[START RECORDING] MS. KATHRYN HAMBLETON: Hello everyone, this is Kathryn Hambleton from the HHS Center for New Media and welcome to another installment of our Center for New Media Webinars. We are excited to bring you a webinar about Twitter chats at HHS and general advice from some experienced folks on how to and when to do Twitter chats. As you have seen from the invitation that went out, today we have Amy Heldman from CDC, Anne Rancourt from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and Silje Lier from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. The way that the webinar will work today is a little bit different from our previous webinars in that it’s going to be a panel discussion so we are going to throw some questions out to our panelists and they are going to answer with their experience. There may be many of you all online that also have experience with webinars so if you guys have tips and input, feel free to raise your hands and with my webinar controls I can give you... I can un-mute your microphones. Please submit any questions that you have in your questions box and we will answer them as we go when there’s a good pause between our panelists’ answers. And on the screen we‘ll have the question so we’ll be recording the webinar so you can get a full transcript of all of the discussion and the questions with what will be on the slides. All right. Well, with that said we’re going to get started with our first question and hear from our panelists: How exactly have you guys been using Twitter chats within HHS? MS. AMY HELDMAN: This is Amy at CDC. I guess I’ll start off. First we just want to be clear on what we’re talking about with Twitter chats. We actually have a formal definition at CDC of what a Twitter chat is. The way to have a conversation and interact with followers, use tweets, obviously, and a predefined hashtag, you do a lot of coordination in advance, have a formal script to guide the discussion, and you have your subject matter experts, outside partners, participate in the chat and interacts with followers. So just kind of level-setting what we’re talking about here because I sense there is sometimes confusion about different kinds of Twitter events. As far as what we have done at CDC, we’ve done several Twitter chats across the agency on a variety of different topics, so we do them as a way to increase the reach of our messages but we’re also focusing on interacting with our audience, listening to them, and we’re responding to their comments and questions received during a chat, so I think that two-way thing is really important. We’ve actually had a couple of different roles and chats. I’ve divided them up to be—we’ve led chats, we’ve partnered with chats, and we’ve participated. So we’ve led chats that focus on agency-wide priority topics, such as tobacco control, obesity, STDs, etc., etc., but we’ve also looked at some of our different campaigns such as Million Hearts, the Office on Smoking and Health and their wonderful tips campaign. We’ve partnered with groups like the American Public Health Association, the HHS Office of Women’s Health, Surgeon General’s Office, to participate in chats that they are leading, and then we’ve also just kind of participated in the conversation with chats like Dr. Rich Besser from ABC. He used to be at CDC and he does a variety of Twitter chats—we’ve been asked to contribute information to those. So that’s kind of a broad overview of what we’re doing at CDC and I’ll turn it over to my colleagues. MS. SILJE LIER: Hi, this is Silje from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Here at ODPHP we’ve hosted and participated in a number of Twitter chats both from Healthfinder.gov and Healthy People Twitter accounts. We started in October 2010 when we co-hosted, with Health Literary Missouri, a Twitter chat in honor of Health Literacy Month and our first one featured our special guest, Dr. Cynthia Baur from the CDC as a health literacy advisor. And we also invited what we call the “panel of influencers” to represent a variety of different perspectives on the issue of health literacy and we had more than 160 people participate and we found that the chat was pretty successful in continuing the conversation after the chat, so we held one again last year and plan to do that again in October. A couple months ago, we teamed up with CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention as well as the Office of HIV/AIDS and Infectious Disease Policy and the Assistant Secretary for Health—Dr. Koh—participated and we had the Twitter chat focus on National HIV Testing Day, and ways that people could get involved in that. The chat was convened about a week before the national event and so we had a potential reach of more than 984,000 followers and it was also trending on Twitter. So overall we’ve found great success in hosting or participating in Twitter chats that aligned with either a national health observance or data releases or timely events. So that’s our experience here at ODPHP. MS. ANNE RANCOURT: Hi everyone, this is Anne from NHLBI, which is part of NIH. And for our institute we’ve done three Twitter chats this year. Two of them we did through one of our large consumer-facing campaigns, the Heart Truth, which educates women about heart disease. We did one Twitter chat in February for National Wear Red Day on heart disease, and one recently in May on blood pressure for High Blood Pressure Month. We’ve also done a Twitter chat from our more research-focused NHLBI Twitter handle on the subject of sleep, which we did during National Sleep Awareness Week. And like my colleagues we partner with other groups for all of the Twitter chats that we do just to expand reach and to bring in new audiences that we normally wouldn’t have access to. So we frequently partner with CDC and we also have worked with the American Heart Association, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and other Institutes and Centers throughout NIH. And our main goals for doing Twitter chats are similar to what’s already been stated but I would also add that one reason that we like to do them is really to put a name and a face with our institute and with our program. Sometimes it’s really nice for folks to know that there is a live human being at the end of the line, and so Twitter chats are a really nice way to sort of showcase that and especially when you’re able to showcase some expert, a scientific expert in our case, to answer questions on the fly. MS. HAMBLETON: Thanks. Okay. Next question: Why would you want to do a Twitter chat and how do you know if you should or shouldn’t do a Twitter chat? MS. HELDMAN: This is Amy Heldman from CDC. I’ll take the lead on this question. So we always say that Twitter and Twitter chats at CDC should be part of a larger integrated health com program or project. It should not just be a standalone activity that you do without some kind of framework to it. And also, reach is important but we also really stress that you need to interact and engage during a Twitter chat, you need to talk and listen to your audiences and not just do one to push out messages. That goes against the entire intent of a Twitter chat. So you should not do one just for the sake of doing one. You have to have solid goals and objectives and a plan behind it. As far as why should you or should you not do a Twitter chat, I think you have to really think through your topics. Not every topic that you have at your agency might rise to the level of a Twitter chat. You have to think, do you have something to say about the topic that’s of interest and importance to your audience, and you have to think about if you want to have a dialogue with them. You don’t want to saturate your audience with too many Twitter chats on too many topics. You have to really pick your topic carefully and think about how it aligns to your overall health communication goals and objectives, and make it all make sense before you do a Twitter chat. A couple other things that I think are important when thinking about decision making related to Twitter chats are there are some advantages to doing a Twitter chat in that you can learn a lot about your audience’s health information needs. Where else do you have the opportunity to find out what types of questions are they asking? Are those the questions you thought they would ask? How are they asking the questions? Who is participating in the conversation? Is it the audience you expected? What messages resonate during the Twitter chat? What gets retweeted the most and what gets the most traffic? I think it’s been interesting for some of our program people to see the types of messages that actually get a lot of pickups during a Twitter chat. It’s not always what you think that they are so I think it’s been a really valuable tool for health com people to go back and maybe readjust their messaging and approach to social media. I think the other last important point that I want to reiterate before turning it over to my colleagues is, if you have an important topic that’s timely, that people are talking about it, those conversations are going on in social media with or without you, so you definitely want to think carefully about being in the conversation and being an influence versus just being a bystander, not let that opportunity pass you by. It gives you an opportunity to show leadership in your subject area in social media. You don’t want that to happen without you. So those are just a few of the reasons that we talk about at CDC as far as why you’d want to do one and I’ll turn it over—Anne, I’ll just kick it over to you so you can share your perspective. MS. RANCOURT: Thanks. Just to add onto that, I mean in terms of developing your strategy around your Twitter chat and having that tie into your broader strategies, I would really consider your audience that you’re trying to reach and if a Twitter chat is really the best platform to reach them. If your audience is a consumer audience, Twitter might make a lot of sense. If this is a topic that your audience has questions about or if there is confusion in the marketplace, this can be a great setting to sort of clear that up. If your audience is more of a professional—for example, for our institute we often try to reach out to a researcher or a health professional audience like a specific type of physician or healthcare provider—a Twitter chat might not be the best platform for doing that because those people are at work in a clinical setting during the day, they’re not on Twitter chatting away like some people who have more of a desk job might be. So making sure that all of those facets of your strategy are in alignment is very important. And I’ll kick it over to Silje, if she has anything else. MS. LIER: Sure, yeah, I agree with all that. I would just add that we’ve definitely used Twitter chats as a way to drive conversation on a specific health topic or issue and we’ve found that it’s a great organized event for dropping resources. If there’s a lot of information out there, kind of pulling it together, synthesizing it, and sharing quick information with colleagues and stakeholders. MS. HAMBLETON: Thanks guys. How do you prepare for a Twitter chat? MS. LIER: This is Silje again, ODPHP has developed a guide to hosting a Twitter chat and it’s available for download at http://health.gov/healthliteracyonline/Twitter_Chat_Guide.pdf. And in this resource we share seven different steps to planning your own Twitter chat, as we’ve experienced. Some are lessons learned from our own Twitter chats. The first one would be to choose a topic. You’ll need to develop a focus for your chat and some way—trends, past events— Can someone mute their line, please? Listen to issues that are important to stakeholders, or follow topic at hashtags to identify emerging areas of interest. You’ll also want to determine your goals, as Amy and Anne have discussed, ask yourself what do you hope to accomplish during the chat, who is your audience, and what actions want people to take after the chat. Then you’ll need to pick a hashtag. As you know, each tweet related to the chat will use the hashtag to enable participants and onlookers to view all the chat-related tweets, so your hashtag should unique enough as to cover the focus of your chat and short enough to maximize the amount of characters that you can use when you’re tweeting. Then you’ll also want to determine roles. At ODPHP we’ve split the running of the chats into four main roles. They’re the director, moderator, monitor, and the responder. The director would oversee all the operations of the chat, direct the questions to responders, keep time check and coordinate with all the others during the chat. The moderator would be responsible for sending out the prewritten tweets that would be developed from a script or a guide, and the monitor would track questions asked by participants during the live chat and field them to responders and they can use the free tools so that they can make sure that all the questions are being addressed. And then the responder would actually answer the questions that are asked by the participants. We’ve also found it’s helpful to create what we call moderator’s guide, or a script, essentially the same thing, and we recommend developing a guide that outlines your planned tweets to send before, during, and after the chat. And the purpose is to guide the conversation and add structure to the chat, especially for those that might be coming in and might not be as familiar with Twitter. And then we also found that it’s really helpful to involve special guests. So consider reaching out to subject matter experts, to people who have great influence on your audience. We’ve found that the direct message feature on Twitter is a great way to invite these influencers. And then, last of all, you want to promote the chat, so you can reach and engage your audience and try to get the word out about two weeks in advance, and provide participants, interested organizations with sample promotional tweets so they can easily push it out themselves. To promote our own chat we’ve conducted outreach via e-marketing, social media, and via direct messaging to influential bloggers, organizations, or parties that may be related to the health topic of your chat. So again, like I said, details about planning a Twitter chat are available in our resource that you can find on health.gov. I’ll turn it over to my colleagues. MS. HELDMAN: This is Amy from CDC. I’ll take it and then turn it over to you Ann. I just want to say that we learned a lot from ODPHP and other groups, so I think one of the ways that you can prepare for a Twitter chat is to talk to people and participate in these kinds of webinars so that you can learn more about what actually works within a Twitter chat. I actually agree with everything that’s already been said, and I’ve broken down what we do at CDC into three big buckets. The first one is: planning, planning, planning. I can’t stress enough that you have to start early in planning for your Twitter chat. You don’t just wake up one day and decide you want to do one and then the next day hold the chat. There’s a lot of coordination that goes on that you need to address. We recommend starting several weeks out, not a few days before. Again, I think all three of us have reiterated making sure that you have goals and objectives and really think through what you’re trying to accomplish. That is definitely the first thing you need to do from a planning perspective. You need to communicate a lot with your stakeholders, I mean briefing, kickoff, talking, reiterating, you need to be sure that everybody who’s participating is aware of what’s going on and knows what to do. I think another important part of planning that is very valuable to do some environmental scanning to help inform what you’re going to do with your Twitter chat. What are people saying about your topic in social media spaces? Who’s saying it? And tying into those conversations and those influencers in your chat. You don’t have to necessarily have a tool to go do that; you could Google and at least find out some of the information. But I think that’s a really great way to try to tap into the conversations that are already going on. And I think one of the planning things that can trip people up too is logistics. I mean you want to try to make that whole logistical process as easy and streamlined as you can so that you don’t have to think about it during the chat. I mean things as simple as where will the chat be? Are you in one room or are you participating remotely? Do you need to do your run-through beforehand? I mean that’s just really important stuff that can get you tripped up in the moment. So those are all the planning things that I was thinking about in preparing for this webinar. And I just want to reiterate the point that was made before about promotion. At CDC we think that promoting your chat is really key to the success. It’s not a “build it and it will come”; people need to know about your event so that they can participate in it. We always do a really solid multichannel communications plan, similar to what Silje was saying, it’s not just social media promotion, but we look at communicating with partners, e-mails, web, etc., to make sure that we’ve kind of hit all the various ways that we can get the information out about our event. And then finally as far as planning or as far as the preparing goes, I really think the script, or the moderator’s guide, you can call it whatever, it’s interchangeable as Silje said, having a good one is really key, it’s the bedrock. So you need to be sure that you have worked with all of the health com people, the media people and policy folks to make sure that your messages are translated into tweets and make sure you get things cleared. And then just having enough content so that you can respond to any unanticipated but relevant topics, but just having a really robust script is key because it guides the conversation, it helps you streamline things in the moment, and it keeps everybody on track. And one of the things too that is really important in building that script is focus. You want to be sure that you don’t go too broad with your topic so that people are not interested in it because it just seems to apply to everybody. You may want to think about, for example, not just focusing on cancer, but focusing on an important subtopic within the cancer health communication world. Because that, in our experience, really helps to keep the chat corralled and ensure targeted messaging versus kind of a free-for-all where people are just commenting on everything under the sun. And then finally before I turn it over to Anne, I think a really important thing in your script when you’re preparing the chat is thinking about things from an issues-management perspective. You have to think about things like what if you get spammed during the chat? That’s happened to us. What if you get off-topic questions and comments that are really detracting from the intent of your Twitter chat? What are you going to say to them? Are you going to ignore them or are you going to address them? Be ready with those protocols for handling before the chat starts and make sure that you have responses if necessary in your script that you can pull from it. So that is, in a nutshell, some of the things I was thinking about the preparation, and Anne, I will turn it over to you. MS. RANCOURT: Thanks. Those are all great points so I would agree with everything that my colleagues have said and also the ODPHP guide is excellent, and I wish that I had known about that or had it available when we did our first chat, because we have a lot of lessons learned and a lot of points that I think that we’ve all been able to collect after doing several of these but I know for our first one we were very nervous about all of this and venturing into new territory. And so I would just want to say too that that’s normal and that is just part of gaining a comfort level with this medium, and it does get easier the more that you do. By the time we had moved on to our second and third chats, it felt just as normal as sending out a press release or any other type of communication that our office typically does. And I would just touch on one point that was mentioned about getting clearance is to really think carefully about the level of buy-in that you have at your agency with being able to tweet kind of spur-of-the-moment types of things because that’s really going to be necessary for your Twitter chat. I mean as we’ve said before, you don’t just want to have your messages that you’ve cleared and just be sending them out and not be responsive to questions, or to weird points that people start bringing up that are outside of your messaging wheelhouse. So either having buy-in from above that grants you the ability to kind of answer things on the fly and have trust in your office’s ability to do that, or bringing on a VIP or a subject matter expert, someone in your organization who is more of a spokesperson, has that ability to speak off the cuff and not having things cleared before they speak, can be a real asset because then they can answer a question and their answer is cleared because of who it’s coming from. And so that can be a great way to make sure that you have that ability to respond and go with the flow and answer your audience. But it’s also a great way to build internal buy-in for your social media program and show kind of the neat way that you can interact with the public through Twitter, which is not something that leadership and that people in high-level position see on a day-to-day basis as much as the managers of those platforms do. MS. HAMBLETON: Now we’ve talked a lot about preparing and whether or not we should do a Twitter chat and now we’re going to get into a little bit more of the meat of actually during the Twitter chat. How many people does it take to run a Twitter chat, and what exactly are their roles and responsibilities? Because it’s really not just one person answering questions over Twitter. MS. RANCOURT: That’s right. This is Anne from NHLBI and I’ll take this one and then turn it over. In addition to all of the backend work that we’ve just talked about where you’re preparing your strategy, preparing your script. That’s going to be based on kind of your office’s level of ability to handle that kind of thing and time availability. We usually have two or three people working before a chat to address all of those points that we’ve just brought up that are needed for the preparation. But during the chat, we have found that it takes at least four people to run a Twitter chat. So I’ll kind of go through the roles that we assign. The most important role is what we call the “tweet traffic controller.” And so in this assessment I’m assuming that you have partnered with other groups to do a chat and that each group has their principal tweeter sitting with them, whether it’s a VIP or a subject matter expert or a celebrity or someone like that. You really need to make sure that all of the groups who are participating are in communication in some way and that there is a system in place so that as questions or comments from the twitterverse come up, people are assigned roles in answering those. Let’s say it’s CDC and NIH are doing a Twitter chat together, and somebody asks a question about blood pressure, let’s say, CDC then comes out with an answer and then NIH comes out with an answer, and ideally those would be the same answers but heaven forbid they’re not the same answer, and then HHS has two messages out that are conflicting, and you just want to avoid that situation. So the tweet traffic controller, as we call this person, sits on a conference line in the chat, which we have typically done in a conference room, convening as many people participating in one place as possible, and sort of acts as the air traffic controller and says, “Okay, we have a question coming in from so and so. CDC, you take this one.” “Okay, we have another question coming in from Person B. NIH, you’ve got this one,” and sort of assigns it and triages it so that everybody knows what they’re doing. And this person is also generally responsible for keeping an eye on the script and making sure that we’re stepping through that on time, and keeping the pace going within the hour. So that’s pretty much the most advanced role in terms of being able to work under pressure and get that done. We also have an assistant role to that person, to the tweet traffic controller, who sits beside that person and is constantly refreshing the feed, looking for questions, looking for tweets that have come up that could merit discussion and response or retweeting, and drawing them to the attention of the person who’s on the conference line. Those two people working in tandem to really monitor the chat and then assign roles. The third role is sort of a handler. Assuming that you do have a VIP or a subject matter expert who has joined you for the chat who’s going to be offering their expertise to you, you really would probably want to have somebody sitting with them, helping them understand, okay, we’ve got this question, what’s our answer? And depending on that person that you’ve brought in, it’s helping them literally with the Twitter platform enter in the answer and hit send with the appropriate hashtags and @ responses and also, where needed, helping them massage an answer down to 140 characters. And so that role really depends on the individual that you’re bringing in. If it‘s someone who’s very text savvy, that’s a lighter role. If it’s someone who has never seen Twitter before, then you’re going to have more of a hands-on role there. And then the fourth role that we assign is—one of the steps that we do ahead of time is we compile a list of all of our tools and resources and press releases and web pages that are related to the topic of the Twitter chat. So if we’re going a Twitter chat, say, on cholesterol, NHLBI has many resources on cholesterol—templates, booklets, wallet cards, websites, BMI calculator, those types of things. We’ll compile a list of all of those ahead of time and we’ll go ahead and pre-shorten the links to all those resources, and then as topics come up on the chat, or questions are answered, we’ll tweet out a link to those resources, so: “Great question on cholesterol! For more information, go here…” That type of thing. And so what we’ve found for that role is we’ve assigned someone specifically to do that, to monitor the chat, see what we’re talking about, and be tweeting those links during the chat. And one lesson learned that we’ve had is we’ve done chats where that person has been in the room as a part of the chat, and where in times where our space has actually been more limited, they’ve been located away in their own office taking care of that, and also dialed into the conference call. And we found that actually having them be away from the chat is much more effective because they can really concentrate on their task and not get swept up in the excitement and the discussions and kind of the back-and-forth chaos of what happens during the hour of the Twitter chat. So, it’s a small piece of advice and a nice lesson learned. And if you have more than four people to devote to this, then I would suggest that their role be assigned to also be monitoring for questions, because one of my colleagues described the Twitter chat as “drinking from a fire hose” and it really is a huge barrage of information that your Twitter feed is just constantly refreshing. So having more sets of eyes there can be really helpful but depending on your resources and the size of your office that can be more optional. And I would also suggest if you can have someone around or someone who just pops in for a moment to take some photos. That’s a really nice thing to have. We’ve used them for several different applications over the month since we’ve been doing them. And now that HHS can use Storify, you can actually tweet the photo during the chat, and it’ll show up in your Storify recap of your Twitter chat as a nice visual. And it shows that there are live people here and this is what they look like, and a picture is worth a thousand words. So I’ll turn it over to Amy if there’s anything to add from CDC. MS. HELDMAN: Well, Anne, it’s funny because I think from the CDC perspective, our established roles are remarkably consistent with yours and I actually laughed when you were talking about the air traffic controller because we called that equivalent at CDC our “Twitter chat wrangler,” so I do think that that’s a very important role to have a person who’s kind of looking at the 20,000-foot view to make sure you’re on message, you’re on script, that questions are being answered, etc. And the only other thing that I would reiterate because I agree with everything you said, pretty much, is the importance of having roles established so that people can focus because I think Anne’s point about people getting excited and caught up in the moment… As soon as that first question comes across your Twitter profile, everybody gets excited, jumps up and wants to run around and answer it. And you need to remind them, “Stay in your role. You don’t need to do this right now, it’s okay.” And that helps keep the chat flow going, because that hour goes so quickly. So that’s my additional perspective on that. MS. LIER: And this is Silje. At ODPHP, we just “monitor.” I think we’re going to have to officially change that to a Twitter chat wrangler or a tweet traffic controller. I would just reiterate that as much as the Twitter chat is scripted, a lot of it is on the fly, so it’s important to have a conference line open so that you can all communicate and make sure that you’re getting your responses out in a timely manner. And it’s also useful to sign in from different locations in case there are any technical difficulties, or one browser is loading slower than the other. That’s all from my end. MS. HAMBLETON: Great. I really like the names that you guys have for the roles. It makes it more fun. MS. RANCOURT: You’ve got to keep a sense of humor with some of it. MS. HELDMAN: You do. MS. HAMBLETON: Absolutely. So we talked—I heard Storify mentioned at one point, and I know that drinking that fire hose is quite a challenge, so what are some of your preferred tools for using during a Twitter chat? MS. HELDMAN: Well, this is Amy from CDC, and I’ll start off with this one. First of all, we’re always looking for ideas of different types of tools and techniques that other groups use so I would love input and feedback from those who are participating in the webinar. But basically, pre-chat, we use the tool called Radian6, which I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with, to do some environmental scanning, figure out what the conversations are about the topic that we’re going to discuss, and identify people who are influential in those conversations so that we can make sure that we’re aligning our message to that. During the chat, we have Twitter up on our screen, and we look at Twitterfall potentially into different things to try to help organize the controlled chaos that goes on during the Twitter chat. I got to say, sometimes the old-fashioned printing out a question and going over to someone and talking to them about it works better than trying to do things with a tool or technology, because what you might find in your Twitter chat is not everyone is sitting there looking at the screen. They’re an observer, a bystander, or they’re dealing with another issue so sometimes having that tangible thing that you can go and talk to somebody about, I mean we’ve written things on Post-It notes and just done it in a variety of ways. So all that’s to say, don’t feel daunted if you don’t have a particular tool that you think you need to use to do a Twitter chat. You can kind of do it the old-fashioned way, and still be successful. And then post-chat, we usually look at Radian6 again to look at what the reach was, to look and see the influence that we had and those kinds of things. So those are really the main tools that we used and Silje or Ann, if you want to jump in and talk about what you’re doing, go ahead. MS. LIER: At ODPHP we use, we just prefer to use an app or platform that allows us to see the tweets updated in real time so that we can follow along with the conversation because Twitter chats do run very quickly. And so we use something like TweetDeck or TWUBS.com, T-W-U-B-S dot com. MS. RANCOURT: Yeah, the same for us we use HootSuite, which is a similar tool. We have the advanced version of that which I think is a pretty low monthly fee to get the advanced or the professional version I think. And we also have used TweetReach to generate a report at the end, but again, to kind of echo Amy’s point, we actually—after our first chat where HootSuite failed and one of the automatically updating Twitter websites that we were using failed, we have sort of streamlined and really only try to introduce the technology that’s absolutely necessary during the chat, and often are kind of forced into using Twitter.com because that’s just what’s kind of easiest to refresh and to see given the technology restraints and kind of how the Wi-Fi is working in the conference room that we’re in. But I would also make a plug, which Amy did as well, for kind of the old school technology, especially when you‘re doing your Twitter chat planning. In terms of reaching out to organizations to get them aware that your chat’s going on, encourage them to promote it or participate in it, I think that the phone or e-mail is—funny that I consider e-mail, I guess, an old technology now—but it’s still really the best way to kind of make a personal connection with someone and ask them to participate and send them approved content that they can use. I‘m sure that there’s a way to effectively do it using only direct messaging and all kinds of online, Twitter-friendly technology but in the end nothing beats the personal connection, so that’s always been our go-to for developing partnerships for Twitter chats and participation. That’s it. MS. HAMBLETON: Great. We do have one question from the audience. Amy, can you talk just briefly about what Radian6 is and how you use it, just to recap a little bit? MS. HELDMAN: Yeah, sure. And happy to talk offline after the webinar to whoever is interested; you can contact me because we could talk about it for hours. But basically Radian6 is a social media monitoring tool that kind of scans all of the conversations that are going on in social media about your topic. So you enter search terms and you get a report back, and it can be more complicated than that but that’s the basic premise. So what I find most useful from the reports that we get pre-chat is here’s a list of people on Twitter who have a lot of followers, who participate in conversations about your particular health topic. And you can then use that list and reach out to them, try to get them to promote your chat or whatever you want to do. Post-chat, Radian6 is really helpful because it tells you what your reach is, so how many people are potentially exposed to your Twitter messages. It tells you who influenced the Twitter chat conversation, who the participants were who really helped push your message out, that kind of thing. So again, happy to talk more about it, but it could take up a whole webinar in itself. But I think it’s a really good tool for us from a monitoring perspective. MS. HAMBLETON: Thanks, and maybe we can follow up and actually do a full webinar on Radian6 and similar tools in the future if that’s something that you guys might, in the audience, might be interested in. Brooke from Office of Women’s Health chimed in and she says that they love Radian6 also. It allows them to see their follower numbers tweet by tweet throughout the Twitter chat. She says it’s very useful. Another tool that I’ve used in the past that I like is Monitter, and I believe it has two Rs, if you are looking for it online—no, it has two Ts: M-O-N-I-T-T-E-R dot com. Similar to Twitterfall in automatically updating pages. Another question was “Do you have an HHS-wide subscription to Radian6?” No, we do not. And it tends to be a pricier tool, but it may be something that folks are interested in. FDA I know has used it in the past, and they really liked it. And I think that there are a few other offices using it and so we can follow up and do a webinar about similar tools in the future as well. Our next question is what are some of the challenges that arise during a Twitter chat and how have you dealt with them? MS. HELDMAN: This is Amy, I’ll start out and I know we’re probably running a little short on time, but I just want to—I have a whole list but I just want to reiterate one that I think is kind of a pet peeve when we’re doing these. Not answering the question. I think you can debate how to answer the question all through the chat, and it can really slow your chat down and that’s why your script is so important. You probably have an answer that will work and address the information need of the person who sent you question. I feel like sometimes we get into maybe more detailed debates than we need to instead of pushing out something that we’ve already cleared and worked on. So that to me would be a challenge that you just need to be mindful of in the moment and that’s where that air traffic controller/Twitter wrangler comes into play. I’ll kick it over to Anne or Silje. MS. RANCOURT: This is Anne. One challenge I think that we’ve encountered was figuring out sort of the balance on our partnerships for the Twitter chats, and when I talk about partners for chats, we sort of have two levels of partners. One is the principal partners for the chat, and these are the people that you are on the phone with, that you developed this script in concert with, and they’re really your core group for the Twitter chat. Then there are sort of other partners that are groups that you reach out to, you invite them to participate, but they don’t have as formal of a role as your core partners. And so after our first chat we had such a great interaction with our core partners and we were really able to expand our reach and collaborate, and it’s wonderful and so we were like “This is great, let’s have... let’s get more partners; that will even be better!” And it got a little unwieldy pretty quickly after that. So for our third chat we dialed it back to a total of three core participants: us and then two partners. And we found that that’s really kind of the perfect balance for that person who is in that wrangler/tweet traffic controller role on the phone to kind of maintain a level of chaos that’s comfortable while still expanding your reach. And that’s not a hard and fast rule, and sometimes relationship mean that it’s quite imperative to invite a fourth group or maybe you just want to keep it to two groups if your topic is quite broad and the two of you have a really good handle on it and broad following alone, but that’s sort of a general scope that we’ve found to work. MS. LIER: And this is Silje. I would agree with Amy about the challenge of responding to questions on the fly. I think that the character limit is a double-edge sword in that there are benefits to keeping your message concise and down to 140 characters, but it can definitely be challenging; when you have to respond to someone, you might not be able to respond in a way that you naturally would in a conversation. So it’s, again, imperative to develop a really solid script to overcome that challenge. MS. HAMBLETON: We have one question from the—one of the previous questions actually. Would any of you, of the panelists, be willing to share one of your moderator’s guides or a couple of them from past chats? MS. LIER: Definitely. MS. RANCOURT: Yeah, absolutely. MS. HELDMAN: Yeah, sure, we could probably rustle up one for you. MS. HAMBLETON: Great, and any materials that we end up sending out, you guys can send directly to me, and then I’ll send one consolidated e-mail out to the LISTSERV. So after the Twitter chat’s all done and you’ve planned it and you’ve organized it well, how do you know if your Twitter chat was a success? MS. RANCOURT: I can take that one. This is Anne. I think this really goes back to Amy’s point from earlier about developing your strategy for what you want to accomplish with your Twitter chat, and so as part of that you need to think about what success would look like for your agency before you plan the chat. And there are a number of different ways you can think about success. I think the most traditional is impressions, especially if you’re coming from a PR background, that’s a very traditional metric. Another metric that we have found that we’ve had that we didn’t necessarily expect to see was just a huge increase in followers every time we’ve done a chat, and so that could be your metric—to grow your follower base, so that that’s something that you carry with you. But it can also be... success can also be something more topical, it could be you have a problem and you want to crowd source it with a group of professionals or with a core audience that you trust. And I think that there’s also sometimes room for internal success metrics. I mentioned earlier bringing in a VIP or someone from your agency, a high level official, who maybe doesn’t see the value of Twitter and is sort of skeptical about it. This can be a really nice way to showcase some success to them and show them the interaction and the hunger that’s out there for information from your agency and the need to participate online. I think Amy said before, you know, this conversation is happening online with or without you and so you just have to make the decision to be a part of it, and sometimes chats I think can be an effective way to help communicate that leadership. So whatever you determine your metric is, then that’s what you should be striving for, for success and you should look narrowly at that success and go after it very specifically and plan your chat accordingly. And in terms—if you’re really looking for metrics in terms of followers—a follower increase, impressions, users, click-through to your links back to your resources or your website—then I think doing a first chat is a good way to benchmark that and to understand what that’s going to look like for your particular Twitter account or your agency. I mean it’s really going to be different for all of us, I mean this is very broad department that represents a lot of different groups. For our chats we’ve really been reaching out to a consumer audience, which is very broad, and so there are a lot of consumers on Twitter, so it’s fairly easy to get a large number of impressions. If you’re really targeting a narrow group of professionals or a niche trade area, you’re going to expect lower metrics, but that’s okay because you’re reaching a hard-to-reach audience through Twitter, so it’s really kind of balancing those priorities and being realistic about what success is going to look like to you. And I would encourage people not to compare themselves to other agencies [Break in audio] —10 million impressions for their chat, we only had 3 million. Why is that different? Is it your topic area, or is it the size of the audience you’re trying to reach, and just be reasonable about that. And someone actually once asked me what would happen if your Twitter chat failed. And I thought that was an interesting question because when we were doing our first chat that was definitely something that I was thinking about and worried about, but one of the things that’s really nice about Twitter is that it’s a very forgiving medium, and really I think the only way that you can “fail” is if you are unable to reach your audience or unable to get a crowd to notice what you’re talking about and engage with you. And that in and of itself can be an opportunity for lessons learned that you can implement in a second attempt. But one of the nice things is that this is a fairly low-risk engagement. You’re not up on a stage tripping in front of people who are staring at you. If no one is paying attention to your chats, then no one is really cognizant of the fact that you have “failed.” So even though there is always a potential there for lessons learned and for room to grow, I think that this is a very nice forum for some experimentation and for learning about your audience and about your outreach and what you can do better and growing from there. So I’ll turn it over to Amy. MS. HELDMAN: Yeah, and this is Amy from CDC. I agree with everything that Anne said a hundred percent, and the only other thing that I would add is that one of the things that we found helpful in assessing whether or not we were successful is to talk to our internal participants—so other people from the program, subject matter experts, health com people, etc.—to get their input on how the event went and what worked and what didn’t. And I’m glad that we asked because sometimes we thought the chat was amazing and the program didn’t think so, so it was just like a nice way to get their feedback and see that different groups have different measures of success. So, helpful inputs… MS. LIER: And this is Silje. I would just add that, at ODPHP, we would consider Twitter chat successful if the conversation continues beyond the Twitter chat. As we noticed after our first health literacy chat, people kept talking and using the hashtag after the kind of formal conclusion from our moderator, and that was one of the goals of our chat: to raise awareness during Health Literacy Month. And so, I mean, it depends on your goals, but that’s something that we’ve found as a great result from our chat. MS. HAMBLETON: And I have one question, a follow-up to Anne’s response. It says, it seems like one metric is how far your key message is retweeted. Is that what you mean, Anne, by impressions? MS. RANCOURT: Yeah, I think that that’s definitely a great metric, what you said about the reach of your key message, especially if there’s one point that you want to hammer home, like if you have a newsworthy event and that’s why you’re holding the chat and you just, you really want to get out the main thrust of an argument or a finding or a new release. Absolutely. In terms of impressions, what I‘m specifically talking about is one of the metrics that we calculate using our tools after the chat, which is looking at the number of people who have the potential to have been exposed to your messaging, so it’s basically a calculation of how far your messagings have gotten looking at the followers of everyone who has tweeted in the chat. And so it’s a real aggregate number that is larger than the actuality of the number of people who probably literally, actually saw your message. But it’s sort of an apples-to-apples comparison to some more traditional types of media and also is a consistent measure that lets you compare chats to each other. So it’s a metric that I think should be taken with a grain of salt, but it can be useful in showing growth and benchmarking. MS. HAMBLETON: Thanks. We’ve talked a little bit about metrics now and a little bit about tools also, but do you have anything to add on what your preferred tools are for analyzing the data after the Twitter chats specifically? MS. LIER: Yeah, this is Silje. I have two tools that I haven‘t mentioned yet. They’re both web-based programs that track hashtags and produce reports for you. One is RowFeeder, which you can check out at rowfeeder.com, and other is the Archivist. And I’d be happy to chat about those offline if anyone’s interested. MS. HELDMAN: And this is Amy—sorry, I was writing that down Silje, thank you. I just want to reiterate we use Radian6, I feel like it answers a lot of the questions that we have post-chat that we get from different groups at CDC. MS. RANCOURT: And for us just HootSuite and TweetReach and now Storify, which we’re excited to use more. The way that were using that—and just so everybody knows, Storify is the service that allows you to compile the text of your Twitter chat along with any tweeted photos or videos or multimedia aspects, into one website where the chat can sort of live for eternity, so you don’t have to do a search on Twitter to try to dig it up two months later. And so what we’re doing with that is when we’ve done chats on blood pressure and we have this nice archive of a discussion that lives on Storify.com, we can link that on our website on pages that talk about blood pressure, so that we’re offering a little bit of a different option for a user who comes to our site who wants to learn about topic. MS. HAMBLETON: Great. And we’re coming up close to the end of our time. We do have one more question for the panelists and then if anybody else in the audience has any questions, please submit them in the question box. If you have any experience that you want to chime in on, raise your hands in the webinar panel or chat to me, privately, and I can un-mute you. So for our last question, panelists, what are some of your top takeaways and lessons learned from your experience with Twitter chats that you would give as must-remember points for our audience? MS. HELDMAN: This is Amy. I’ll just—I have a lot, but I’ll just sum up with the one I was talking to my colleagues at CDC about this webinar and getting their input. The one that I was told to put at the top is: be comfortable with chaos. All this preparation that we’ve talked about, still you need to be ready to nimbly adjust to meet the needs of your audience during the chat, so where the chat goes, you must go. And I think that’s really key in helping you pick the right people to help you with the chats, too, because some people are just naturally more comfortable in a chaotic environment. So that is the one thing that I wanted to get across. And I’ll turn it over to Anne and Silje. MS. RANCOURT: This is Anne. I think that’s a great one. I think for ours, we have really attributed a lot of our success to our partners that we’ve been able to work with on our chats. And one of the things that I’ve found to be really fun and rewarding during the process of building those partnerships and reaching out is thinking broadly about who within the HHS family, who within the federal family, shares a similar mission to you and where there’s some overlap, and reaching out to those folks and kind of building a relationship through a Twitter chat and offering content that you can both use to accomplish your respective missions. One example of this that I really enjoyed was for our sleep chat. At NIH we don’t work with the Human Services side of HHS all that much, but we were going to have to chat where we were going to talk about sleep tips and sleep hygiene and the public health importance of sleep. So we were thinking broadly about who at the department might be interested in that information, and I know that Head Start has a Twitter feed where they offer information for parents and caregivers, and certainly sleep as it relates to child health is a very important part of that. So we reached out to them and they participated in our chat, and it was a really nice collaboration across the department, and it’s a nice relationship to build as well. I think that in our role as communicators that’s something that’s really important, that we don’t always nurture those relationships and reach out to folks, and so Twitter chats are sort of a nice occasion, I think, to do some relationship building, so that’s been a really nice part of our effort. MS. LIER: Great. And this is Silje. For the sake of time I’ll just pull out three of our top lessons learned. One is to definitely retweet from a good sampling of your chat participants. It shows that you’re listening, you’re involving others, and it also helps to communicate common ground and shared opinions among the community. We’d also recommend that you anticipate questions that you might get. Consider potential questions and then prepare tweets in advance and add them to your script. And third, we would also recommend that you engage online influencers to further promote the chat by tapping into people with relevant networks who can then engage their followers in that chat’s topic. MS. HAMBLETON: Thanks. And I just want to reemphasize on what Anne had said about connecting with folks across HHS. The Center for New Media has a database with all of the social media accounts across HHS, including the Twitter accounts, so you can definitely browse that. In the back end of our database we actually have a point of contact for each of those accounts, so if you’re interested in connecting with someone that manages a specific Twitter account, you can get in touch with us at the Center for New Media, tell us what accounts you want to connect with, and we can connect you with the person who manages that account or POC that can connect you with the team, so that’s one way that you can get involve with others. I want to thank all of my panelists. I have a couple questions. One of the questions is how do you choose an effective hashtag for your Twitter chats? MS. LIER: Hi, this is Silje from ODPHP. You can actually find health-related hashtags that are currently being used at the Healthcare Hashtag Project, and the project lists an up-to-date calendar of current health-related Twitter chats and conferences. That is at—I can send out the link after this webinar. There’s also a few sites—I think “What The Hashtag”? And then you can just do a simple search on Twitter of hashtags that you are interested in. If it’s something that occurs every year like the National Health Observance, you might want to consider adding the year to that and making it somehow unique to your chat. MS. RANCOURT: This is Anne. Just to add to that, I would just say keep it as short as possible. Especially when you’re chatting, you’re going to have some complex answers that you‘re trying to communicate in 140 characters and so the shorter your mandatory hashtag is, the better. And also just doing a search on Twitter to make sure that whatever you choose hasn’t already been chosen by something that you wouldn’t want to be associated with or something where there is a brand conflict. When we were doing our blood pressure chat, we chose #BPC initially and found that it was like a Boston pizza company or something that tweets everyday about it, so just doing a quick check is helpful. MS. HELDMAN: This is Amy. I agree with all those points. MS. HAMBLETON: Great. I have one more question and it’s slightly unrelated, but I’m going to throw it out to the panel anyway. Would you recommend setting up a unique Twitter account if you want to specifically use Twitter to engage people related to a two-day workshop, or would you use an existing account? MS. HELDMAN: This is Amy. I would say leverage existing accounts if you can, because you can take advantage of the fact that they already probably have more followers than you have. I don’t really think, depending on how Twitter works at your agency, I don’t really think it would be necessary to set up another one if you can basically piggyback off of someone else. MS. RANCOURT: Yeah, this is Anne. I agree with that wholeheartedly. And just another plug for partnerships: If there’s a two-day conference on a particular topic area, that’s a great occasion to look across the department or across the government or even to non-profits or the private sector and figure who else is going to be tweeting about that, and offer them content, reach out to them, align your efforts. Retweet them, ask them to retweet you, and just get greater exposure by working with others, because we’re all trying to fill content space on Twitter and looking for stuff to post every day, so people are often just very receptive to that. MS. HAMBLETON: Great. Thank you again to our panelists. I learned a lot as well, and I hope all of the audience learned a lot. We will be following up the webinar. Like I said, we recorded the webinar and we will have a transcript. I will send out the links to some of the resources that our panelists mentioned, and I know that they kind of chose their top nuggets for their lessons learned and takeaways, but I’m hoping to capture the ones that they weren’t able to share due to time, and we will share them with the LISTSERV as well. We are looking to get a better handle on who across HHS is doing Twitter chats so that we can help each other out, and learn from each other. So look forward to more information coming through on how we can connect related to Twitter chats. And if there are no other questions, I’ll give one final thanks to our panelists and thanks to our audience for joining us today. MS. RANCOURT: Thank you for the opportunity. MS. HELDMAN: Yeah, thank you everyone. Good luck. MS. LIER: Thank you. MS. HAMBLETON: Bye everyone. Have a great afternoon. [END RECORDING]