Webinar: Building a Business Case for Social Media

Date: August 24, 2011
Speaker:
Jonathan Cho (NCI/NIH) - discussing how to a business case for social media, how your organization and audience play a role in the process, and how to develop a plan. He shares his own experiences from his work at NCI.
Download Slides (PDF) Please review our exit disclaimer
If you have questions regarding this webinar or the HHS Center for New Media Webinar series, email newmedia@hhs.gov.
Transcript

Hello all. This is Kathryn. I am joined by Nick Garlow and Jonathan is on the line. We're going to give folks a minute or two to get online, and we're getting set up here. We'll be starting in a few minutes. I'm going to put you folks on mute for now.  You're already on mute. Never mind. If you have questions or problems, please type them into the questions box in your go to webinar control panel.  We're just experiencing technical difficulties right now, we'll be starting very soon. Hang tight. Thanks.  Hi, this is Catherine. I think we're ready to get started now. Hopefully everyone can see the screen. Jonathan, can you see the screen as well?  Yes, I can.  Great. And so everyone, welcome to the new media series. We have Jonathan with us and he's going to give us a brief intro, something about his background system. And I am going to turn over the controls to Jonathan and let him get started.  All right, well, hello, everyone and welcome to the presentation. Today, I have been asked about how to build a business case against real media and I will speak about samples about how we try to do it here at the cancer institute. It's building a case for the social media and the focus is as all, and most things, dealing with organizations as people, the process, and technology. And with that said, I will go to the next slide here. Great. Okay. I am -- my role here at the national cancer institute is I am the chief of the humanications technology branch. What we do is we see a number of things, but primarily web and new media activities but digital strategy in general. We oversee capser -- of espanol and the content web enterprise system and systems, rather, that oversee that, mobile web strategy design development where we're generally close, probably a few months away of launching cancer.gov. Design of mobile media NCI channels, facebook, twitter, Youtube and linked in as well and a number of custom types as well, using either name or -- and word process. And we also do new media products, including video and we do the creative development production and the multimedia designs as well. We also manage the intranet, which includes my NCI and other sharepoint types of enteral collaboration types of sites, et cetera. Contents indication. We partnership with others that are overseas partnerships with other organizations in terms of how we syndicate and cross and share our content and we also spearhead the web and new media policies on behalf of the National Cancer Institute as well when it comes to standards and best practices for web and now media and R&D, research development, now and emerging platforms and development in general. We development things as the risk assessment tools that are -- we work with program officers who oversee melanoma risks or colorectal cancer ridiculous and try to development -- cancer risks and try to develop online tools and we happen to do web hosting and management for NCI. Not all of it but that that is a shared responsibility between us and the CIOs office and CIT and NIH and so on, and we do host in our www.cancer.gov on the third floor of Execute of Boulevard and that is literally right down the hall and that is down the hall and basically in a large nutshell, that is the scope of work and tries to support. Okay, with that I will go into why social media? 's few years ago, when he first started in this job, we really weren't doing any social media and I think a lost organizations were getting used to that and to the idea that social media is something that is up and coming, something we should do. And for some reason, my slide is not -- my slide is not moving again. So, in terms of social media, what I'm going to try to cover is what is it, why is it important and hopefully that is bask and that most people on the call do understand, you know, how do you understand your audiences? It's ultimately about your audiences -- audiences. How do you get your leadership involved so there is executives and from a budgeting perspective that when resources and investments are necessary, you don't run into too many obstacles and how do you get your organization involved. The various functional groups across your organization at that number one should be involved who need to be involved  and more than likely, they want to be involved  and how do you do that in and how do you identify the teams who will essentially coordinate and manage your organization's social media activities, and how do you choose your trolls? And -- tools. You notice I put tools last. That is the last thing you should be considering. Because there is a lot of other things you need to think about first. So web, new media, social media at NCI I will cover that at the end just a little bit, okay. And so how do we define social media? Well, the definition of social media is really, has really changed a lot. I first started giving this type of participation about a couple of years ago and the destination has evolve sped changed and I am directly from Wikipedia. Why not use a social platform to really, for us and how we define and understand things collectively and I think Wikipedia is a great example how we as a society understand things collectively together. Currently in Wikipedia, it might be outdated, too, but seems to be okay. The social media and use of web-base and mogul -- mobile technology, interactive dialogue, so on, so on, so on and it makes sense if you think about it and so on, but it's not the easiest to convey in an elevator and when you're talking to your executives or supervisors, a definition that works much better and that people can talk around is the social media general and that is a term used to describe many and facilitates most importantly, conversations and enter actions between people online and -- interactions from people online. You need to focus on value and having conversations and interactions between the organization and the audiences and stakeholders that you serve, then probably some value doing that. Hopefully that is the heart of as to why you want to engage in social media so that you can have the conversations and interactions in a more meaningful way with your audiences and stakeholders online. And a question I often get is what is new media? And what is the difference between social media and now media? You in media is not that now and that is generally a term meant -- the emergence of network communication technologies in general, and it's a hundred-year-old concept that has been around some time. Some of what is predicted tease what we called, what they were referring to as new media, the technology has involved on e involved to a point where it's able to meet some of the promises that new media therests were first talking about, you know, a couple of generations ago. But one of the promises of new media, there would be a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device as well as our interactive user feedback, a communation formation around the media content and that kind of touches upon social media as well there and the other thing, there would be a demockra itselfization of consump hip of -- consumption of media content. If you read into what new media is, you can see there is some aspects of social media people are thinking about a very log time ago, and now the technology has actually evolved to a point where these things are real. These things are really possible. And I want everyone to understand that social media and new media are not interchangeable terms. Social media is simply an aspect of new media in general. Okay. That is one thing I like to clear up with people. Social media, no matter what, just keep in mind s about conversations and interactions between people online. Let's not forget that. Why should we care and how do you, you know, explain to anyone else within your organization as to why they should care? Well, there are many reasons why we should care. Some of you might be familiar with a lot of statistics that are growing and growing. As of January, I could probably update some and as of January, facebook surpassed 600 billion users. Really, the most amazing thing, half of users log in once a day and twitter is estimated to have approximately 175 million users and with some supports over 95 and 100 million tweets a day and there is an important aspect with the tools and technology available today, that is easily accessible by mobile devices which, is a growing trend and how people prefer to access online resources and social networks in particular and if you look at facebook, for an example, facebook a own has over 200 million mobile users and that works out allot in terms of getting the users. Social media can be a powerful organizing tools, everyone got a taste of that during the 2008 presidential elects, what happened in Egypt and it wasn't surprising to me that the protestors, you know, actually used social mediaitols to organize and what was surprising was when everything really hit the fan, spoke, even the then Prime Minister resigned not on CNN or Al-Jazeera or traditional outlets but in facebook and that was incredible. Social media overtook pornography as the number one activity on the web. It happened and happened a couple of years ago. So, what that says, well, tells me is thank goods, thank goodness we care about interacting more with each other at a social level than just about anything else. Okay. And there are wrecks and -- risks and everyone is aware of them. You have some fuels and this is a quick example of, of course, as soon as you empower employees to kind of represent you and empower them on the social media tool and -- social media tool and you don't necessarily want to go by role. And really, you know, some people kind of do it themselves and, unfortunately, so there are a lot of risks. There are some inherent risks and some risks that people haven't even, you know, experienced yet. We'll probably hear about it in the news at some point. Keep in mind, there are a lot more risks. The supervisors and executives and people in charge who look at it as a level, they tend to focus on the risks a little too much and I think it's our job to remind them of the benefits instead. And the benefits of using social media, the list can go on and on and on and I will just list a few of them here. You can establish a brand to raise awareness, something pretty obvious. You can observe and learn from other organizations. Now, you know, in this profit sector they call it corporate spying and in the fig, it's about -- Federal Government, it's about learning from each other. We can also share product services in a more human and interactive way. We can bring tag to our, the service -- attention to the services, the ideas you have, the stories that you untell and you can really use the stool tools to recruit talent, inspire the next generation or inspire the current, you know, workforce to perhaps join your organization and add skills that you don't have now. You're building relationships which instantly increasing loyalty and trust among your audiences and your stakeholders. You have an opportunity to listen and not just listen but respond to your community's opinions and their, they're frustrated, whatever it is and that is a great way to conduct low-level and in some cases as you get O&M research, you can conduct market research using the tools. Use strength in customer service overall, as long as you manage the platforms properly and are response testify your inquiries and posts that you get. Really overall, building a sense of community and to tofoster communication, collaboration and long-term relationships, okay? And deeper relationships, leave all. So, from a business case perspective, I know a lot of people, a lot of organizations invest in Google, invest in how their search engine optimization or how they are found on Google or how -- whatever it might be, related to search or any other, you know, app or tool. Let's look at facebook and Google. The trends seem to point to social media, you know, the visits to facebook has surpaced and that is basically since last -- surpassed and that is basicallience is last year and they trade spaces, back and forth. More importantly, you look at the time spend on these sites and this is -- and about a year old now. The time spent on facebook, if you look at it, facebook as come a long -- has come a long way and quickly at that and another consideration, there is still a million mobile facebook users already and you have to ask yourself as an organization, if you're investing in Google or search engine Yahoo! and being found and being seen on any other platform, why are you not investing in Facebook? Doesn't make sense to invest in Facebook or any other social media platform. These are business decisions that need to be made and ultimately made by your executives and supervisors that control the resources and that is some information they should have to make a quick decision and what are you prepared to do? You might be different in terms of, you know, where you are from a social media perspective, and you might be starting and might be thinking about it and you might be deep in the middle of it and no matter where youia, you're probably having challenges, whether it's organizational or money, staff and culture. That is a big one. What is the best way to start if you haven't started yet? I all start with people. I think people is the key to your success, warm I -- one way or another. The appropriate people to be working with and the ones that you haven't thought about yet, believe it or not, they probably want to at least be informed or be involved in some way. That is at least within the organization. But, of about you start engageing them, what do you need to see? You need to understand your audiences. Who are you trying to engage across the social media platforms. Identify the need and, you know, are there parts, healthcare professionals, researchers, you know, others and once you identified the audience, audiences and the need, then you can begin getting your leadership involved. You start talking to your leadership and there is this need and, you know, whoever it might be, but you have to get them involved early, as soon as possible so that because authority and sponsorship has to be defined  and this can't be a side road of activity and now won't you to support it. It's not going to happen what is it that your teens within your organization, what are they doing currently? Liver aing systems, as an example for us, the national cancer institute, we have a team dedicated to public increase, you know, people who responded to e-mails or letters and so on and phone calls even from the public, the general public and this is a teen who had that experience and what a great opportunity to leverage that to use the new social media tools to deepy thep gamement with the public in general and they will enter mittently be involved  and will use the platforms as necessary and there has to be a core team within your organization and that mean you. Try to make it a formal responsibility as much as possible. Try to incorporate it if you're a federal staff member or not but turning incorporated into your performance plan, making a part of it and anyone who is -- to make sure that it's a part of their official duties. I think that certainly goes a long way in terms of process, there are many approaches for organizations and in terms of how to use social media. Forrester has a popular methodology, the post methodology among them. There are others and ultimately it comes down to some back things, you know, that I touched upon briefly and who do you want to reach? What do you want to accomplish? And how was your social media support and enhance the existing strategy? A lot of people forget about this one because a lot of people forget to reach out to people who are thinking about these things and now media and how to get your organization to embrace the strategy and getting the leadership and existing teams and organizations and being transparent as to what you're trying to do and what you want and how others can contribute to the rotor. And that is a team effort, ultimately and there are other ways. There is caps to worry about. Who is going to implement the strategy? Can you implement the staff time and ongoing resources, these are things you need to work out with the leadership. Before they can answer, that you need to have a clear understanding as to, you know, how many, how much time are we talking about? What level of engagement are we talking about and that is -- and then you still have to understand the audiences and what tools they're using and which best supports the audience and finally measurement. You don't want to do all of this stuff and nothing and you want to measure along the way. What are you measuring? There is quantitive measures for how organizations use social media and there is more qualitative types of measures and that depends on, as an organization, how do you define success? What is the success metrics we need to define so what you're measuring, you're measuring your success and not necessarily just what you're doing. And if you're measuring for your success, the future evaluation of your activities and so on and the executives who need to continue to -- need ton the success metrics defined early have met and how will you manage this? Clearly defines how social media engagements love to be managed. That is not what you want to do. Okay, you don't want it to be so complicated that people can't really even follow the process. It should be simple and straight forward and it should be a governance structure in place to this and in place to manage this. That is very straight-forward, and clear lines of authority. There is issues and escalations that will come up and people need ton when something escalates, what they need to do with that and if something does come up, someone is cryptizing you and the organization on the platforms, how do you am that and whoever doesed ins to chime in, the program specialist or expert and needs to know that they need to and what clearance process should you abide by and talk to your clearance, you know, talk to anyone within the organization at team, there is probably a team or person who makes sure that the content and the things that you present as an organization is approved and cleared. How will you engage others within the organization? Coordinate or social media activities holistically. This is very, very important. I say when in doubt, reach out to your existing communications and web team to see what they're doing already. They can really help you, believe it or not, their knee-jerk reaction will not be to say you can't do that and what they want to do is make sure you're in line with the leave all larger organizational strategies that might be in place. So in other words, you know, that goes to how you make sure that everyone is consistently on point. All right. But in terms of process, it ultimately comes down to governance. I think a lot of people think it's a complicated process you some that they have to define. It comes out to a few bask things and not as a -- basic things and not as a cult. The roles are clearly defined  and once they are defined, do the people know what roles they play? And once they know what roll they're -- role they're supposed to play, first to nothing, do they know how to put forth their roles so governance is about making sure all of those pieces fit together. No matter what, structure you put in place, whether it's a board or a couple or web team, what Jeff, it's ultimately about people and the processes that they agreed to follow, and governance is as simple as that and social media must be governed. Do not let it be a some type of standalone activity. That is the one of the think this you can do and more than likely, yet will fail. So, you get started, think of a pilot. What can you implement first as a pilot? Your executives and your supervisors and the people who control the resources typically, they will be much more comfortable when you present things as a pilot first. Let's just try this first. So, think of where your greatest needs may be and so what you can tackle in terms of addressing that need by using some of the social media tools but in the, you know, in the goys of -- guise of the pilot first, with clearly defined metrics and so on. Now, after you have kind of gotten all of this by in an organization, then I think we can look at the technology and there is so many different technologies to choose from, and it's constantly, constantly changing and whether that is talk about blogs, microblogs, social networks, professional networks. Whatever it might be. Things like social shopping as an example. And it was not on the radar a couple of years ago. Itols come and go and keep naming -- changing and evolving and want greating or just working against each other or for each other. And so, social, the tools themselves don't get too hung up on it. But when you are, it's ready, you know, you can look at all of the stuff that is out there and it's growing and growing. If you don't like the list, you know, you can have a picture of it instead. There are a lot of choices. Okay. And you can get lost in here and people have done all keeps of analysis, researchers, social media experts, they have done all kinds of, you know, analysis as to what types of platforms are appropriate for doing different kinds of things, whether for sharing or discussing or blogging and so on and a lot of really smart people looked at it from different angles and different cultures have even picked it up and doing the different languages and I am sure we can find one for Farci, I can probably find one for Spanish and so on. Everyone is struggling with whatitols are appropriate, and they're struggling because they get lost in the sea of information. This was a graphic that was going around a couple of weeks ago and around the blogo sphere and twitter and so on. It just captures why, I think, for me, people get so lost in the technology because, you know, in such a short period of time, all of these amazing things happen across all of the different platforms. Shouldn't we be on all of them and so sa? Is that the knee-jerk type of reaction a lot of people have. I would say no. Don't get caught up in that. Don't get caught up in the shiny new tool or that everyone else is using that and we should be using it, too.  And you are in drowning and that information and you will come to a point where you can't make the decision about what tool to use. What it comes down to for technology is to select the tool that makes the most sense. How do you determine that? One is for the audiences. What are they using? That is the first thing they're looking at. Is it for public or internal -- make the destines and and in the tool will kind of identify itself in terms of what is appropriate for what. The objectives that you define and based on the the metrics. There are different tools that perform different things. Make sure whatever it performs or does, it's in line with the objectives you're trying to accomplish and has to satisfy a need. Where is there, you know, for lack of a better word, pain. If you're not using the tools to actually resolve a problem or a need somewhere, then you are going to get a lot more questions down the line. Do we need to do this? Is this worth it if&so on? If people see like there is a real need that a particular tool is being used to need them and you going have a lot easier time in managing the social activities. Choose the tool that makes most sense and brings mutual -- to your organization and audiences. It can't be for something that is easy for us to use and let's make sure that the audiences get on it. That is not the way it should be it brings other value beyond what you're trying to do with it for the audiences and so, always -- with the audience first and what they're using and the valley to then. You have to be realistic about the capacity that you have and the expertise that you have and if you don't have that expert ease in-house, what resources are you able to bring in, whether that is contracted or just from a consulting perspective what have we been doing at NCI? We're using a lot of different tools. As we have our primary website, which went through a somewhat of a facelift, the past year. And what we did is we, we tried to incorporate all of our social media channels, our production ones right now and the public-facing ones. And just out on our home page and many other areas throughout the site. We do have a number of twitter accounts that are growing, they're all each managed by a separate team and a unique community manager. We have Youtube, I mean Facebook pages as well, everyone is probably familiar with the smoke-free activities and we have the official NCI channel as well and also some media relations has a separate facebook page. They have a unique audience and they're trying to message to the press. And we have our NCI on Youtube and our Youtube channel is unique. It's not a single channel. It's a network and we refer to it as our NCE Youtube network. It's -- NCI Youtube network. It's a number of channels into a network and you can access any one of those channels separately. What we do, we try to make sure all of our channels, so when our audiences go to our web page and then they go to Twitter, one of the Twitter pages or Facebook page, there is a cold fronty to the look and feel -- consistency to the look and feel and the conveyance of NCIs brand to whichever audience is coming to us and that applies to all of our of course, twitter and if you look at the Youtube chapel, the channel has got another facelift not too long ago, so if you look at it now, it's different than what you're seeing on the screen now. What we did is we need the navigation of our Youtube network basically almost exactly the same as the navigation on our cancer.gov web page. So that our thinking wassing you know, when users go to learn a certain navigation to our web page, cancer.gov, they shouldn't have to learn a whole now way of navigating the contents because they're on a different platform. We try to replicate the navigational top structure across on our Youtube app as well. And so that is just the highlight of some of the different Portals we have and subchannels win our network and each subchannel has its own unique content, different types of videos and so on. We have a wide rage of video content, so we cover everything from patient stories to researchers stories and to covering, of course, our director him and the -- he's involved in and we cover speck program areas as -- specific program areas as well. We have a production team that goes out with the program officers and in particular, if anyone on the call has a chance, you know, visit our Youtube chapel and take a look at the particular video that is targeting in ouro blastoma, and -- ne, roblastoma, one of the first videos we did from beginning to end and our video production resource team is fairly new, even with this team. So, what are we doing here? Our facebook page, we have it and that has been evolving and is very active. We get all kinds of questions and we use it as a channel that we can share and NCI information and what we do. Really more importantly, it's a page where our audiences, they really share some of their most personal life-changing altering things on this type of package and that deserves a human response. Remember, it's about cover sayings and interactions between people on line. What we do is get increased like this, we will get questions like this and comments posted on our page and we try to use it as a teaching moment and beyond that, as a moment where we can, as one, you know, human being to another, convey that we do understand. And that we even as an organization, we exist because of this and all of us are passionate about it and thank you for reaching out to us and this is everything that we have that we can hopefully try to help you through the journey, whether it's you as a cancer patient or loved one or family member or caretaker. You're all familiar with some of, you know, the smokefree.gov activities, we hope you find the station and not working with our tobacco group and they do an amazing job. Eric Augustine and his teen prevent and they do an amazing job in managing this particular community. And it's really been our pleasure to support them in any way we can. But what you will see is even though there is a unique look and feel to the smoke-free women, I think there is what we try to do is convey a silver lining, you know, a cold fronty to the NCI organization and brand of -- as a whole. And the interactions that take place on whether it's their facebook page or their Twitter, it's really remarkable to see, and I love it because this particular group really showed me that this their is rarely a time when it's a bad idea to say you go girl. And -- with the audience, the particular audiences and they're trying to reach out to and to deliver a necessary service. So, at NCI, we do custom networking sites and have some sites and we use word press to develop blog did our internal sites using word processing -- wordpress and we use Truple as another platform and pretty relatively easy to use and doesn't look like too much technical expertise to manage them. And those are quick examples of built-in using them. And so, the digital evolution at NCI has, you know, come a long way and this is a snapshot of our home page from, I believe, almost 10 years ago, and then we have the red banner type of home page and at the web page one way or another, was a simplex communication model and we're hoping and praying that our audiences out there would seek and find the answers, you know, to the questions that they have. Whereas now, with next -- hello. Okay, here we go and we always had our 1-800-4-cancer service. And that is a due flex organization where the user can use questions and pose problems and we can provide the solutions and other insights necessary. What we have now with the current technologies and social media anding else, you know, and these should be two-way arrows here and that would be more of an actor representation of where we are now and talk about the multiplex commonications and you can share knowledge andp game issues and have multiple conversations as once and these tools allowed us to do that here at NCI and to you our 1-800-4-cancer service, we will -- our call papers, our agents feel over 20,000, you know, contacts per month, whether that is through live chat or a phone call or even e-mail and now they're able to use some of these other social media tools to have a much deeper engagement with the audience and have multiple conversations at the same time. Because it's all about the conversation and the stories. The stories that you want to tell, the stories that your audience wants to tell you and in those stories and in the conversations around the stories is where your relationships will be made and why where your long-term loyalty and positive perception of your organization will be established and so these are just some examples of the types of engagement and the teen of interaction that I love to see on our channels and here is a woman who did quit smoking and she's so incredibly happy about that and, of course, the smoke free team with the the trademark, you go girl and that is important to establish the relationship and to continue to build upon it and for us, you up, we deal with sensitive things and sometimes, you, from a human-to-human type of thing, you can't lose that. Organizations have a tendency to be leavely careful or sterile in their responses and you don't want to do that. Your audiences have to know there is a real caring human being on the other side and no matter what type of conversation you're doing. That is what we're doing at NCI and that is my presentation and I can open it up to presentations, if there are any.  We have a couple of questions.  Okay.  I didn't hear this.  And this is cath lip again. Looks look we have a couple of questions. The first is will this presentation be available for download. The answer to that one is yes. Can I answer that one.  Okay.  And the second one for you is do the civil service staff monitor the facebook pam at work or does the contractor? How would you go about getting access? I see.  And at NCI, we are banned, actually, from using facebook and when I, there was great momentum and great desire to establish on faceo book. We have a copup drum and how do we ask staff to work from home and so on. The first think this I would recommend to any organization is that has access issues is to talk to your visor or anyone who has the authority or the -- and the desire or who is at least some type of peer level with your senior security officer, your ISSO, okay, and just sit down and talk to that person. What I realized after I started was I asked a simple question, well, did anyone talk to the security officer about this and everyone saidee in, this is just policy. This is policy that is handed down and applies to everyone. Well, no, actually, any ISSO has some level of flexibility, okay. Believe yet or in the, the security people, they are the good ones, at least, they want to support and facilitate your business and your program. So, just set down with the senior security officer, what I did and I sat down with our ISSO Bruce and planned to them. Our audience is asking them to do this, there is an executive desire for us to do this as well, and we have the appropriate teams and people who want to do it, so we need your help to help figure out what is that level of access they can provide. Over the next few months, we were able to work with the IP shop to gain access for everyone that was part of the communications office at NCI and that is almost 150 some-odd people, which would include on-site contractors and everyone else, a significant number of people. And we were able to get every one of them access to facebook through a secure, through a secure channel. But the IP shops set up for us and there are ways, I believe Daniel Sames, the ISSO for NIH is very open and works with the different ICS and the different access they need and as long as there is a justified access, a business-related necessity to access the tools, they will work with you. My first thing is to set down with your senior security officer and get him on your side and get him to help you. And in terms of how we monitor these channels, I am very wary of any organization who puts the power of their organization social media channels into a contractor's hands or enter's hands. I -- interns hands. I think it's very dangerous. I do sincerely believe that you need to have a senior of a civil servant as possible to be overseeing each of these chapels. Any -- channel. Any channel that you set up an organization. There are liabilities and there are risks that come with using the channels and this. You're not careful and if you have a contractor or less experienced person who is not sincative to the organization -- sensitive to the organizational or political dynamics of the organization, you're going to get in trouble. You need to is a senior civil servant or any civil servant who can take charge and really be accountable for how each of the channels are managed. If you can use contracted resources, you can use interns and so on, but they need to be supervised  and they can not be the soul decision maker in terms of how escalations are handled, how negative feedback from your, you know, audience and so on are handled, so they can not have free reign, whether it's a contractor or intern or anyone else. It should be a senior civil servant. That is what I would recommend.  We have a couple of more questions come in. In the meantime, if anyone else has any questions, just a reminder, type them into your questions box in the go to meeting g to webinar control panel. The next question is do you have a social media communications plan that you can share? Ah. That's -- we have a plan that has actually come together simply through experience. So, I have -- it depends on the kind of plan you're talking about. What we do, what we do for each of our chapels is in up with a separate plan. So, because it's very hard -- you can set up a governance process that oversees your, the universe of your social media activities, but each chapel should have a -- chapel should have a -- channel should have a unique plan. Even when you look at twitter, I think it's very difficult and probably not realistic to have a single plan for all of your twitter channels. Most organizations will have multiple Twitter channels. I think what is important is that you lay out a framework for anyone who wants to tweet or anyone who wants to do a Facebook page win your organization, that you lay out the appropriate framework for the types of considerations, the types of questions that should ask themselves. Basically a check list and I would be happy to provide that because I think that is what would bring the most value. If someone said hey, I want to start a Twitter account, you know what? You should sit down with that person and go through a list of questions that would be relevant before you even say yes or maybe or whatever. And certainly of about you set up the channel. Yes. Yes.  Do you want to Sunday that to the listserv? I can do that. Sure. Really, if you think about, if you look at the presentation within the slide that you get some kind of inside types of questions. I do have a little more detailed list that I may just perhaps add on. Maybe I can sudden it to you or something and that is just a series of considerations and questions that you can ask and sit down with your peer or colleagues. If they want to do a Twitter or Facebook account, and go through the versions with them before you do anything.  And we have a couple more keys. And I know we're running short on time. We'll go to the questions and that. Why I you have a chance to hang on for the question, then we can -- we're recording the webinar and you can contact me for the rest. The next question is what metrics do you use to measure the success of your social media tools?  We use a tool, actually. For a long time, we struggled with this and owl of -- all of our social media tools were popping up left and rate and there is so much excitement about it and we did put a halt to things momentarily and said let's is the back and say, ask ourselves how are we going to measure and e value -- evaluata our use of cools and we set up the project where we wanted to look at what do we want to measure and ask ourselves, how do we define success on facebook. How do we define success on our twiner and we had some group meetings about that and help kind of flush out and make it more clear so were of's on the same page. One of the quantitative success metrics we have done that we want to measure. And once we define that, then we were able to look at, well, where is the universe of tools that are out there that is available to us see that we can do the appropriate analytics on all of our chapels and the tool that we chose and not that I own stock in this company or anything like that, was -- spread fast and I can share more information about that as well with you, Catherine, if you feel that will be helpful to share with the group.  Okay, great. And then next one is and these questions might be longer than we have time for, so if you want to follow up offline, and give an suddenner is for then, that, too.  Is any any predictions on Google plus?  Yes, I have actually, I have open say -- seen a number of people plussing and I have been on Google plus for a about the now and I'm impressed with it and I think in Terps of Kiegle -- Google. There are a number of things the platform needs to do better and to integrate better and that does it, there is some integration that you can do and where is they can the two it. Google plus has a platform, I think the circles are grabbing great and in one between and they're struggling with somewhat of the news feed noise and I think goggle has to work on that and with that hangout and livevo chatting, that is an excellent feature. Think the huddle feature is incredibly powerful. The only thing they're lacking is as soon as kmsent -- SMS integration and they can still receive the text messages and that is not happening and with Google plus, they need to work on some of the deficiencies and they will, they're getting a lot of feed back. I should have with the Google team and in terms of what I'm predicting for the future, I do think that Google plus will be evolve something fairly quickly and to address some of the issues that currently exist, but if you take into account Google as a company and in general, I think that they are supremely well-positioned for social, a social networking tool to take off. Now that they have maps and on top of that, they have all of the other apps that are verts of other things out there and whether that is four-square versus Google places, which is what you can't check in with that yet and there is -- and translate. They have a wealth of tools. If they simply integrate the tools, seemlessly into goggle plus. For example, if you get -- Google plus. If you get a post from another magic, why shouldn't Google automatically translate that for you. It's not as straight forward as it could be and I think that was Google's dominance of so much and information management in general, and with the stability of the Google platform as a whole and all the apps that they have and seems to run seemlessly on this platform. I think Google plus is going to do quite well and it's not going to leave take facebook, but I think that goggle plus will be used for other things and that is going to be a more appealing look to the professional crowds and people will continue to have the facebook accounts and may do Google plus for some of the other activities and they might be able to live side-by-side. If I had to pick one over the other, I think I would big goggle plus.  All right, one more -- Google plus.  And one more question. This is the last question.  Okay.  Can you discuss who are NCI asmany audiences and how you chose, how you use the social media channels to connect with the audiences? Oh, sure. Well, very quickly, in terms of the, if you look at the analytics reports that come out for cancer.gov itself, which is our central and primary repository of cancer research information and what is related to NCI, about 70% of the traffic that comes to cancer.gov and the people spend the most time on cancer.gov is patients and their friends and families. Okay, and they, one way or another, even though we are a research organization, our primary audience is the patients sense of family and we use -- it was logical for us to use facebook initially. There are a lot of other social networking tools we could have chosen and considering the heavy patients and families, our audience that is interested in our content, facebook made a lot of sense. That is what the audiences were using and we have a significant portion so the other 25 to 27%, depending on what month you're talking about of traffic, and so everyone knows the average traffic to cancer.gov is 2 1/2 million unique visitors per month and 25, gone % of them are healthcare professionals and that can be be nurses and any other type of healthcare provider, and for them, we are, you know, we are looking at other, twitter is much better for them and in Terps of it's more of a professional audience and so, reaching out to them through the various twitter chapels makes more -- channels makes more sense. We have newsletters, some of you might be familiar with the news letter and the cancer bulletin team,.  worked with them corporate social media into their newsletter, and see we try to use that as a platform to help the professionals. The audience group, and we're still struggling, is, believe it or in the, being a research organization s the researchers. So, we still have a will challenge and actually using any of our social media tools to work with researchers. And to collaborate with then, and it's at least on a public, in a, on a public matform. Internal-facing platforms, we seem to have more success and that is where we do build a customized like whether using Ming or word press or truple to build more closed commune as where I think researchers are comfortable in closed social met-- networking communities opposed to wide-open public ones. That is something we're realizing slowly and also, researchers in general, they don't necessarily seem to be generally the ones comfortable and really publicly sharing everything that they have. So, for research audiences, we're struggling to figure out what is the right approach, what is the right approach to the community management with researchers and for the bulk of our audiences, the patients and families, we have been fairly successful.  Jonathan? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.  Sorry, I said that is all the questions we have and thank you very much for your presenting a.  Oh, thank you. It was -- presentation.  Thank you, it was my pleasure.  If people have any questions, they can contact me directly and I can put them in touch with you.  Okay.  And directly, if that is all right. Your contact information is up there.  Yeah, and I put it up because, and I really am open to anyone just, you know, contacting me or visit any of our channels on the web. Go to our facebook and tweeter accounts and YouTube and let us know what you think. I definitely put a link there and --  A great job and what you and Reid have done, the extra trust, and I give you guys credit for that.  Thanks. And I definitely encourage anyone if you have questions, that the rest of the community can benefit from, sudden your questions to the listserv. It's a discussion listserv and what you were talking about.  Okay.  And the federal employees still, more comfortable discussing things and that is -- feel free to use it for everyone on the line.  Thank you very much, thanks for having me.  That's it. Thank you.  Okay. Bye-bye. [event concluded]
HHS New Media Webinar Series

View Past HHS New Media Webinars
	Follow @HHSNewMedia on Twitter
	Read our blog
	Get in the Loop
	Join the ListServe (HHS only)
	Subscribe to e-mail updates
Directories of HHS Accounts
	Facebook
	Twitter
	YouTube
	Blogs
	Flickr
	Podcasts
Webinar: Building a Business Case for Social Media

Transcript

HHS New Media Webinar Series

Stay Connected

Whooo is on?
