Event 2017 NCSBN Leadership and Public Policy Conference. More info:

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1 2017 NCSBN Leadership and Public Policy Conference- Social Media Impact: Public Policy and Healthcare Decision Making Video Transcript 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. Event 2017 NCSBN Leadership and Public Policy Conference More info: Presenter Kaela Carey, Digital Strategist, SPM Marketing & Communications So I'm very excited to talk social media today and its impact on public policy and healthcare decision making. To think that we ever lived in a world where social media didn't exist is kind of mind-boggling because we rely on it for so much today, personally, professionally, and socially. And if you think about it, depending on how it's defined, social media can actually date back in history further than we may think. So if you ask some people how they define social media, they may categorize it as a written letter sent via postage. Because technically, it's a social interaction and it's sent via mail, media. You ask people today what it means and you'll hear words like tweet, snap, post, share, like. But regardless of how you define it, there's always going to be a constant when it comes to social media. And that's that social media allows for greater opportunity for communication and for us all to have a louder voice in an effort to be heard. And that's what I hope to demonstrate today in this session. With a focus on the modern day definition of social media and putting it in context of public policy, the reason we're all here today. So let's start by taking a look at how much time people are actually spending on social media. The average user will spend five years and four months on social media in their entire lifetime. They're accessing it several times a day and they're spending at least two hours a day on it. That's a lot of time. And you will notice that the time that they're spending on social media will vary by all the different channels that are made available. Later in this session, we'll get into the many different social media channels and their different roles, but the big takeaway here is to understand that not all channels are created equally. People are using different channels for different things. They're consuming content on different channels in different ways. Therefore, they're spending more time on certain channels than others. So you'll notice people are spending a lot more time on channels like Facebook or YouTube, and that's because there's a lot more content to consume there. And the formats of that content is in longer form, so think video. Video is huge in the social media space right now. Whereas Twitter, you'll notice, there are only a couple minutes being spent a day. And that's not to say that people don't want to spend more time on Twitter, it's just that they don't need to. Because the content that they're receiving is in small digestible bits so that extra time isn't really needed. So we know people are spending time on it, it's widely used. Most everyone has some sort of social media presence. But what does that mean for us? What is the impact? What is the impact on public policy and public policy outcomes? That's what we all want to know today, right? Well, we're not the only people asking that question. There are a lot of people out there asking that question. emarketer recently released some survey results that they 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 1

2 conducted this past year asking a pool of people that exact question, "Do you believe social media has an impact on public policy outcomes?" And the answer was a very strong yes. Eighty percent believes that there was impact on public policy outcomes from social media and 30% of those people believed that impact was significant. And this impact has been being measured for some time. It's nothing new. People have been trying to understand it and trying to understand the impact on public policy, political issues, and many different policy issues for some time now. But it's probably become more evident due to the most recent election. Nearly half the public looked to social media to learn about the 2016 election. And many of those same people admitted that they found out about the results via Twitter. And as you all know, post the election, people took to social media to express their points of view on the outcome. They went to social media to talk about it, to talk about their feelings about it. And they started to increase dialog around particular issues that were important to them because of fear that the political outcome would have an implication on those issues. Issues like immigration, gun control, trade, climate change. And regardless of our stance on those issues, the big idea here is that we have watched over the last year social media amplify this conversation and give more access to this dialog across the nation and across the world, which has really paved the way for policymakers across the board to start using social media as tools in your own efforts to push your policy agendas. At SPM, our main focus is on the healthcare space. Most of our clients are health systems in the hospitals. And I personally work with a lot of our clients to develop social media strategies for them from a consumer marketing standpoint and then help to implement those strategies, measure them, and watch them grow. We've done some research in-house that has really shun some light on, you know, who these people are, who these social media users are, and the impact on social media when it comes to making big decisions in health care. This is a study that we call the "American Health and Life Study." We currently have 20,000 people in our database. And every two years, we conduct the study nationally with a pool of 4,000 individuals asking them a group of questions, some specific to health care, some specific to lifestyle and behaviors so we can start to gauge any trends we're seeing on lifestyle and behaviors, and those impacts on decision making in the healthcare space. And from this study, we were able to identify nearly 900 individuals who we call the "Active Social Networker." These are people who have admitted that they are on a social platform, that they use it regularly, and that they share content out on it regularly. And we identified a couple of unique things about these Active Social Networkers that I thought may be relevant to some of you that I just wanted to point out. One is that there are Active Social Networkers in every age group. So yes, it may skew younger, but there still are people who are using social media more and more across the board. People are on it. Two, these people are more likely to have strong opinions about healthcare policy issues. So for instance, from our study, we were able to understand that 60% of the Active Social Networkers believed that the Affordable Care Act was good for America. Whereas, only 39% of the entire pool that we interviewed said the same thing. So what does this mean? What it means for us is that we should be paying attention to these Active Social Networkers. And why? It's because they have strong opinions, and they're more willing to vocalize it and become more active especially in the online space. We also identified some reasons as to why social media may have this impact on society today. And we identified three different roles that it's playing in society that are very important. One, social media as a news source. Two, social media as virtual word of mouth. And three, social media as a reflection of one's personal identity. So talking about social media as a news source shouldn't be too surprising to you. Six out of ten Americans get their news from social media. Now, this doesn't say that it's replacing other news sources. People still rely heavily on cable television as their primary source for news. But what this does tell us is that people are also looking to social media to get it as an additional source. And they're finding the news that they're getting to be valuable. Thirty-six percent say social media is important when consuming news, especially about politics. And you'll notice that there 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3 are a couple leading channels when it comes to news consumption and news distribution. The first is going to be Facebook. And that's because it's the largest network. There's a lot of opportunity right within that channel. It has plenty of partnerships with different publishers across the board in many different categories. So the amount of content available on Facebook and the amount of news available is really bountiful. Then comes Twitter. This is the second most used channel for consuming news. But the way people are consuming news on Twitter is very different. People are looking to Twitter to get live updates about real-time events or breaking news that is happening. They're going to Twitter to get those updates immediately because that's the information that they're looking to seek. So social media as this idea of virtual word of mouth. This is very interesting to us, especially in the healthcare space. And that's because we rely very heavily on word of mouth. Those referrals are very important when it comes to making decisions in health care, referrals to and from family and friends. And that's very prominent. It always has been, it likely always will be. But what we're starting to see is that people are starting to use social media to seek similar information. Because people are able to comment and talk about things through social media channels, provide ratings and reviews. People are seeking that type of information on social media channels, and they're believing it. And they're using it to help craft their points of view. They're using it to help influence their own decisions. And 41% of people say that they would actually go online to recommend a product or a brand. So just like, you know, they are going to social media to seek this information, they are also more willing to provide it. And finally, this idea of social media as a virtual identity as we call it. And I'm excited to talk about this one because I was speaking with a couple women last night around dinner that kind of lends itself nicely to this idea of why people share the content that they do on social media, why they post the things that they do. And many of you may be saying it like, "Why would someone post the things that they do?" But there are reasons why. And I don't have all the answers, but I do have some insight as to why that may be. So, <i>the New York Times</i> did a study a couple of years ago where they correlated people's social media behaviors with their personal identity. So things that are important to them personally, things that are a priority in their lives. And they identified six different personas when it comes to social sharing. So for instance, the Careerist. The Careerist is someone who uses social media regularly, but they're using it for professional reasons. They're looking to make strategic connections. They're looking to share content that aligns with their points of view when it comes to their profession. I think many of us in the room today can relate on some level to the Careerist when it comes to social media activity. Whereas, someone like that falls into the Boomerang category, is on the opposite spectrum. So they may be sharing all different types of content, but the reason that they're sharing it is for that immediate reaction. Because it's like a selfgratification. They're sharing it because they want people to like it. If it's humorous, they want people to laugh at it. And that's what matters most to them in this life stage, in their current life stage, is that immediate reaction knowing that they shared something, it's been seen, they've been heard, and they've been reacted to. So there's all these different ideas for, you know, how people share content, why they're sharing it, and how it correlates to who they are, what's important to them and their identity. And then from our study, we also pulled this interesting stat about how more and more people are becoming more willing to say things to people online that they actually wouldn't have the nerve to say to someone faceto-face. And this is very interesting. It's kind of scary if you think about it that someone would be willing to go online and post something, but they would never do it in real life. Sure it's scary, but we can also look to this as an opportunity, especially when we're talking about means of advocacy. So if we're thinking about, you know, maybe someone is not as willing to attend a protest or to stand up in a room and express their point of view, but they may be more likely to talk about something and have a louder point of view in the online space. So as much as it can be a little striking or come across a little scary, there is some opportunity here when we're looking for ways to use social media in terms of 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

4 advocacy. So I'm going to share a few examples of some organizations that have either been impacted by social media in certain ways or that use social media in strategic ways to make an impact. The first example is a very newsworthy one. You've probably heard of it, Standing Rock. And the story here is how people use social media to protest that ended up magnifying a crowd's presence. So as you recall, last October, when the Federal Court had denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's appeal regarding the Dakota pipeline construction. There were over 100 arrests made on protesters. And that gained a lot of news traction and a lot of media attention. And it also started a lot of conversation. A lot of conversation that was happening online. And stemming from that conversation came this idea, or this rumor, that law officials were looking to Facebook to target people by their location in order to put a cease to the protests. That probably wasn't true. But people who, you know, couldn't be there and felt passionately about this issue, looked to this as an opportunity. They thought, "Well, I can't physically be there. But maybe, I... You know, I have a Facebook profile. If I can log into my Facebook profile and I can checkin on Facebook using that functionality, claiming that I'm at Standing Rock when I'm actually I'm in my apartment. Maybe I can cause some confusion. If those government officials are really looking to Facebook to try and track these people." And again, like I said, it didn't really end up being true. It really didn't end up, you know, creating that confusion that people thought that they were trying to do. But what it did do, is it had this huge impact on magnifying the support group around the issue and creating conversation around it. Because it started a chain reaction. Once one person started to check-in, another person saw that, tried to understand why, they checked-in, and the chain reaction kept going. And in social media, we call that "It went viral." Because within the matter of just a couple days, there were over 1,000,000 check-ins on Facebook across the nation. When people were actually entirely in other locations. I also just wanted to highlight the media's reaction to this as well. Kind of considering some of the things we heard in the last presentation, in the presentation from Ron about, you know, people being informed about issues and knowing enough about issues when it comes to making decisions, making the right decisions. When people started to check-in and this chain reaction started to occur, a lot of questions started to be asked. People weren't understanding why their friend was checking-in when they knew that they were at home in their apartment. And they weren't totally informed or correctly informed about the issue. So many media outlets kind of took it upon themselves to react to this in more real-time by providing content in a very simplified manner. You know, easy to understand, to help better educate and inform the communities about the issue, why it's important and why it should matter to them. So the impact we see with this example, exposure, mass exposure to the issue. Support, again over 1,000,000 check-ins, so it really magnified the supporting crowd. And education with regards to the media's reaction. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is an organization that uses social media very strategically in many different ways. And they do it really well. This is an example of an organization using social media to educate and tell stories so that they can spark advocacy. So if you visit their website, you'll notice a ton of great content that lives there. All of their research lives there. It's very compelling. They have amazing authentic stories about people who are impacted by the disease, their family, and friends. It's very valuable content. And people find it very valuable. Those people that know to come to their website to consume it. But not everyone that could be impacted or could benefit from this content knows to come there. So one way JDRF uses social media is to strategically take their content and use social media as a means of distribution to get their content more visible, to expose it to more people, to get the right eyeballs on it. And through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, we're able to strategically target people so that our message is aligned with people who are more likely to be willing to receive it and feel similarly to the message that we're promoting. They're also very strategic when it comes to pushing certain agendas. So, when there is certain legislation that they're looking to oppose or support because it has a direct implication on the foundation, they start to heavy up 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 4

5 in their social media conversation. They start to push out messages that are very compelling, very actionable, urging those communities that they have spent years to build across their social media channels, especially Facebook and Twitter, and asking them to play a role by taking action, giving them enough information to become informed, and then again, pushing them to take that action. And this is an example. I recently visited their Facebook page. And I noticed this as of recent, and you may have noticed these types of things when you log into your Facebooks as well. More and more people are beginning to donate their birthdays to charitable organizations. So they are able to, you know, put on Facebook, "Hey, rather than a gift or sending me money, please take what you are going to give me and put it to this organization of my choice." And I wanted to highlight this because just as much as we're talking about social media having an impact on what you all do, what you all do and how you act on social media can also have an impact on that industry. Because if you think about it, Facebook has been listening. They've been taking a look at how people are using the channel more and more to help support organizations that are close to them even in terms of funding, and they're building new features into their channel to help us do that more often, make it easier for us to do this, and making it more accessible. So the impact here. Education, in terms of the research they provide, making it more visible, making people more aware of it. Advocacy. So at particular times, when it's really necessary, when they're either opposing or supporting legislation, they're really looking to drive advocacy with strategically planned communication messages and strategically targeted distribution means to get the message in front of the right people to help spark that advocacy. And then funding, as in that last example. So tapping into these channels and using more innovative features and tools, you know, can help us provide funding for organizations that are important to us, and therefore the organization can be positively impacted by that. And the final example that I want to share with you is one that I'm really excited about. Per Mary Anne's introduction, we are working together to develop and implement a campaign to support APRNs and granting them full practice authority. So this here is a story of how we are using social media to encourage action and generate buzz in an effort to put pressure on legislators. That's a big ask to put pressure on legislators, and we understand that. And we're not saying social media is going to do that alone. There are a lot of people, a lot of functions involved. So what you're seeing here is a big picture or strategy where social media is going to play a role in some of these components. And where it's going to play its largest role is when we're looking to reach consumers. When we're looking to reach consumers in order to raise awareness, inform them of what's going on, educate them on who APRNs are, what they do, and their importance to the health care industry. And we're going to do that through paid and earned media on social media. We're also going to use social media to help activate our nursing communities. So by tapping into nursing communities available within channels like Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram, we're able to activate them and encourage them to act as advocates on behalf of our organization. So in order to do that, we need to be mindful of different people's mindsets when they're using social media. Because not everyone is in the same mindset. So what you're seeing here is a tool that we often use. It's a simplified version of this thing we call "The Consumer Journey." And there's a lot of letters in here. We're not going to go through this whole thing. You don't need to read through it. But the big idea here is really to just try and get an understanding of people are at different phases of this journey. And it's our job to deliver communication that's going to execute on what they're looking to receive through all of these phases. So for instance, if we're talking about someone who may be in the awareness phase. Maybe it's a consumer who isn't as familiar with APRNs or they're not as familiar with why they should be granted full practice authority in certain states. So, it's our job here to serve them strategically crafted communication that's going to educate them on just that. Consideration, so maybe someone becomes more aware of it and they're considering, "Is this an issue I want to stand for? Is this something I want to advocate on behalf of?" Well, it's our job to push them through that consideration 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 5

6 phase. Maybe we can do this by telling some authentic stories from the perspectives of the APRNs or people positively impacted by APRNs in order to make the stories more compelling and drive people further down this journey. And then finally, action. So this is similar to what you saw with the diabetes example of how they're strategically timing out actionable bits of information, encouraging advocacy, encouraging people to contact their state legislators, or driving them somewhere to sign an online petition or write a letter online. We're looking to do this as well. But only when the time is right, and when we know that we have our best chances of turning someone into an advocate. And we're doing this in a couple different ways. So we have a lot of great new communication that we're excited to put out there, and we're going to use different social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to push that communication out there to make it more visible and to strategically target it so that, people who are more likely to be influenced by it will see it. We're also going to use social media to find people who are likely to be interested in this message and bring them back to the website to create an action. So whether that action be to browse through our website, to become more informed with the content that we're providing on that website or to sign an online letter, to sign a petition, to call their state legislator, we want to bring them back to the website, because once they come back to the website, we can learn a little bit about them. Once they get there, we can tap into our backend analytics and take a look at how people are navigating our site. What is the information that they're spending most time with? What actions are they most likely to take? And we can take those learnings, and then apply it to our future strategies. And we're also using social media to collect stories. So channels like Instagram are great for collecting content from advocates, from consumers. And what we're looking to do here is encouraging our nursing communities to tell their stories and to share it authentically and visually through the use of Instagram. And we'll provide them with the tools that they need so we can collect it, such as a hashtag or instructions on how to tag us appropriately so that we can easily find that information, bring it in, and reuse it in the future to tell more and stronger stories from the perspectives of our advocates. And this is another example of how, you know, Facebook is listening. They are making changes to their platform to make our lives a little bit easier in some ways, hopefully. So what you're seeing here is one of the newest features with regards to what you all do that is available through Facebook. It's called the "Town Hall." And I'm not sure if any of you have tapped into it yet. But the general idea here is that Facebook wants to make it easier for individuals to know who their state representatives are and to connect with them directly. And just by logging into your Facebook account, with the information that you have provided to Facebook about where you live, it will automatically sync you up to your appropriate state representatives. And it'll give you multiple different options for getting in touch with them in different ways. So this is a tool that we're definitely looking to tap into, and definitely looking to encourage our advocates and our consumers to talk about, so more and more people can start using it in terms of what we're looking for them to help us do. So the impact we're looking to make through this strategy is to, of course, strive advocacy among our consumers and our nursing communities. Education will be a big one, especially for people in that awareness phase. We really want to make people more aware of APRNs, what they do and their importance. So education is a big component here. And influence, so as part of that bigger picture strategy, we're using social media as one component of that to hopefully influence legislation and create change. So the last portion of this presentation is going to be on some social media best practices. And I'm going to walk through these best practices as if we were all trying to put a social media strategy together, together. And I'm going to try and put it in some context where the usage occasions may be more relevant to you. So when we think about kicking off a social media strategy, the first thing we always want to do is to understand why we're using social media and who is our target audience. Who is it that we're trying to reach? So, as a member of your state board, you may be looking to make some strategic connections with influencers or you may be looking to push your 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 6

7 policy agenda and create more advocacy. So ask yourself, who are those people? Who are the people you're looking to make connections with? Who are those influencers? And who are the people that are most likely to advocate on behalf of you and your organization? So once we've identified that and we've written it down, what we like to do is we like to craft a narrative behind this individual or this audience segment. Because it really gives us a full big picture of who they are, their behaviors, the channels that they use online, and we do this through research. So we take a look at what their demographics are, their likes, their interests, their politics, their behaviors, and we begin to craft a story. And if we're talking about social media as our primary communication method, we're going to look directly to those social media channels. So we're going to log on to Facebook, we're going to log on to LinkedIn, we're going to log on to Twitter, and we're going to do a search for people who are likely to be our influencers, likely to be our advocates. And what we're able to do there is, number one, yes, confirm that they're on these channels. Again, most people have some sort of social media presence today, especially when we're talking about the Facebook channel. And we're also able to gather information. So there's research made available on social media. Depending on what people are willing to provide about themselves when they fill out their profiles, there's information that we can obtain and we can use to craft our stories and craft our narratives so that when we put this story in place and we begin to push our communication out across social media, we're always reverting back to, first and foremost, who is it important that we connect with? Next, comes our channels, and there's a lot of them. And as we talked about earlier in the session, people are using different social media channels in different ways for different things. And we think it's very important to consider this. So to know why people are using certain channels and the ways that they're using them, and then try to align that with what is important to you, what channels make sense for what you're trying to do, your policy issues, your agenda. And once, we align that, it basically is a selection process, identifying the channels that make the most sense to tap into. So Facebook, people are mainly using this channel to converse and connect with their friends and their family. And as we talked about earlier, it's great for consuming content and distributing content. Instagram, it's a great channel for creating and sharing. So anyone with any creative or artistic capabilities can log into Instagram, they can take a photo, and make it look professional because of the filters and the tools that are available to them. And then they can take that and they can share it out with their network. Twitter is great for that real-time conversation. So think live events or breaking news. Twitter is where you're going to get most up-to-date information, in terms of social media. Pinterest, it's probably not totally relevant here, but just to kind of note that it is a channel that sometimes we look to. It's very retail focused. And a lot of times, people are using it to collect information, collect ideas, inspiration. And because of the focus on retail, you're actually able to make purchases right within the Pinterest platform today. So there are a lot of channels. And it may seem a little daunting. It may seem like, "Well, how do I have time to make sure I'm managing all these channels?" Or "How would I do that?" Well, the good news is you don't need to be on every single channel to make an impact. You only need to be on the channels where your audience is at, and on those channels that align with what you're trying to do. So let's say we're looking to make some strategic connections and we have some content that we want to share out or we want to consume more content. You're likely going to select Facebook as your priority channel. Again, it's our largest channel, our biggest network. Most everyone has some sort of presence on Facebook, including government officials. Next, you're going to think about, "Okay, maybe we have some live events coming up," or it's really important to you to be able to stay on top of trending conversation that is relevant and topical for your agenda and what you're trying to push so that you can be a part of that conversation. That's where Twitter will make a really great channel, because it allows for that real-time conversation. You can log in, you can search for a topic that you're interested in, and then you can immediately insert yourself into that conversation. And we have our priority channels 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 7

8 there. Now, let's say we want to try something a little newer or a little different, and maybe we have some content to use. It's very polished. It's very informative and educative. But what would be great would be to collect some additional content that maybe, it's a little bit more storytelling. Like, it's a little bit more visual. And maybe we want to collect it from some of our advocates or we want to be able to create it ourselves in an easy manner. So that's where a channel like Instagram may come into play. So we've selected our channels. There's three. Your priority ones are going to be the ones where you want to spend the most resources and most of your time on. Because, again, they're aligning with who you're trying to connect with and communicate with and what you're trying to do. Next, comes the communication. So, we know who our audience is. We know what we're trying to do. We know the channels that we're looking to be on and have a presence. Now, what is it that we want to say? And it's very important to have some structure and to have some guidelines upfront on your communication and what is it that you're trying to say, both the what you want to say and what you definitely don't want to say. And it's important to set those things up in advance and to share them with other members of your board or other team members or people within your organization, so that you're all on the same page when it comes to what those communication guidelines are. And a lot of organizations like to align social media guidelines with their overarching communication policy or guidelines. It's a nice reference. This is actually a structure we use often when it comes to organizing the communication that we want to talk about on social media. And what this does for us is helps us keep in check that every single piece of communication we're putting out there is on strategy, it's on brand. And this could apply to you in terms of, you know, when it comes to vetting things that may be content pieces you'd like to share or topics that you want to engage with or things that you want to talk about. It all starts by crafting your content narrative. And this could be a direct lift of your mission statement as an organization or your positioning. And sometimes, you know, we may feel the need to embellish on it a little bit to make it more actionable or to add a little more components to it, but overall, it's our story. It's who we are, what we stand for, and what we're on a mission to do. We then take that narrative and we break it out into different pillars. And what these pillars do is they provide structure. Because not all pieces of your story can be communicated always in one piece of content. One Facebook post that tries to tell your whole story at the same time may come off a little confusing or it may not serve the right purpose because it's trying to communicate too many things at once. So these pillars help us structure out that story, so that we can then focus on developing focus pieces of communication that belong under each of those pillars, but they're always laddering up to that overarching strategy. So that's what we're going to say. Now, how we're going to say it is equally as important. And we mean this when we're talking about in terms of our tone and our voice, and how we're delivering a message, how we sound. We feel like it's very important to have some guidelines on, you know, how you're going to sound and how you're going to present something, demonstrate it, and craft it in the upfront. And we like to use this barometer structure because some words can have different definitions depending on who you ask. So someone's interpretation of sounding confident may be a little bit more extreme than someone else's. So, by leveling it out and putting it in this type of structure, it helps us to become very clear on how confident we want to sound. And finally, the when of the communication. So this is kind of twofold. The when, first off, in terms of frequency and consistency. So it is important to kind of maintain some sort of consistency when it comes to how often you're communicating on social media. And it doesn't need to be the same every single week, but what I mean by consistency is that we want to make sure we're regularly posting if we're looking to regularly post versus posting a lot at once and then completely going dark for a week or two. It starts to throw things off. But when we talk about the when of communication, it also gets into the strategic planning of when it makes more sense to timeout certain conversation or to heavy up certain pieces of communication. So let's say, we need to support or oppose 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 8

9 some legislation, and before session we want to make sure that our communication is really heavied up on. We want to make sure that we are starting the conversation early enough. And we are promoting people and gathering people and encouraging them to support us and advocate, and take action early enough on in that. So we're going to do some pre-planning so that we know that we have this amount of content ready to go when the time is right. And then while it's happening, you know, maybe we can send a few updates here and there, but it's not as priority to, you know, constantly be communicating as often as it was in the upfront. And then maybe we'll do some planning for after the fact when we know of the outcomes to make people aware of it and to thank them, and show our gratification for their support. Amplification can be a very helpful tool when it comes to trying to gain more exposure on your message. We do this a lot for many of our clients. And basically, what it means here is that you can control the level of your exposure depending on how much you're willing to pay Facebook to expose your content to other people. So for instance, let's say we want to post something on Facebook because there is certain legislation we're looking to promote, and we want people to support it. We want to drive action. We want to inform them about the issue first. We want to encourage them to share and spread the word with their friends and family. And we also want to encourage them to take action by clicking through to our website and signing an online letter. So we create that post and we push it out on Facebook. And we watch it for a couple of days, and it gets some good reaction, some positive reactions, some likes, some loves. But we're looking for more. And we take a look at our audience, and we noticed that you know, we maybe you only have 300 followers. And that's a good number, but when it comes to what we're looking to expose this piece of content to, we're looking for more exposure. We need more people to see it. So what we're able to do to get to this next level is what we call "Boosting your post." And you're able to take some media dollars and put those aside. We usually recommend with a small to moderately sized audience to maybe start with around $50. And you can go into Facebook and you can click on the option that allows you to boost your post, and you'll use that media spend to actually promote it on Facebook so that Facebook is exposing that post to more people. And those people can be within your network, maybe they hadn't seen it the first time you posted it. But it also exposes it and pushes it out beyond your network to people who you may not be connected with. But you can target it in a way where we can make sure that the message is likely to be more relevant to the people who are outside of your network and seeing it. So we boosted our post. We watch it for a couple days, and we noticed we're getting a lot more reactions. We have 50 comments, and they're all positive sentiment. It's really good news. But we're on the hook to deliver 25 letter sign-ups on our website, and we only have two. And time is cutting close. We only have, you know, a week and a half left before we need to hit this benchmark. So there's something additional we can do. And we can basically take what we did with the boosted post, but put it into an ad format. And you will either need a partner or you'll need to have a Facebook business page set up to run ads. But they can be a very helpful tool when you're looking to use social media channels to drive specific actions. So we're going to set this up as an ad. We're going to need additional media dollars, but we're going to go into our Facebook business account, and we're going to see a long list of different products that Facebook offers. And there's different ad products, and that's because they're doing different things. So let's say we had a video that we wanted to get more views on, we could set that up as a video view ad, because it's designed specifically to drive video views. In this case, we're going to select what we call a "Website conversion ad." So, we set this up as a website conversion ad because our goal is to get people to our website and then convert by signing that letter. We set up the ad, we spend some money behind it, and a week and a half later, we hit 30 letter signs, and we have exceeded our benchmark. Community management is a big topic of conversation with many of our clients because it's a touchy subject, and it's personal. But we do recommend having community management guidelines. And what I mean by community management is the way that you're 2017 National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 9

10 responding to feedback online, whether it be positive, negative, or neutral. So again, this is likely to be something that should align with your overarching communication guidelines and policies. But we do have some best practices that we like to mention. And the big idea here is that social media is a social environment, and people expect a response. So it's very important that we have some sort of protocol, and we make every effort to respond to feedback regardless of its sentiment. So when it comes to positive feedback, we usually have a little bit more time to respond back just because the sentiment is good. So there's not that dire need to, you know, address something immediately. But we do like to say try to put a 48-hour cap on that. And we recommend responding to these people with a personalized message just to let them know that they've been heard and their point of view and their feedback is appreciated. It also gives you opportunity to maintain one-on-one dialog, which is very unique to the social media space. When it comes to negative feedback, we recommend that you do respond to it publicly, so it looks as if you responded to it and you are respecting a POV. Now, this may vary. I mean, if it is extremely negative and there is really no productivity that would come out of responding from it, there's really no need to respond. But in a case where the sentiment is negative but there is a well-crafted point of view and there is a message to be heard, it's good to respond to the message. And we'd recommend doing this within a 24-hour time frame because it's negative and it's more of an urgent need. Also address the person individually. And if there needs to be any other follow-up or, you know, you don't want to start any confrontation or argument in the online space, direct them offline. So let them know they've been heard. Let them know that you understand that they have some negative feedback, but let's take this conversation offline, if need be. And then when it comes to neutral feedback, so anything that's a question, try to answer it directly as possible. Or again, if it's more personal or needs to be directed offline, suggest that they take it offline. So just to recap, this was a lot of information, kind of to recap, you know, what we talked about in terms of the impact on social media, how it plays a role in public policy, some best practices when it comes to social media, and the examples that we saw. One, it does have an influence, because it influences news consumption and the way we communicate. When it comes to public policy, we can really use social media in different ways as long as we have a strategy in place to do it. And we could do it and use it to help spark advocacy, make strategic connections, and ultimately put pressure on legislation if that's what we're looking to do. When it comes to creating your own social media strategy, start by knowing your audience. It's going to make it a lot easier. Knowing first and foremost, what you're looking to do and who you're trying to connect with is going to really set the stage for the rest of your strategy. Choose channels that align with your policy objectives. So again, we don't need to be on all of the channels. You don't even need to be on more than one. If one suits your needs, and you know that your audience is on that channel, roll with it and spend your time and resources there to make the most impact there. Be consistent in your communication, the what, how, and when. And have some structure and some guidelines put in place before you start rolling out all of the communication or trying new things. Having some of that guidelines...having some of those guidelines upfront is very important. And making other people aware so that we're all on the same page is really good to do. When you need more exposure on content, consider boosting it. And if that's not enough, there are always ads, there are always more ways to get your message out in front of a larger audience. And finally, respond to all feedback, positive, negative, and neutral. Social media, again it's a social environment. The response is expected. It's appreciated. So it's always important to respond. And with that, I'll open it up for some questions you may have. Thank you. No? Thanks so much National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. All rights reserved. 10