You’ve Got Friends, Followers & Fans Now What? Presented by Dawn Crawford Communications Director

Teamwork is AWESOME! Nonprofits and local public health departments rely on information and sources from CDC and the state health departments Universities, researchers, scientists, doctors and vaccine manufactures are FABULOUS too All can be a voice for good Thanks for everything you do! Together we can help parents feel confident about vaccines I think together we can make a difference and turn anti-vaccination tide We just have to work together Local nonprofits folks like me and local public health need the CDC and state governments for information We also couldn’t do this without universities, researchers, doctors and so many more We can all be a voice for good Thanks for everything that everyone is doing to push the ball forward to increase confidence in vaccines Together we can make parents feel great about their choice to vaccinate

Super Secret Magic Tip for Social Media? What is the one magic take away from this session?

BE A PERSON! Be a person. Social media is about being social and interactive. It can be very, very hard for governments and nonprofits to be real Make real connections with people, have fun and be a honest to goodness person.

Items for Your Tool Box So what are some more ways you can use social media to promote vaccines in your area?

Use Your Website Do a special project from your website That could be profiles of nurses or doctors It could be more interactivity with your educational classes At CCIC… We created a Healthy Kids Thank-A-Thon in November to celebrate healthy kids Something that is really important to us at CCIC is to have a very positive spin on vaccines – we talk about staying healthy rather than avoiding disease The thank-a-thon was a perfect way to harness this positive energy

We asked parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and vaccine advocates to share why they are thankful for their healthy kids in photos, comments, blog posts and videos We got 35 people to share their stories. Incredibly touching stories and photos from Colorado and all around the country We also go lots of engagement from bloggers across the country and the local media We even got a TV news story the night before thanksgiving! Ultimately this gave parents a way to be thanked for doing the best thing for their child’s health – which is vaccination

Facebook is another great way to engage parents, health care professionals and vaccine advocates At CCIC… We use Facebook to promote events, share headlines. We have almost 300 fans – which isn’t very much but we still like the interaction we get out of this space. We like the comments and the “likes” and the sharing that happens on this page

Bogging can be a great way to share your pro-vaccine message with the masses. It is free and easy to set up a blog. Use it to share the story of your organization At CCIC we’ve launched a mom blog called Colorado Mom2Mom Our mommy bloggers talks about all the fears and questions parents have about vaccines once a week We also have a few video blogs or logs which help give our mom bloggers a voice and more personality Recently we’ve added guest mom bloggers to get even more voices on the blog

Engaging in niche social media networks in your area can help further the message These are places online where likeminded people join and discuss different things and share tips One nation-wide network MomsLikeMe is in lots of different cities across the country At CCIC We regularly post to sites like MomsLikeMe with stories about vaccine news and questions This has been a very difficult space for us to penetrate We’ve even gotten some backlash but we’re prevailing and sticking to it

By far our most successful space has been on Twitter Twitter allows us to be a news source for vaccine information, correct misinformation and encourage parents to vaccinate their babies As you can see in the Tweets – which is highlighted on the right – we are VERY active – we’ve been heavily engaged since this time last year and we’ve already sent out over 5000 tweets in those 365 days My one tip for Twitter is to post multiple times a day – if you don’t have time to do that, it’s not the right platform for you

We’ve also created Twitter lists of our favorite friends so we can track them at a glance. It’s also a nice way of recognizing our community members in a very public way

Superhero Tools! TweetDeck.com Monitoring EASY Retweets HootSuite.com Updates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Blog Schedule your updates Tracking clicks Update multiple accounts

Finally, this is really what being engaged in social media is all about – it’s about helping parents This is a mom who has come back to us several times on Twitter to ask questions about the H1N1 vaccine and the MMR vaccine She sends me paniced questions that I’m able to answer b/c I have access to information from the CDC and state-health department I weave in a lot of personality and a lot of science and information Being on social media is about being a person

Questions? Dawn Crawford Communications Director Crawford.dawn@tchden.org 720-777-8917 http://www.childrensimmunization.org Blog - http://bcdcideas.wordpress.com LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/dawnacrawford Twitter – @socmediarckstr