Medical Home Work: Providing Social Media for Community PartnersOctober 16, 2015

Margot Malachowski, MLS, AHIPCommunity Outreach LibrarianBaystate HealthSpringfield, MABirthplace of Dr. Seuss

This is an imperfect journey, with lots of stops and starts, which led to a feeling of goodwill toward the Library. The lesson? Consider taking on social media for your community, not your library.

In 2011, I started attending meetings of the Medical Home Work Group for families with Special Needs children in Western Massachusetts.

I was saying this sort of thing…

What is the best use of Facebook?

Newsfeeds: Facebook is designed to send out stories (either links to stories or postings by the members).

Invitations: A FB Group sends out invitations to events to Group members. And, those invitations can be shared with FB Friends of Friends. That’s what networking is all about!

Emotional Support: Friends can “Like” a post, or write a supportive comment.

Pictures: The most popular thing to do on Facebook is post pictures. We can personalize our FB Page or Group by posting pictures of our events.

Journal Articles: If there is a news story about a recent journal article, members of the FB Group can request a copy from the Baystate Health Sciences Library.

Turning it over to the Families: Our hope is that the families will drive the discussion on the FB Page. The FB Page is a more public tool than a FB Group.

We started with a (secret) Facebook Group.

And posted events and news stories.

But it was connected to my personal email address and Facebook profile.

So, I opened a gmail account.

With the gmail account, I started a WordPress blog, Facebook Page, Twitter account, and opened a HootSuite account to manage it all.

Were we reaching our families?

Was this work worthwhile?

(And, is this the work of a librarian?)

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR MEDICAL HOME FOR SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN OF WESTERN MA (SNCWMA) Target Audience: Health care providers, community agencies and caregivers interested in sharing information for families with special needs children. The geographical focus is Western Massachusetts.  What We Bring to the Table: Through our monthly meetings and networking with each other, the Medical Home Work Group shares information for helping families with special needs children. This monthly face2face meeting draws an average of 40 people.

Facebook Page http://facebook.com/SNCWMA A Facebook Page is a great tool for sharing news and information. We are aiming for 3-5 posts per week. The administrators will monitor any conversations (hasn’t been an issue). We have found that the FB Page has not inspired conversations. At this point, we have 105 Likes and each post is viewed by only 4-12 people. Our FB group has 45 members and posts are viewed by 5-15 people. We create events (our meetings) and invite people in our FB group. These invitations may be shared by our group members and posted on our FB page. We are also able to store files in our FB group, but we haven’t done that much yet.

 

http://facebook.com/SNCWMA

I tweet our meetings with #sncwma #specialneeds #westernma. http://twitter.com/SNCWMA

I post about our monthly meetings on the blog, with links to FB and Twitter. http://sncwma.org

I gave up on the HootSuite account. This is a management system for social media. Too much planning involved.

Librarian = links to general resources, tagging key terms, and linking to additional information.

Monthly Averages

Email Distribution List: 210

Attendance at meetings: 40

Twitter Impressions (40 followers): 43

Facebook Page (105 fans): 30

Facebook Group members: 45

Visitors to blog: 90   

You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

Dr. Seuss, writer, poet, cartoonist

Springfield, MA