The latest version of "Keep Your Cell Phones On!" Social Media for Social Good - why people with disabilities need to be part of online communities and how we can make it happen
2. introductions
Aaron Johannes, Director, Spectrum Consulting
Email: aaron@spectrumsociety.org
Website: www.spectrumsociety.org
Facebook: search “spectrum society”
Blog: www.imagineacircle.com
Twitter: @imagineacircle
Hashtag: #imagineacircle
•#101friendsBC
Douglas Tennant, Executive Director, Semiahmoo House Society
Email: d.tennant@shsbc.ca
Website: www.semi-house-society.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SemiahmooHouseSociety
Blog: www.paradigmswivel.com
Twitter: @DouglasRTennant
Early drafts of this presentation were done by Jules Andre Brown and myself.
4. QUESTIONS? Our first workshop parking
lot(s) had 5 pages of questions!
• Who are you? What
might be a question
you wonder about? Do
you have a goal for
today?
5. Learning Objectives
Learn why social media matters to marginalised people and
those who support them
Identify various kinds of social media and the strengths and
capacities of each, and how multi-platform tools like
Hootsuite can help us get our message out.
Think together about how individuals can interact to deliver
messages about themselves, the groups they are part of
and the causes they care about.
Internet safety
Create a basic media plan
For us as individuals
For us as part of organizations
As a social justice movement
20. What’s a #hashtag?
• In small groups:
• Decide on a message
you want to send out to
the world
• Create a hashtag you all
agree to use
• Where will you use it?
• How?
– Pacing
– Platforms
20
40. www.101friends.ca
blog / newsletter / links
Publications
and mission
- Books for
sale: social
enterprise
- We control this
conversation
Our messages:
-People with disabilities are
great citizens
-There is hope
-Research and information
is available
-Reflection is good
-People can make friends,
get jobs, have fun
41. www.101friends.ca
blog / newsletter / links
Publications
and mission
- Books for
sale: social
enterprise
- We control this
conversation
Our messages:
-They can and do write
books
-They can and do lead
-Staff need support too
-There are great agencies
out there
-Agencies can change
-We hope for partnership
49. Caveats:
it’s not really a popularity contest
• Do you have a budget for social media?
– NO
• Do you have someone with dedicated time to spend on
this?
– NO it’s off the side of our desks by interested people.
• Have you hired a firm to take on your social media?
– NO
• Are you trying to communicate with everyone
everywhere about everything? (Who are your peeps?)
– NO we only want to talk about individualised approaches
with people who want to talk about that.
64. Safety Plan for Org
• Track mentions of your
organization on hootsuite
or google search.
• Be clear about what’s
okay and not okay to post
– what’s the messaging
you want?
• Have clearly different
personal and professional
accounts (or never say
anything mean).
66. Safety Plans for People
• Think about the
safeguards that being
online brings
• Spend some time with
fun resources like the
quizz at
www.icanbesafeonline.c
om
Social Media Citizenship
“Please leave your cell phone on!”
Connected and Included: why it matters
Aaron Johannes
www.imagineacircle.com
www.101friends.ca
This is an example of a great article you might want to share
This is how you might share it
www.tweetlevels.com is an online site where you can see who is tweeting about what topics… this is important because we get to see how visible the folks we care about are. We have come to a place where it’s not at all odd to meet someone with a disability in public, or in a workplace, but are we having the same experience online? On the busiest day here more than 8000 people are tweeting something about “disability”
We can look at the word cloud to see what kinds of things they are saying…. The bigger the words, the more people are talking about it
At the bottom of the tweetlevels site we can see where the most popular conversations are happening – here, we see that most of the conversations are about disability benefits – they are reactive conversations. What people with disabilties tell us they want to talk about in our workshops are jobs, supports that work for them, equality, relationships and community… we can identify any of these by turning them into hashtags
Hardly anyone is talking about disability rights
Or employment
But about 6000 people a day are using the “R” word in tweets
And no one is talking about people first self advocacy. We can change this.
Our project blog is one of the ways that we use social media….
It gives people some concrete information about our products, our mission, our understanding of how people with disabilities might be supported, and it’s a conversation that we control and up out into the world -
We send out several messages
Our messages assume that these things are true, and we offer resources to support these ideas
Whenever we post something on our blog, others who agree with it or find it interesting re-post our blog articles…
14,650 views in 2014; predicted 20,000 views in 2015.
So our social media plan has the blog, which a program called mail chimp collects every month and sends out to subscribers (people can also subscribe just to the blog); the blog goes out to facebook, which goes to twitter, and presentations we do go up on slideshare, while our social enterprise site collects people from all of the above and sends them back again…
We are not just the receivers of information, but we can create it. www.noahsdad.com has quickly become a great site that is inspiring and full of good information. An interested aspect of it on facebook is the number of parents sharing photos of their (gorgeous) kids with disabiliites in ways they might not previously have been able to.
More good examples. Totally positive message; an invitation to participate; focused on what’s shared rather than differences / disabilities…
It lets those people take action. Communicating, clarifying, connecting are all ways to take action… from those actions can come a landslide of action
Social media can be a great staff training tool. At it’s simplest, it’s using twitter and facebook to keep staff informed and up to date. At it’s more complicated it’s the creation of and involvement in online training and education.
Say I decided I wanted a new job…
It has never been more important – or easier – to be connected. This is a “map” of aaron’s connections on linkedin.
People want to talk about safety, and we can make these talks fun and interesting. One of the best sites for online citizens with disabilities is I Can Be Safe Online, created and hosted by CLBC.
The Social Media part of your plan needs to be congruent with everything else you’re doing. This is a really quick, down and dirty mind map that looks at how social media might be used within the organization, with community partners, with the folks we support and to engage staff. It’s just a few ideas to get started, out of which more conversations can come.