How Can You Use Social Media to Develop Leaders?

Social Media really lends itself to developing leaders. Social Media can be used to provide new leaders with an opportunity to develop their communication skills. The instant messaging features of Facebook or the ability to hold a live chat using twitter can provide new leaders with an opportunity to use technology to gather, share experiences, ask questions and develop new skills.

Got Writer's Block?  How To Get that Blogpost Written

When working with new leaders it is often important to provide a recipe. In the Guest blogpost above the family leader was asked to share about her experience attending her first national conference.  The organizers provided her with a list of questions to get her started.  The questions included:  How were you picked to attend the conference?  Did you need to submit an application?  What did you do to get ready to attend the conference (did you meet with other members of your state team before the conference?  Did you have to make your travel arrangements?  How did you handle childcare while you were out of town?  What types of clothing did you pack for the trip).  What did you learn during the conference?  How will you bring that information back to your state?  What didn't you know before heading out town, that you wished you had known?

New Role?  Want to Share?

Another way to expand family leadership skills is to ask family leaders who may have new roles, Chair of a Committee, Chair of a Council, or staff to a committee.  To write a few blog posts about this new experience. This type of blogging can help answer questions for other family leaders.  It can provide a forum to explore changing roles, the complications that arise when a family leader moves into a role or when a family leader is also a provider or professional staff. Sharing these experiences can be helpful to other family leaders, and can create a community of practice.

Expand the Reach of Others

One of the reasons we like to Web 2.0 is how easy it is to share, repackage, and re-share content.  Sometimes the content we find is too complicated or uses legalese, sometimes it is too vague for our purposes. But thanks to the advances available to us we can rework content to suit our needs.  

Don't Forget to Hit the Share Button

We also like to hit that share button on Facebook or the retweet button on twitter. It's the 2013 version of that Breck's commercial: I told someone and she told someone, and so on! With only a few minutes, we have a quick blurb and can quickly share information with our followers that they might not have seen from the original poster.  We can even add our own spin, by writing our own blogpost that explores our thoughts on the topic, link to the original site and share the whole thing via Facebook and Twitter!

Won't Our Followers Be Overwhelmed?

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, there is so much content floating around on the web that sharing, re-packaging and re-sharing is necessary. In addition, it does take visitors time to view, absorb and act on content.  Thus re-sharing is often a necessary activity on the web.

Start With A Plan

When using social media to inform and support it is important to start with a plan of action. The first thing to do is to decide how frequently you plan on updating your contact. You can simply pull out a calendar and start scheduling your content. It is important to think about how much time it might take to develop that content. You can spend time drafting content beforehand, so that you have content ready for posting.  

Use a Calendar

One way to begin is to use a calendar and review various awareness months. April is Autism awareness, June is Aphasia awareness and October is the Campaign for Healthier Babies. Using these months can help you to plan topics. If you are trying to educate families regarding the Part C or Part B of IDEA system, then using the APR/SPP (Annual Performance Report/State Performance Plan) calendars.  For instance, a blogpost about the importance of family involvement in the development of the Annual Performance Report, would have more impact if it posted in the late Fall/early winter. 

Frequency

Decide how often you can post.  While you write a blog once a month? If you only have 12 ideas for blog posts, than once a month might be the right schedule.  It is definitely preferable to do one post per month, than to upload 12 posts in 12 days, and follow that with nothing.  You might generate some great buzz in those first 12 days, but your followers will be long gone in three months when they realize you don't have anything else to say.  You can also use other social media sites to generate buzz about your posts and to drive people to your blog or website.

What's your endgame?

Finally, it is always important to keep in mind your endgame.  Why are you writing your blog?  What do you want people to do after they've read your post?  Do you want them to contact you?  Are you hoping that they'll take some sort of action? If so, have you helped them to figure out what to do, when to do it and how to do it? If not, you'll have to go back and revise your plan to include reference to your endgame.

Why Branding is Important

Having a consistent color scheme and using consistent fonts and logo is important to your social media plan. The photo above shows a website, blog and Facebook page. Visitors can tell from the strong purple and turquoise borders and the logo that they have found the right site.  Using links that connect directly from one site to the next.

Not Ready to Jump In? 

Even if you are not sure if you want to start using Twitter or YouTube, it is probably a good idea to set up an account now using the name you wish to use, so that you can use your preferred name.  You can also take some time and check out other sites to see who others are following, what they are posting about and how many followers their posts have generated.

Visuals

It is  important to have high quality versions of your organizations logo. There's nothing worse than uploading a poor quality version of your logo.  Some sites, like Twitter and Facebook rely on square profile images, while others, like YouTube work fine with rectangular images. It is also important to know the hexidecimal codes that are used in CSS or HTML that are used to tell your browser what color to display.  Twitter and YouTube both allow users to create their own backgrounds, which can insure that you have a consistent theme across platforms.

Gentle Corrections

While the disability movement has a long and rich history, many families who find themselves raising a child with a disability often have no clue about it. Families learn their child has a diagnosis from a doctor or evaluator, or they notice that their child is missing developmental milestones over time. Others may refer a family to a program, or suggest they contact their local school district for supports and services.

What is the History of the Disability Movement?

Over time, families learn about the laws and policies that affect what supports and services might be available to their child and family. They may begin to research their child's specific disability or join support groups.This quest for support and services does not always mean that families are connected to groups that can educate them about the history of the disability movement. They may not learn about Justin Dart or Ed Roberts, they might never encounter Norman Kunc. They may not learn that before Geraldo Rivera was famous for getting hit with a chair by a skinhead, he had exposed New York State's approach to people with disabilities by filming the horrible conditions at Willowbrook. Thus families may not realize that people with disabilities, their families and the professionals who support them, have worked together to change how disabilities are viewed in our culture. Families might not know about the importance of using People First Language or using a strength-based approach to supporting people with disabilities.

How do we inform others about the Disability Movement?

It is important that family leaders and professionals share information about the history of the disability movement. Using anniversary dates or linking current activities to past activities can be helpful to insuring that families learn about the history of the disability movement. There are many wonderful YouTube videos which show the movement's activities to end the prevalence of institutions.

What Do I Do if I See Someone Using Non-People-First Language?

The first caveat is that it is never a good idea to call someone out for saying they have an Autistic son, or that their Uncle Bob is mentally ill. You'll only manage to embarrass them, and they will end up being defensive. Instead, modelling is the best first route. Mention that you have a wonderful daughter who loves to paint, is very physically active and has Down syndrome. When you see articles written by journalists, sending them a quick note thanking them for their article and ask that they use people first language or refrain from stating that a person is wheelchair bound, but rather that that person uses a wheelchair for mobility. And always share links to good references on the topic like Kathy Snow's Disability is Natural website. 

Provide Guidance

We've talked about the importance of helping families to be aware of and understand their privacy rights under the law, and how to use the available privacy controls of the different social media sites.

Got a Template?

There's good news, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Great content is already available! You can edit that content to your liking so that you can address your audience. The NICHCY Social Media Policy is a good place to start when developing content to explain to families how they can safeguard the privacy of themselves and their children. NICHCY recognizes one of the most important facets of using web 2.0 to support and inform--share content you've developed, reshare good content that someone else has created (with a citation or attribution) and when necessary make some slight changes to fit your audience! In fact, they even have a great little toolkit called "Steal These Strategies" . On that page they encourage folks to adapt their social media policy, they have examples of Facebook and Twitter posts and they share their dissemination plan with readers. The cost? They simply ask that you share your great strategies with them! (Which is something we've been doing for some time now!).  This member of Congress has a nice social media policy, that explains that she wants to have an opportunity to hear from all of her constituents, that email is what constituents should use if they are looking for an answer, and then she gives some warnings that she will not tolerate  bullying, intimidation, or harassment on her page.

Do I Really Have to Teach People How to Use the 'net?

Unfortunately, dear reader, yes you do! Not everyone understands the subtle communication rules. Some users, simply jump in and start sharing without realizing that there are different levels of sharing. For instance, not everyone realizes that when they post to Facebook they can control (to some extent--but not completely), who see's their posts by clicking on the icon in the share box on the lower righthand side, this allows them to set whether they want a post shared with everyone by clicking on the little world icon, or you can reveal the choices, to decide if you want to share with friends except acquaintances, Only Me, Custom, etc., 

However, and this is an important point, once you've shared something on the internet, even if you've limited who has access, you no longer have control over what happens to what you've shared. Even the gurus of social media sometimes encounter problems with this. Last December, Randy Zuckerberg, sister of that Zuckerberg, posted a picture that she thought was only going to be seen by her close friends. What happened next could happen to anyone:One of her friends, saw the photo and re-shared it, then someone else re-shared and tweeted it--probably because they had added the twitter app to their Facebook page. What happened next could only happen to someone famous: a public temper tantrum. When Randy used twitter to chastise the person who tweeted the post, tech gurus everywhere laughed.They pointed out, correctly, that Facebook has a history of changing privacy settings without warning, that they often revert settings to a "default" or public setting without asking or warning users who have spent time setting their privacy controls. And finally, they reminded Randy that once it's out there it is out there.

What Other Tips Do Users Need?

Many users still need simple reminders that it is not a good idea to post their full birthdate, address or days when their home will be unoccupied on social media sites.  We've talked about these types of posts before here.  Which is why I think it is important to have a social media policy, that way folks aren't surprised when you hide or remove their posts on your page.

Recording Studio

I'm putting the finishing touches on a webinar series.The text is almost done, we've got photos--though we're thinking we want to get our "own" photos rather than use stock photos. And now it is time to add some audio. 

Engaging Webinars Need Engaging Audio

Good audio is important for an asynchronous Webinar. It needs to be clear, crisp and  engaging. I think I've got the latter down pat, but how to get clear and crisp without going to a recording studio? Have you looked at how much a recording studio costs?  $50--$75 per hour to use the equipment, well we don't have the budget for that! So I started looking into where to purchase some recording equipment. But again, that seemed too expensive too! It could easily set me back hundreds dollars. 

A quick search on some of my favorite sites and I had some ideas. I did a search on the Articulate e-Learning Heroes blog and saw a thread on making your own recording studio. 

Good Audio Needn't Break the Bank

Thanks to some ingenuity I have created the smallest recording studio ever! Using a pop-up hamper and some egg crate foam that a friend had on hand I was able to fashion a recording box. I did have to work to insure that the pieces fit in snugly so that no sound escaped or entered the box, but careful cutting and shaping and my box was ready! I found a Samson Meteorite microphone on sale and the sound is great! If you're looking for me, I'm probably in my recording studio, with my headset on, hoping that the dog doesn't bark!