YAPA Conference

As you may or may not know, I presented at the YAPA Youth Worker’s conference on Thursday. Here are my slides and transcript for those who came and wanted to know more information, or didn’t attend and wish they did P.S. each paragraph represents a new slide.

Hi and thankyou for coming to today’s presentation. My name is Jess Nichols, and I am a final year Bachelor of IT student at the University of Technology, Sydney. I’m here today to talk to you about social networking and why you need to get your Youth Organisation connected to Social Networks. By no means am I a social media expert, but I believe I spend enough time on them to be able to talk to you about them today.

What are we going to discuss today? Firstly, I’m going to explain what social networks actually are, then the business value of implementing social networks into your organisation. I will discuss what you need to think about when you decide to set up social networks, then I’m then going to discuss each of the five key social networks you should be a part of – they are Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress. Finally I will talk about some of the issues with social networks you have raised.

So, what are social networks?

Social Networking is the practice of expanding the number of one’s business and social contacts by making connections through individuals. So pretty much its connecting people who have a common interest – this may be from school, university or a job, or anything to a hobby, industry interest or place that they have visited. You may or may not know that all these websites aren’t called Social Networks – but Social Network sites. However, in the case of this presentation, whenever I refer to Social Networks, I will be referring to Social Networking sites.

There are two main types of Social Networking relationships. The first type is a one to one relationship. Now these relationships require both people to accept that the relationship exists. Think of it like a phone call, both people have to be on the line to communicate with each other. These sorts of social networks are the classic type of network – so like Bebo, Myspace, Facebook profiles.

The other type of relationship is a one to any relationship. In these cases, only one person needs to accept the relationship. So it is more like someone broadcasting on the radio to the world. Listeners have the choice whether to listen in or not and create the relationship between the broadcaster and themselves. These types of social networks are the newer version, so think of Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages or WordPress Blogs.

So, you know what Social Networks are, but why are they beneficial for your youth organisation?

Firstly, social networking is cheaper than most other marketing schemes to implement. There is no need to create expensive marketing schemes or rely primarily on paid marketing. All you need to do is develop the pages on the different sites, and promote the pages via word of mouth to the youths that attend your youth organisation.

Secondly, social networks are perfect for your target market. Youths commonly use social networks –the latest statistics had it at about 9 hour per week are spent on social networking sites. Therefore it is a lot easier to advertise to youths online about your events than it is to do it with normal advertising media.

Additionally, social networks are fantastic for being able to communicate with others – whether it is a youth from your work, your fellow employees or other organisations who work with youths. Social networking allows for you to speak to anyone that has the same interests as you, regardless of time or location.

Furthermore, social networks allow you to respond back to any negative or positive feedback left on your pages ensuring that all youths are happy with the way things are running, which assists with maintaining a positive vibe associated with your youth work.

Social Networks are also a great way of providing a sense of belonging and support for all of the youths. This is because they know that they will be able to get help from someone that is only one click away. They also may find it easier to type something out to someone in a message than speak directly face to face, which can also be helpful for ensuring all your youths are emotionally ok.

However, these benefits may all sound well and good but it’s all about the execution! If you don’t utilise and develop the social networks properly then you won’t be able to connect with the youths properly!

So, you’ve convinced the management that Social Networks are the way to go. So what do you need to think about before setting them up?

Firstly, think about how you want to be perceived. There needs to be a consistent voice per se – so for most of you I’m assuming its someone who is compassionate and caring. This is important especially where there are multiple people maintaining the social networks – your voice should always sound the same regardless of who is updating the pages or communicating with the youths.

Secondly, you need a consistent style – each page needs to be customised in the same way. If the background of one of your pages is blue, then make sure you use the same blue on any other pages you are able to customise. This also helps with branding your youth organisation on the web.

Additionally, naming needs to be consistent on all your sites. Like the style, this is really important for your branding – especially when youths are looking for your site on other social networks, they will assume it has the same name as the current social network they are looking at. In most cases generic words or acronyms aren’t necessarily available, so it’s a good idea to think of a few names so if the first one isn’t available you have a couple to back it up with. A good way to work this out is to set up accounts at the same time – so you can check that the same user name is available for all sites.

Finally, it is important to work out who will own the social networks and be responsible for their maintenance. Social Networks should be maintained by someone who understands the technology, understands any marketing strategies by the youth organisation and has experience in communicating with children. This means that it’s not necessarily the responsibility of the IT or Marketing departments, but people who are genuinely interested in utilising social networks.

So lets get down to the nitty gritty. What social networks should you use.

Today we will be talking about five social networks – Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress Blogs.

Let’s start of with Bebo.

Bebo.com’s profiles uses a one to one relationship with users. If you remember, that means that both people have to agree for the relationship to exist. Each profile consists of a customised page with a user selected username or Bebo defined member number, where users can post up videos, notes and photos. There is integration with AOL’s Instant Messenger, so if you have an AIM account it means you will be able to chat with your youths directly.

To be honest – I don’t really hear of many people using Bebo now. But as it is still heavily utilised with younger teenagers – it’s still recommended that you do try to have a presence there.  However to bebo’s credit their user friendly timeline approach is great for showing the latest news and updates to the profile. Also, the ability to customise the page to fit in with your brand is great. Additionally, the integration with multimedia such as videos and photos plus the integration of games and other functions allows  you to make the page your own whilst providing youths with fun things to do on your page to keep them interacting with your brand.

So here are a couple of screenshots from a Bebo profile.

• Here you can see the timeline and how it shows a image whenever a new photo or note is loaded.
• Here you can see Youtube integration – great for adding any videos from your events
• And here is some room for describing what your youth organisation does
• And overall, you can see how the page has been customised especially on each of the boxes

On this page we can see

• A list of all the friends this user has, a great way for your youths and other youth organisations to determine who else is on Bebo
• Plus a comments wall, where your youths can ask questions or you can see how your youths are doing
• And down the bottom here you can see a post from a blog, one of the extra functions you can add to the page. We will be discussing blogs in details later.

Next up is Myspace.

MySpace is very similar to Bebo that it has the one to one relationships and there is a customisable profile with integration. However, with MySpace there is more of a focus on the communication with other friends more than anything else on the page. If you compare this to Bebo, as you saw there is more of a focus on showing your friends what you have been up to.

Even though MySpace users are dwindling, there are still a lot more youths using it than Bebo, which is why I would recommend that if you had to pick between the two, you use MySpace. Like Bebo, it’s great you can customise the site to fit the brand. MySpace also has integration with multimedia and games, however, there is a focus of integration with music more than anything else – which is a great way to get the youths in your youth organisation who are in a band to promote their music.

So here are a couple of screen shots from probably the most famous MySpace person – Tom.

• You can see the music player here on the left hand side
• Like Bebo, there is a blog area, but unlike Bebo it’s an embedded space within the profile
• There’s also an about me section where you can explain all about your organisation

Here on this page

• We have the top friends, in most cases I would recommend having other youth organisations over actual youths as some youths crave to be in top friends of other pages and may feel rejected if they are moved off it
• And here down the bottom we have the comments section, where friends can comment on your profile
• This page isn’t the greatest example of page customisation however like bebo, each of the components on the page can be modified.

Next up we have Facebook. Now facebook is a bit different to the other social networks as there are multiple ways to utilise it. Today we are going to be discussing Facebook Groups, Facebook Profiles and Facebook Pages.

So first up we have Facebook Groups. These are a one to many relationship – so like the radio presenter broadcasting his news to everyone who wants to listen. So like that, users join groups based on their interests – so those who are interested or a part of your youth organisation will join the group and become members. The main components of a group is the wall, which is like the comment page on a bebo or myspaece, and a discussion board, where users can talk about certain topics related to the group. So for example, they could discuss the latest events happening in your Youth Organisation. One key issue is that you need to be a pre existing Facebook member to create groups, which also means your personal profile will always be associated with the group as long as you are an administrator.

Facebook groups are good for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you want a secure group, you are able to change the privacy settings so you have to approve all members who wish to join – think of it like a secret club. You also have the ability to email members directly, if your group has less than 5000 members, which I’m assuming most of yours will have. Like I said before how your personal profile will be associated with the group, it means that users can contact you directly, so if youths have issues they can speak directly to you. And this also means if there are other users who should be points of contact for the youths, you can appoint them as officers of the group, so a link to their name will appear in a special part of the page.

So here’s an example of a Facebook group.

• As you can see Facebook doesn’t allow for customisation, so the branding needs to be in the logo of the group up the top.
• You can provide a description, as well as contact details here, plus recent news which could include the latest events you have.
• The group type here shows users whether they need to request to be added to the group. In this case, any users can join.
• The officers are here on the right hand side, which are key points of contact for the users

Here on the second page

• We have a list of all the members in the group
• Plus the discussion board which shows related discussions
• The Admins, which will be you, appear on the right hand side with a link to your user name
• If you have events, you can create group related events and invite all the users to these events
• Plus the wall where you and any other members can post up things related – so this could be links, questions or just general comments.

Facebook profiles are a bit different. They are a one to one relationship, so you must approve the friendship for the relationship to exist. These are the normal personal profiles that most people sign up for when they join Facebook. They are great as you can include status updates and photos which can appear on all your friend’s pages, plus you can add applications which can be relevant to your youth organisation.

Profiles are great when you want to have an individual bond between users as you can speak to each of the users directly on a one to one personal basis. This is a good idea when your organisation has a strong focus on counselling youths. It also means you can personally invite youths to any events you may run.

Here is an example of a business using a profile as their method of communication.

• Here it has the wall where you and others can post information.
• You can see down the bottom how this organisation has become friends with people

Here is the information page

• As it is a personal profile for people, the information is not always relevant, such as the activities and interests components, plus the birthdate
• Down the bottom you can include your contact information

However, according to Facebook profiles can only be used to represent an individual and must be held under an individual name. This means that it is possible for Facebook to shut down your profile as it will be related to a business. The way to get around this is to develop a Facebook page.

So Facebook pages have a one to many relationship, and the main difference between these and groups is that pages are always public and groups give you the option to make it private. Users become fans of pages, instead of members, but they include the wall and discussion board like a group. However one of the best differences is that you do not need to be a Facebook member to develop a page which makes them a lot easier to set up.

The main reason to use Facebook pages is that they are the profile equivalent for businesses and organisation which means that all posts are derived from a standard being – the organisation. This means that no individual person is identified on the page, unless you provide direct contact details which is great for maintaining the youth worker’s privacy. You also can’t email users however you can provide updates to your page, which can appear to be less intrusive than emails.

Here’s an example of a Facebook page. Notice that they are minimal differences between this and the profile. There is still a feed, but all posts for the organisation appear as the brand.

The main difference is in the information, you can see that it is more related to an organisation than an individual person, which makes it easier to present your brand online.

The next network we will be talking about is Twitter.

If you haven’t heard, Twitter is the latest craze where you broadcast news, links and events through 140 character updates. This is the definition of a one to many relationship as users will only subscribe, or follow, interesting accounts. It is a great way to connect with your users as you can reply directly to their posts, or tweets.

Twitter is like Facebook Pages, all posts appear as the brand or organisation which is good for consistency. Because of the way Twitter has been developed to broadcast, you can provide your followers, or the people who subscribe to you, the latest news on your Youth Organisation, which is a great way to promote links and events to your followers. Also because you can connect and directly communicate with other youth organisations, it means that you can share tips and links with each other. It’s also beneficial for building up relationships with youths through the conversation functionality. Now Twitter has been awesome and developed their own guidelines for setting up a twitter account for business, so if you check out that link below, you can download the presentation which will give you some other great tips to developing your twitter page.

Here is an example of a Twitter profile

• As you can see, you can provide a short biography and URL to your main website which is good for referring users to your primary site
• Each of these lines is a tweet, ones with an @ sign is part of a conversation to another user
• You can see here that you can post up links and other interesting information with links to other pages
• And here is a list of accounts this profile is subscribed to, or following.
• You can also see that this user has customised their page to be consistent with their brand colours and have provided an image to show users the other web spaces their brand is available at

And today’s final social networking tool is WordPress.

WordPress hosts blogs – which are a space where you can load up short articles with photos and videos that are related to a specific topic. They are a one to many relationship as you broadcast these posts to everyone. Like most other social networks, you can customise the page to ensure it fits in with other parts of your online brand.

A wordpress blog is a great idea as it provides free web hosting for the blog – you only need to purchase a domain and link it to your blog if you wish to use a blog as your main website. WordPress is also really simple to use, which means that anyone will be able to use it to post up information. The main reason for a blog is that you can publicise the latest news and events for your youth work, or any other youth organisations in the area. Also, you can allow for conversations with people who read your blog through the comments tool found at the bottom of every post.

So here is an example of an organisation using a blog. As you can see, they have used the blog to promote an upcoming event. They also have customised the page with their logo, but by keeping the page simplistic they have ensured the focus is on the content not the design. You can also see the modules on the right hand side, including one that links directly to their Twitter page.

Here is another post this organisation has included. This one is talking about one of their previous events, and they have provided a recount of the event, plus some photos. I feel for every post you put up about an event, it is a great idea to include a recount post, so those who don’t attend the event know what they missed out on!

So, we’ve been through the major social networks you have been a part of, but how do you manage them?

Firstly, with the design, there are four points you should keep in mind. Keep it yours which means that if you want to customise it, you should develop it yourself because if you use something off the internet, it is more than likely to have some sort of link or “created by” component which makes the page look tacky. Keep it simple means not to make it overly flashy and over the top because it just looks tacky otherwise. Also keep it low bandwidth because if it is full of massive images, it will take a long time for the page to load on people with slow internet connections and they will probably just get frustrated half way through and log off. And finally, keep it consistent, so if you decide to customise a Twitter, Myspace and WordPress Blog keep the style exactly the same with colours and icons.

These are actual MySpace pages. As you can see, the page looks messy because there is no consistent style; the massive images will make it extremely slow to load and they have used images from other areas as you can see the copyright.So don’t make a page like this.

Although this page is consistent, the background is animated – you can’t see that on this slide – but you can see that this page has been created by someone else because of the copyright found down here.So don’t make a page like this either.

In terms of maintenance, it is vital that you update your pages regularly to keep people engaged with it. There is nothing worse than someone creating a great social networking scheme and never updating it. That actually creates more negative feedback than good. If people start contacting you on the pages, then by not replying for a long time may be demoralising for the youth. So make sure you check each profile at least twice per day, so maybe once in the morning when you start work, and once when you leave work in the afternoon, to ensure you are replying to anyone within a day of their post. Also, make sure you update each page at least once per week – this may be anything from a new tweet or post on your twitter or blog, or uploading a link or image to your myspace, bebo or Facebook. Like I said before, you need to keep the youths engaged and the only way to do that is to constantly update.

Integration is important. As you can see here, there are lots of ways to connect the different social networks. WordPress allows you to include widgets to other sites. Bebo, Myspace and Facebook all provide platforms where you can allow the more technical inclined to develop applications for their pages. Bebo and Facebook provide image links you can include in other pages. And RSS or Really Simple Syndication can be used in blogs and twitter to include the latest updates on your website.

Security is also really important with Social Networks. You need to ensure there is a distinction between any personal accounts you have on any social networks and ones you develop for your Youth Work. This means not adding youths onto your personal Facebook account – although you may think it’s a good way to build a relationship, it means you will be opening them up to everything about you. Secondly, ensure there are private accounts where possible if you want to have security between your youths. This also goes for your personal accounts, if they aren’t private then youths, again, will be able to find out all about you. Additionally, don’t post personal information and embarrassing/incriminating photos to these accounts – although this is fairly obvious, some people don’t follow this rule and damaging photos can be posted to these sites. Finally, when logging into these sites, don’t log into a site where the URL address doesn’t equal the domain. This is called phishing and it’s a way for people to steal other user’s passwords to hijack their accounts.

Here is an example of the URL not equalling the domain. Although the pages are exactly the same, you can see only on the bottom page the URL is twitter.com which means you can see it is the legitimate site.

Governance is also really important for managing the information posted on social networks by others. Like I said before, you need to constantly check the sites. Unfortunately there is no way to automatically remove offending material, but if you do constantly check the sites, you will ensure that any offending material is removed as soon as possible. Additionally, if the same user continually posts offending material, it is possible to block or remove users from having access to your accounts. Another way you can maintain that everyone behaves on the social networks is by writing user guidelines for both the staff on how to manage the sites and for youths on how to use the social networks.

When you develop a following on these sites, it does become tempting to email update all users whenever you update something. If you do this constantly, it becomes spam, which may deter users from going to these accounts. It’s recommended that you only email out users a maximum of once ever two days and ensure they are on different topics. A major deterrence is people repeating the same information in multiple emails. Also check your integration settings – if things from your twitter are being sent to your Facebook through an application, then don’t post the same information directly from your Facebook otherwise it will appear twice. The other way spam can appear is if someone hacks your account and posts up advertising for their organisation – so to ensure this doesn’t happen to you is to ensure your passwords are secure.  A great way to do this is by using numbers and special characters in your passwords and ensuring that they are more than eight characters long.

So that is all the information I have for you today. Just a quick rundown of the sites I showed you – Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress are all great sites for getting your youth organisation into the social networking scene.

Here are the links to these sites if you are interested in developing your own profiles.

Here are my contact details if you are interested in following me on twitter, adding me on Facebook or reading my blog on Social Media at WordPress. I’m also happy to field any emails from you if you have any questions or comments. Thankyou again for listening and I look forward to meeting you on the internet!

[Via http://jessnichols.wordpress.com]