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Audio:
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Slides: Swine flu social media monitoring
Transcript:
So I’m sure you all remember the swine flu, there were alot of hysteric headlines in the press. But we had to make sure that there problems and messenging were getting through, the write messages to the public and it wasnt really reflecting these headlines and it wasnt reaching the right people in the right town. So we launched are comm strategy on the 24th byte pro and it includes its content across the major sites involving the nhs choices business link, and also the right activity like search mapped……(Sorry bulletpoints) But we decided to take swine flu and put a media on the trend…we wanted to highlight issues of concern that people were talking about online. Just to see if people were worried about swine flu in schools or were people worried about pregnancy and swine flu effects, or people with underlying conditions, or were the worried about it at all even. And we waitied to gage image response to our communications. So your all probably aware of the advert and things like that, so we were attracting things like that. And it was also good to counter miss information kinda around different media tunnels, like rumors circulating about the vaccine, that we’ll talk about a bit later. And it also helped discover new uses of data and other things from people around the social media space for an example there was quite a few good websites for swine flu, and things like that. And also gave just insight into general pandemic flu in relating to topics who helped to shape our? We covered these reports out daily and a mamber of our team at COI uses a report to produce the daily headline report that we circulate to give to our key state ? around government so thats people at the health department and health people at direct gov. And we look at sites like twitter blogger, and social networks. To see what people express so we see what people are talking about. It was a couple of tweets there that you probably cant read wondering whether they should get the vaccine and what’s going on with that. And all the tools we use are free, we don’t use any paid services, so we use like netvibes dashboard were we get rss feeds from relevant searches on twitter. And sites like trends wish provide great stats on websites like twitter. And also other sites like social mention and addictamatic. Ok, so what we’ve learned it’s helped to find stories before they’ve broken the mainstream press. For example a rumor started to circulate about the swine flu vaccine contianed a toxin that had been linked to gongunfon syndrome, and it doesn’t by the way. And that was first noted on US blogs on Aug 3. And it hit twitters and blogs in the UK within a week. But it didn’t hit the main press unitl Aug.23 and that was a story in the daily express. So we’ve been able to compile a list of vaccine myths, wicht the Dept of Health so they could then redefend their own press office or their websites. And I know in the campaign there was alot of chatter in the social media space about swine flu and pregnancies, and the Dept. of Health looked at what people were saying and they got the health secretary to do a quick chat on Moms net where he cauld answer some of those questions in the space were people were asking them. And in general it’s helped us keep our site up-to-date and relevant. So the Dept. of Health has learned that the monitoring accurately guages the public moods and it could done quickly and cheaply with the right tools. Social monitoring media on this scale has gotten people in my organization and working and its got people doing it on a much wider scale, using a range of different tools and its helping make our c? more effective. The monitoring parts have also made policy makers to take social media seriously, because we have been able to prove that news is breaking their first and not on the mainstream press and maybe and maybe traditional press offices see it. And most of all social media accurately reflects the public moods alot more than mainstream press does. So for example you say all those crazy headlines in the press about masquarades and all that, bloggers and twitters were actually alot more calm aboout the whole situation. And accuse the press of hype and hysteria. So alot of people kept a cool head and there was actually alot of swine flu jokes which you problem can’t read. Things like Yea I called the swine flu headline to do but all I could get on the line was crackling and things like that. So it’s certainly helped me keep a sense of humor. So that’s what I learned,…so ok.