March 2016 AETC Program E-learn Committee Call Transcript
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(Judy Collins)
A few housekeeping notes. Please mute your computer speakers -- I think I'm hearing an echo. That could be me -- so we don't hear echoes. As well, if you do have to leave the call, please do not put us on hold. Please hang up and call back so that we don't hear your hold music.
And so without further ado, I will get started introducing Michelle. So Michelle is the creative director and senior consultant at John Snow. She has more than 20 years of experience in health communication, public health, social marketing, graphic and web design, and social media. For the last eight years she's been the digital media director for aids.gov. She's the creative director for projects such as the Tobacco Cessation and HIV Prevention and Social Marketing campaign, and as well, for other federal projects for the White House, CDC, HRSA, Department of Health and Human Services and others.
She's additionally the adjunct professor at Tufts School of Medicine, where she teaches a graduate-level course on Health Design and Technology. We are happy to have her with us today. She is well poised to discuss this. You're going to be learning some strategies on how to use social media on every level; national, regional, and local levels, while maintaining the national identity of the AETC program.
As many of you know, we have really been trying to rebrand the AETC program and elevating its national status. We need the support and the help of all the regional and local programs to do that as well. Social media is probably one of the best ways that we can do that. While we are in the process of redesigning the website, designing new logos to the program, we are hoping to incorporate all of that very, very soon.
But, while you all are using your social media accounts, this is going to be a little training on some ways that we can get started on elevating the national identity while you are still posting events and programs and resources to your local and regional audience. So I'm going to move on, and, Michelle, you can take it from there.
(Michelle Samplin-Salgado)
Great. Thanks, Judy, and I'm really happy to be here with you. Judy talked a little bit about my background, but I also wanted to say why I think there's some similarities and kind of some synergy between what's happening with AETC and what's happening with aids.gov, which is my primary project at JSI. One of the things is that at aids.gov we're a portal, also, for HIV information, so a lot of times we're getting stuff from the national -- at the federal level, and working also at the regional level, and, so, trying to really figure out how to share those resources, how to help curate resources. And Judy is going to talk about that a little bit later.
And we're also going through our own redesign now. Now, I've been with aids.gov for almost nine years. I think this is our fourth redesign. The big news for us is that it's going to be hiv.gov instead of aids.gov this summer. But we're also kind of, again, thinking about how to provide this. So, we've been in your shoes and are going to be in your shoes in terms of kind of some of the changes that will be happening at AETC. So, again, I'm happy to be here.
I know you're all on mute, but to the extent that we can have a dialogue, and if you have questions and want to put them in the chat, I would, again, love to make sure that this addresses your questions and concerns as we go.
So I want to start by saying that one of my kind of favorite things and ways to think about, there's a couple things that I always think about when working with social media. One, I don't have here, is that that social media is like a free -- it's free as a free puppy, you know. The entry point is, seemingly, very easily, but the nurturing and the maintaining and the feeding, and the nurse and care is a whole other story. So we're going to be talking a little bit about that.
And also I think it's really our role, and I when I say "our role," I mean kind of collectively, those of us using social media to listen, to learn to connect, to engage, to be more of a telephone and a two-way conversation where you're doing as much listening as you are talking, if not more listening than talking, depending on kind of what your strategy is and how you can best use social media, as opposed to a mega phone of just kind of announcing and having it be one way.
And social media has really changed how we -- I don't need to tell all of you this, but I'll just reaffirm it, because it's always helpful for me in our meeting and thinking about this -- is that people, not only do they want to be involved, but they be involved, in ways that they never could before. So it's really exciting and slightly scary and slightly overwhelming, but I'm going to, you know, at the end share some tips about how we can do that.
But, again, the telephone versus megaphone, I have to often remind myself that here I am talking on this headset like a megaphone. But, again, you know, to the extent that we can talk, but thinking of it as a telephone as opposed to a mega phone. And also thinking that we're all learning together.
You know. I was with aids.gov when we sent our first tweet and first Facebook post, and, you know, this quote is a Martin Luther King quote but I often -- blogger that is you may be aware of, Beth Canter, she uses this analogy a lot, in terms of where an organization or an agency might be with their social media involvement is, if you can't fly then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward. And so I think that's really the goal here.
You know, so we at aids.gov have the luxury of being -- I have the luxury of being the digital media director, and that means that we have people doing digital media. It's not just me. We have people helping with video. We have people helping with messaging. We have people posting. So I understand that we have resources that many of you may not have a dedicated person like we do, or a team like we do. And so one of things we really strive to do is to share what we learned, but also recognize that we're all at different levels and we're all always learning. Even as I was preparing for this webinar, I was revisiting things.
You know, maybe I intuitively might know or have heard before or talked about before, but reading and seeing it again kind of helps me to kind of keep moving forward, because technology is moving forward. So I wanted to -- you know, if we were in person, if we were all sitting around together, I would ask you to break up into pairs and talk about where you are in your organization or in your office. Is it crawl, walk, run, or flying with social media? I'll just ask you to kind of reflect on that question. But if you could put in the chat things that you think you need to improve. Because, again, regardless of what stage, the idea is to kind of always keep moving. Even if you're flying you want to kind of keep yourself afloat.
So that would be, you know, again, helpful for me to learn and for you to reflect on what kind of things you might need to improve. And then when I come back towards the end of the webinar I'll tailor some of my messaging around that. So feel free to add to the chat, or not, but it's a little quiet on the chat, but welcome you to add your comments. You could also do private comments just to me if you didn't feel like sharing with the rest of the group.
So I want to talk now about just a few things I think are really important, again, regardless if you're crawling, walking, running, or flying, something that we always do, and I'm going to show a couple of examples that just came out of CROI [ph]. But thinking about listening and engaging and really thinking about who you're listening to. This is really important as you start your kind of path on social media. Now I went to many of your social media platforms, mostly Facebook. I know that you're all at different stages. Oh, thank you for those of you who are typing questions and comments into the chat. But, really all listening and thinking about who you're listening to and what you're learning to, and then what you do with that information.
So a couple examples that just came out a couple weeks ago from CROI, you know, the two big things that we were reporting on from aids.gov was the vaginal ring and the new CDC projections. But now speaking of vaginal ring, what I did just the other day is I shared some things. I put in "vaginal ring" to see what the -- I mean I was following what was happening. But from the New York Times, as you see here, 176 comments, at one point, over a thousand shares. So, to me, you know, there's information that we can use that in multiple ways.
One of them is that we could share it amongst ourselves as providers, so we could understand. You know, I took a scroll through the comments, and it was, you know, probably -- if not more information than I would have gotten from a survey or a focus group I might have conducted in terms of what people's questions were, what people's reaction to the messages were.
I mean, there was a whole string about Africa being -- you know, speaking about different individual countries. There was a whole string about stigma and racism. There was a whole string about how do you even use this thing, and then people responding. And so I think, you know, at the regional level, as you're training at the local level, and at the local level, those local levels are seeing patients, I think it's really valuable to be listening, knowing what you're listening to, and then taking a little bit of time to think about how that information will influence your messaging out. So I thought the vaginal ring was one example.
Also, so that's kind of seeing how the popular -- how it's being perceived by the popular media and the community at large. And then this is another one. Venton Jones, he's a friend of mine, both on Facebook and in real life, and he is a black gay man living with HIV. And what I was interested in this, what I learned from this when I'm listening to what Venton has to say, and I'm listening to how he's messaging to his community. And so this is about the projections, one in two black gay men, and one in four Latino men. I happen to be friends with or following several folks in the community, and it was really interesting to see how this was perceived. So some people, like he really took this as a call to action. Other people felt that it was stigmatizing. And so being sensitive and allowing us to be that telephone or be that listening ear that is -- you know, a negative of way of saying it, I guess, is lurking. But I'm proud to be a lurker if I'm learning things like this, as I can then turn around and improve how I message back to the community. So those are two examples, real recent examples of listening and influence -- directly influence, actually, how we're messaging phrase.gov [ph].
There's another. I'm going to put this in the chat. Give me one second. I didn't pull this up as an example, but I'll send this around. There's another really active Facebook group called PrEP Facts that I would encourage you -- it's private but it's very easy to join. And it runs -- you know, there's advocates on there, there's providers on there, there's patients, there's people that have been taking PrEP for a while and want to offer advice to people that are just starting and have questions. So there are people responding to news. You know, last I think it was last week when the first person that was taking PrEP was diagnosed with HIV, and so there was a whole dialogue about that. So, again, you know, it's a way to kind of to engage with the community or listen to the community that we never could before. It's kind of a beautiful thing, especially if we use it to our advantage to turn around and message and reach the community.
So, with that said, you know, as you're listening, and always listening, you know, we've been doing this for a while at aids.gov, we're always listening. We also speak about -- and this might be when we're thinking about our relaunch. This might be when we're thinking about planning for our National Youth Day next month, but, you know, how are we going to reach our objectives. And for you all, how are you going to reach your regional and local audiences while elevating the national AETC grants.
So how can you kind of -- we'll talk about this later, but I think, you know, act global, but think local. Like, how can you use a local language? I always use an example from -- so I actually now live in Miami Beach, and if you live in Miami Beach, the island of Miami Beach, people just call it "the beach," like you live on the beach. It doesn't mean, like, my feet are in the sand right now. It just means that I live on this pretty large island that we call "the beach."
So if I was reading a post that was from a national level but it was trying to reach people on the beach, and someone used "the beach," I would feel, like, a little more connected to it. Also, I think there's a lot of opportunities to take some of the messages that Judy is going to share with you and localize it to your own community using just the local language and local terms so that people will connect in the way that they might not connect at the national level. Like you all are the conduits to kind of make that connection to the providers at the regional and local levels.
And another thing that we think about a lot, what we do, and I think one of testimony -- I hope that aids.gov is one of the resources that you look at. I know Judy is going to share it, but aids.gov is one of the resources. But, you know, we curate the content. How are you going to find content? So one way Judy is going to, again, share how. She's curating content for you all.
But what about, what is that local information? How will you find that information? Will it be through your own kind of curating on Twitter? Will it be -- I use Flipboard a lot, the app Flipboard, as a way to kind of follow different topics and magazines and hashtags. That's how I curate content, then thinking about how you would share that content out.
And lastly, what are some of the resources that you have available? And I would say that, in addition to the resources that you might have, there's a lot of resources that are being made available to you as part of the AETC national brand and the new website and the new branding. So who is doing the work and how are you going to make it sustainable? So really thinking about that, thinking about that. And you're at the local level, and also recognizing what resources will help you get there.
So with that, I'm going to pass it to Judy. I'm going to get a glass of water. I'm going to pass this to Judy to talk about what's happening at the NCRC.
(Judy)
Thanks Michelle. Go take care of yourself. So, yeah, so a lot is happening at the NCRC. As you all know, we are in the process of a website reconstruct, as well, we discussed about the new branding initiative, which includes the new logos, et cetera. So we are really encouraging you all to use the NCRC website as a resource for finding information, for curating information. I'm going to be curating the information for you. That is my primary role at the NCRC as a digital media coordinator. And we are introducing this new hashtag, #aidsetcetera (aidsetc), which is really our URL, as you all know, and we're encouraging you to use this hashtag in your posts. That's a way for us to continue to elevate the national brand of the AETC program.
So, like Michelle mentioned earlier, we are a think national but act local. And here is kind of a tip for you to adapt some national messages for your local audience. You can use our hashtag aidsetc, but then you can also include your program name as well. If you're not familiar with what the hashtags do, is that they connect the threads, the topics and the threads through social media messaging.
So, if you place the hashtag in front of a word or a phrase, if there are other hashtagged words or phrases or similar words or phrases in other messaging, you can go to -- like, in Twitter you can just type in that hashtag and everything will come up that has been posted under that hashtag. So if you continue to use aidsetc, and/or your program name, you'll see that there's a thread building with that identity. And so that's kind of one of our new strategies to build that national or to elevate that national identity.