The Yahoo Social Accessibility Lab

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Social Accessibility

Monday, March 5, 2012
Yahoo! Social Accessibility

Nate Ebrahimoon
Social Media Manager
Yahoo! Accessibility


September 10th,
2010


The Yahoo! Accessibility Facebook page was born on September 10th, 2010.

September 10th,
2011


In one year we acquired 4,252 Fans.

March 1st, 2012

Today we have 5,599.

100% Organic


Best of all, we have gotten to be where we are today 100% organically. Without spending a penny on ads.

Sh*t Sighted People Say To Blind
People

YouTube


We attracted these users by offering them content within the ﬁeld of accessibility that they are not used to
seeing.
Example: One of blog contributors, BFC, of mainstream, fun, entertaining, social content centered around
disability.


How do people
see accessibility
& disability?

How do WE
change the way
people see
accessibility &
disability?

How do people
see accessibility
& disability?

How do WE
change the way
people see
accessibility &
disability?
The answer to this question is they donʼt. The mainstream audience is not typically exposed to people with disabilities / accessibility.

Yahoo! Mail Accessibility Help Page
Before Y!A Social Media, external accessibility efforts from Yahoo! were found in Help Pages.
Help Pages: Serve the purpose of Communicating information about a speciﬁc products accessibility practices to users.
Therefore:
Help pages do not appeal to the mainstream (disabled and non disabled alike). Do not address all users with disabilities. Instead, only addresses users that
company focuses on.

How do people
see accessibility
& disability?

How do WE
change the way
people see
accessibility &
disability?

Question: How do WE change?
We:
" Go where our audience wants to be!
" Expose ourselves to the outside world because guess what? They donʼt know we exist.
" If our goal is to mainstream accessibility, then we need to go to the main stream.
"

Social Media!


3 social media channels Facebook, Twitter, and Blogging

Facebook
=
Conversation
conversations around content

Facebook Lingo


Facebook “Like Page”:

Fan club thatʼs hosted on Facebook.
Looks and feels just like a personal facebook page.
Except Facebook users choose to “like” a page and become a “fan” of a page as opposed to personal accounts where
users become “friends”
Owners of pages send updates to their fans, which shows up on the pages wall

The wall is your personal proﬁle space where any content you publish is shown.
The most used form of content within a wall is called a post or status update. A post can contain photos, videos, Polls, links, and/or text.

Fans have the option of interacting with the post. They can choose to:
“like” a post to communicate their support of the post content.
“comment” on a post to join the conversation around the post.
and/or “share” a post to spread the content to their social community.

Twitter
=
Information
Twitter is an information hub. Itʼs where you go to share content and ﬁnd up to minute news.

Tweet

Content begins with a Tweet:
A 140-character message sent to Twitter via phone, the web, or a third-party applications.
Tweet: Message you send out to your followers.
Mention: Mentions always begin with an “@” sign. The same “@” seen in email addressʼs. On twitter itʼs how you direct a Tweet to
another twitter user.
Hash Tag: Allows twitter users to group multiple tweets by keyword. Works well for events and groups.
Retweet: Think of this as forwarding an email. By Re-tweet you are sending a tweet by another user to your social community.

Blog
=
Exclusive Content

Have your own voice. Determine a vision and publish content that ﬁts within vision. Permanent vs. temp. Leverage social
streams to promote blog content. Blogging is the closest relationship you will ever form with the outside world.
Maintaining a blog requires much higher effort than a facebook, twitter, or similar page and itʼs 100% reﬂective of your
organization.


Beneﬁts
Communication
Connection
Marketing
Product Feedback
Promotion
Measure

Your organization can beneﬁt from social media in

Beneﬁts
Communication
Connection
Marketing
Product Feedback
Promotion
Measure


"hello, world"
twitter tweets, facebook posts, and blog publications are an organizations way of saying hello world. Itʼs a way for an org to communicate with outside world. Internationalize your
efforts.
Constant reminders of your organizations accessibility efforts. Our social media audience is reminded 4-5 times a day of our efforts through social media. Again, these reminders come
in the form of tweets, posts, images, etc. on our social channels.

Communicates your efforts throughout your company.
This slide shows one example of when social media allowed us to reach out to an executive at Yahoo! Blake Irving, Chief Product Ofﬁcer at Yahoo!, Blake Retweets: “” In doing so, we
observe top down support of accessibility.

This tweet from Blake contibued through the Twitter Verse and reached Anand a Sr. Director, product manager of Mobile Search at Yahoo!
Anand, product manager, uses his twitter handle to connect with Blake Irving, and show his support of making products accessible. Further showing accessibility support throughout
the company.

Some rights reserved by The U.S. Army
When people have questions, comments, complaints, etc. they go to twitter and broadcast to world. These People expect organizations to respond. Social Media is a strong force.
Work with it or it will work against you. Put out small ﬁres before they turn into forest ﬁres.
Orgs are now hiring people solely to monitor what people are saying in social media. Maintain a high reputation is crucial.

Connect The Dots
IBM
Accessibility

Yahoo!

Life After Spinal Life Rolls
Cord Injury On

Connect with other players in the ﬁeld.
Easiest, Most enjoyable, and effective ways to connect with key players in the ﬁeld.
players you most likely wouldnʼt have known about and wouldnʼt have connected with otherwise.

Beneﬁts
Communication
Connection
Marketing
Product Feedback
Promotion
Measure

Once youʼve connected you begin to build army of marketers. Social Media audiences are an organizations Marketing Military. How?

Twitter example: Kevin Chao speaks loudly to his social media community in favor of Yahoo! Kevin enjoyed our product and wanted to voice his opinion. This is free and effective advertising.
The next question is how effective can a tweet from some random person, in this case Kevin Chao, be?

Kevin Chao

To answer this, itʼs helpful to know who is kevin choa? Who are his followers? How often does he tweet? How often are his tweets retweeted, shared, responded to? Who is retweeting his
content? What does he tweet about? All these questions collapse to how Inﬂuential is Kevin Chao in the social media world around the topic of accessibility. This measure is called Klout.

Klout.com is a free tool that crawls through a specified social channel to measure how influential that channel is, in the social media universe. The measure is a number from 1 - 100. The
larger the number the greater the influence.
Important tool in weighing impact of mentions and retweets.

Facebook example of marketing military.

Product Feedback

Real life actual usage user experience. More realistic than user experience within labs where 20 people are put in a lab and observed. These are people on their personal machines in their
comfortable environment.

Beneﬁts
Communication
Connection
Marketing
Product Feedback
Promotion
Measure

Organized promotional campaigns. Social media allows orgs to leverage the right channels to gain massive exposure.

Example: Yahoo! Shine
Thanksgiving we published a post from Parents helping Parents about the experience of Thanksgiving as the mother of a child with a disability.
We reached out to our friends at Yahoo! Shine, who have over 1 million followers, and suggested a cross promotion.
In doing so, we tracked the highest trafﬁc weʼve ever had in a single blog post AND
it was one of yahoo shines most engaging posts on their facebook page.

The post read.

The Yahoo! Accessibility FB page increased 2,424% in "Weekly Total Reach"
Weekly total reach: The number of people who have seen content associated with your page during a one week period.

To recap, we took a disability related post and posted it to a massive mainstream media channel and saw a massive response. Further conﬁrming the interest of disability related
content via the mainstream. All of this done through a partnership with another social media channel.

Some rights reserved by Chandra Marsono

Asking how many users with disabilities use a service or product is often times like asking how many of our users are wearing a green t-shirt.
Social Media allows us to measure through audience count, engagement, and visibility

Facebook Insights

Measure results over 1 month period or weekly period.
On this slide we have an image of our ʻusersʼ overview and overview of Interactions.

Klout


Demographics

Demographics. What demographics does accessible related information attract? From our page weʼve gained information about our target consumers.
Top 5 locations:
Gender of users in these locations: 67% Male to 32% Female. 1% unknown
Age: 30% between 18 -34
26% 25-34

Great Example of an organization doing it right: Flex Watches.

Flex watches is an organization with a goal to raise awareness toward organizations and charities in the most mainstream manner.
Selling attractive watches. They sell 10 different color watches. each color represents a different charity / organization. 10 % of proﬁts go to
charity. Sales are 100% centered around support of charity.
Flex Watches uses Social Media Heavily

The Social Channels around Flex Watches are right on point. One example: The photo contest campaigns
Here they are engaging users and Connecting users with external partners as well as overall causes.

Motivating people to connect and share their feedback by posting personal photos of themselves with their Flex Watches.


Measure: Of the x amount of photo contributions they receive they choose the top 3 and
reward those people. spreading the message far and wide.


Another great example in the same space: IBM Accessibility Facebook Expert Hour. Invite
Experts around an accessibility related topic to discuss with facebook “fans” for an hour. High
engagement rate.


Getting Started


Research social media channels and ﬁnd out which one(s) is best for you. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, etc. Commit to it and make it a priority. Itʼs going to be hard at ﬁrst, but
stick in there because soon enough it will pay off.

Connect with Others
Players in the Field

Share content Form relationships

Make Friends NOT
Customers

Be the friend that brings a lot to the table.
Ask questions. Write posts that encourage engagement
Talk about your efforts but donʼt try to sell them.
Only brag when you have reason to.
Quality over quantity. Focus on quality of friendship not quantity. Quantity will come after quality.

THANK YOU
• Facebook: /YahooAccessibility
• Twitter: @YahooAccess
• Blog: Accessibility.Yahoo.com
• YouTube: /YahooAccessibility
• Flickr: /YAccessLab


The Yahoo Social Accessibility Lab

The Yahoo Social Accessibility Lab

The Yahoo Social Accessibility Lab

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