This extension of the API will allow users to add twitter to different contexts, extending twitter to more places and connecting news, artists and users in a real time.

Biz Stone commented on the twitter blog, "With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting."

People will be able to connect to each other and share information and conversation aiding better decsisions. You can find out what is happening in the world that you care about, connecting to the people that care about the same things.

Watch Evan Williams, Twitter's CEO, introduce @anywhere at SXSW2010

In the future intergrating with media sites will allow audiences to collate news as and when it happens. Headlines can be sent out via twitter, but @anywhere will also allow the gathering of information via twitter.

Stone commented further, "When we're ready to launch, imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo home page -and that's just the beginning."


Read more about @anywhere on the twitter blog

Follow @anywhere

Socio-political media.

The Conservatives have recently targeted Leeds with their pre-election campaign, through the use of eye catching billboards dotted around the outskirts of the City.

Following the election debate and keeping track on each party has never been so instantly networked, as both parties develop their digital campaigns. Both Labour and Conservative parties have turned to social media as both election campaigns begin to take flight. According to Brand Republic, it is thought to be the first time that a political campaign as become reliant on social media.


Labour Party bloggers mock Cameron's recent comment
on his Conservative plans for the BBC.


Labour bloggers continue to use the power of independent media to spoof the Conservative leader. The run up to the election certainly comes close to home, and away from billboard adverts as 'we the media' set out to contribute propaganda and steer the vote with conversation ahead of the election.

Keep track of Cameron and co on twitter
Keep track of Brown and co on twitter

Digital Age theives?

Paul Bradshaw, author of the Online Journalism Blog, recently published a post that got me thinking. As his posts on the development of Web2.0 usually do.

This time I threw my thoughts into the conversation.

Below is my response to his post on how bloggers are viewed by those media execs types.

My response on the Online Journalism Blog to Paul's post.

The mention of bloggers and our parasitic ways, of supposedly leeching from mainstream media is just narrow minded, and money focused rather than information.

We are a network that feeds each other, tribes of people with the same interests, re-tweeting what we liked to hear. We create our own news away from a centralised hub of ‘validated’ content.

When writing my reasonably small thesis on the use of Twitter as a breaking news platform it became apparent, even then, that this tool would allow citizen journalism to flourish. Away from the reliance of say, the BBC, to collect and disseminate our news for us- 7 July bombings for example.

In its early days, and I am sure even more so now, twitter broke news ahead of Reuters- those PR companies that Murdoch and co relies on. Is Reuters even as valued as before?

Bloggers create their own news and network, tweeting, searching, bookmarking. Building on an already established genre of journalism. To say that this is amateur and trivial is denying its purpose and its value.

Blogging is both valuable and diverse, and could not be more of a reflection of the people that read it, as well as create it.

You and Me.

I know you are talking. You always talk.

I'm listening... here.

Piracy & Lily Allen.

Lily has gained a strong online social network, and is not afraid to use it.

Forever tweetin' her whereabouts, insights into her appreciation for the England cricket team or winding up Chris Moyles, "I suggest we start calling him tedious Dave as he spends far more time doing his aptly named link than being funny".


Lily has racked up over 1 Million followers on Twitter, directing them through her tweets to see her view on the recent dispute about P2P music file sharing.

Lily Allen, equiped with her online status and a GQ shoot, gained an impressive 14 thousand profile views whilst actively blogging about the issue.

A month on and her blog has closed, "I have shut down the blog it is getting too much". Leaving influential breadcrumbs in the social sphere.

Lily's constant tweets and her ability to network with the right people, both on and offline drove a meeting on the controversial subject to be held in London after much attention from netizens and fellow web savvy celebrities.

Tweeting mid morning on 24 September that "there is a meeting today in London where artists are meeting to discuss Piracy. My job done." It is fair to say that Lily has used social media to it's full potential, birthing a policy meeting via an online conversational networking platform.