Musings from our social media week

A lack of confidence, permission and fear are some of the reasons that our teams don’t embrace social media at work. However, embracing social media undoubtedly enables our frontline teams to have conversations that can help them realise their potential and improve their services for patients. So how can NHS communication teams help to bust some of the myths and give our frontline the confidence to use social media?

Over the summer we held our first social media week to do just this and ‘give permission’ to our frontline teams to join in conversations on social media. Our activities were expertly blogged about in real time by comms pro Rachel Miller How an NHS Trust is encouraging Social Media use. However, what impact did it have? And what’s next for us?

Where’s our community on social?

We used the week to launch our corporate Facebook account – and a good job too! Throughout the week we used the online poll on our new website and asked our community:

What social media website do you use the most?

We could easily see we were missing a huge part of our population by not being proactive on Facebook. Especially since, according to the latest Ofcom Communications Market Report, there are 38.9 million people using Facebook.

State of social media - national snapshot

So, great work – the week helped us to understand where our audiences are. What’s next is for us is to move from largely corporate content on our social media channels and to encourage our services to nurture community groups and engage with patients at a more local level.

Impact

Throughout social media week we’d set ourselves the challenge of gaining 100 more followers (an arbitrary number). The activity we undertook from face-to-face events, surgeries, biteable animations, attending meetings, impacted on all of our accounts including our recruitment and charity accounts. Most of our focus was on Twitter and Facebook and the number of followers increased, however, the impact lasted across the whole month as content was retweeted and shared virally. In total we saw an increase of around 350 followers and almost 100 per cent of our interactions were positive (other than one person who thought ‘social media was evil.’)

Leading out loud

We love that our leaders including our CEO, medical director, nurse director and finance director are all on Twitter - in their own right, no ‘ghost’ tweets from the corporate team. We saw these personal accounts all increase in followers throughout the month especially our CEO and Chief Nurse. Ensuring our leaders are visible on social media is incredibly important – as long as it fits with who they are and how they want to work. 

Throughout the week, one of the key feedback themes was that people were worried about trolls, abuse and complaints. People were also scared of ‘getting it wrong’ or ‘saying the wrong thing’ – a real fear. Are we surprised? When many of our own leaders choose to be anonymous online, for example on the Health Service Journal (HSJ) forums, is it any surprise that others feel fearful to engage in open conversations online.

However, if there is a ‘wrong’ thing to do surely it’s avoiding having the conversations that really count in the first place. And just like when we’re at the pub and we have a difference of opinion, it’s ok to adjust your opinion and point of view as a result of listening to others. As communication teams we need to be helping our leaders influence these conversations rather than ‘crafting them a line.’ Instead let’s coach our leaders and help them to lead out loud. Check out Rachel Miller’s blog Working out Loud.

Our social media week showed us that different people have different needs, and different obstacles to overcome to break down the largely cultural barriers of becoming active on social media.  So with our internal digital guru Martyn (Follow @martenshoots) we've developed a Social Media Hierarchy of Needs [JPG] 341KB.

A blog in its own right, but a great tool for taking people through the journey of understanding, permission and safety and confidence using social media.

Engagement

Regardless of what we achieved online, our social media week was a whole lot of fun for our teams, as our social media icons took a tour of our hospitals. With bids for who would get the bird! The power of social media for building a sense of pride, teamwork and saying thank you, although difficult to measure, must not be underestimated.

The week culminated in our first #NHSTweetup, an idea put forward by Andy Heeps (@andyheeps) one of our obstetric consultants, which saw all of twitterati come together, patients and staff alike, to make connections and to meet in real life! Something we’ll do again in the future or perhaps around a particular theme or patient group.

Partnership

A key part of our communications and engagement strategy, Pride with a Smile and our operational plan is to improve our partnership working. So operating within that framework our social media week was no different. We took advantage of relationships with central government, local partners and the private sector. We received some great support from our local partners North East London Foundation Trust @NELFT, huge thanks to their new Director of Comms @CrayonCW and over the next month our CEOs will be holding a joint twitter chat on dementia. Having conversations about issues that have no respect for our NHS boundaries and on a channel that helps to break them down.

As novices in the field of social media we have a lot to learn from our digital gurus in central government, so we stole with pride – and with thanks we reproduced the @DigitalDWP ‘Come fly with me’ infographic, a useful Twitter guide for our staff, which is a step by step guide to get them started on social.

Download our join the conversation social media poster [pdf] 215KB

We also knew we weren’t the only ones trying to get people online, there are some significant initiatives out there trying to do the same thing. For all our campaigns we have stalls in the main entrance of our hospitals, so we did the same for our social media week, however, this time we thought we’d invite the Digital Eagles (no they are not a rock band). As part of the corporate social responsibility programme at Barclays Bank they have a team of people that get out and about in the community to try and get people online, so we asked and they came – providing a great resource for our patients and staff.

Innovation

One of my most enlightening conversations throughout the week was with our junior doctors. The first little insight was that none of them are on Twitter and they’re all on snapchat. Although after sharing our Social media in the NHS explained they were struggling to find a practical use for it in the hospital.

Our junior doctors are however embracing mobile apps and seeing innovative opportunities for how to develop them to provide better, more efficient care. Yet across the NHS we don’t yet have the IT and information governance policies to keep pace, while we reject ideas around innovation and apps because of ‘patient confidentiality’ we still tolerate the use of fax machines as a key form of communications, especially with primary care. This suggests that one of the barriers of using social media and other digital technologies is culture rather than any other perceived risk. Let’s ban fax machines they’re a huge information risk and it appears they’re hampering innovation.

Respect and rules

Our social media week wasn’t about encouraging a reckless foray into a new world. In most of our discussions there was a desire from people to be given ‘permission’ or to understand the framework within which they should embrace social media when they’re at work. Hence why our Social Media Hierarchy of Needs can help us to coach people throughout their journey. As communications professionals we have a duty to support, inform and guide them. Providing people with the policies and the ‘safety net’ to get them started on their social media journey. Where individuals were on that journey varied depending on the role the individual was in and different issues were raised by different staff groups, from doctors, nurses or corporate staff. So a key part of the week was sharing the guidance from the Nursing Midwifery Council, The General Medical Council and NHS Employers. It was also about explaining that all of the other codes of professional conduct and policies that we adhere to and basic respect for each other apply online, and that if we have conversations with good intent to improve things for our patients we can’t go far wrong.

So in summary let’s get the NHS more social and ban fax machines!