 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Joe Cinelli. I'm the assistant director for communications. I work out of Washington, D.C. National Service and Legislative Headquarters. They went DAV for about almost eight years now. About a year after I came aboard, we got involved with social media. At that time, we only had a YouTube channel. We're now just about most of the major platforms. Let's start off with a quick poll here. Just by raising your hand, how many of you are personally on Facebook, just as your own personal profiles? Most everyone, I guess about 80%. How many of you, your chapter, or we'll just start with your chapter, is on Facebook that you know of? Okay? And how many of you have a chapter that's on Twitter? How many of you know if your department is on Facebook? I can tell you, almost everyone's department is on Facebook in some capacity now. And about 84% of all Americans are on some sort of social media. The vast majority of them are on Facebook, and that's where we here at DAV at the national level get the most bang for our buck on social media. If you're not in social media, and a department commander from Virginia Jim said this exact same thing to me earlier today. You're invisible. Your chapter is invisible in a lot of people's eyes. It's become the primary way people go look for information. They don't want to look for information. Really, I should say they want the information to serve it up to them, and that's what social media does for you. I'm going to just diffuse statistics here on why social media is so powerful. And I think this is important, especially for senior leadership in the chapters and departments to understand. And if you're trying to convince your chapter or department to get on to Facebook or on Twitter or Instagram or some of these other social networks, it's important things that hopefully will help your argument. When your chapter decides to get on whatever social media, I would certainly suggest starting with Facebook. You want to have somebody who's obviously trusted. They're going to be controlling the voice, the image, the brand of your part of the organization and in ways representing, even if you say you're not, you're still representing the overall organization. The DAV looks the same across the board. A lot of people won't distinguish between your chapter and the national organization. As a member, even if you're not the one administering a page or profile, you can certainly help us and we need your help to continue to spread the word about what DAV is doing, about the important issues that veterans are facing today. I trust everyone here is well aware of those issues. So putting your personal perspective on those things becomes extremely valuable and we have a very high engagement rate because so many of you know what's going on. A lot of times when you're spreading that word, probably the thing that I see, I need more. I administer our Facebook page for national. You share it when we have hundreds, thousands of people sharing the content that we're putting out there. A lot of it's at the chapter level but most of it's at the personal level. We need you to put your perspective on there. Let people know, let your friends know, those who are following you, let them know why that issue is important to you, why you need them to take whatever particular action that post is calling for or sometimes that action is just simply reading what we've put out there or looking at the image or watching the video. Again it's really important and very powerful for you to put your personal perspective on it. And the bottom bullet here is exactly, it relates to all that. Be proud of what you're doing. I'm sure if you're paying the money to come here taking this time, you're a proud member and that's important for that to be able to show through in what you share on social media. Now a lot of times and if you're a chapter department worried about getting on there, you're worried about privacy, there's a lot of Facebook settings, Twitter settings are very detailed and you can control exactly what's out there at the personal level. But when you are posting at the organizational level, whether you're posting on behalf of your chapter or the department, you have to remember everything you put out there is just like a press release. Every word, every symbol, every picture it can be seen. And once it's been put up, I mean you can delete it if you don't want it up there after a while but the fact is it was there and there will be a track, a footprint that will never go away. We'll talk about speaking for DAV. I urge you not to attempt to speak for the organization at the national level but to understand again, and I think it's very important, I'll touch on this again, it's important to understand that there will be perceived that way often. Especially if you're sharing something that has a DAV logo on it or if you mention that you're a DAV member or that you're a leader within the organization. So just be very mindful of that. As a chapter, we talk about the considerations and concerns but you want something out there that tells what your chapter is doing, tell about the good things you're doing or tell about the deep concerns that your chapter has that the organization has, local news, very important. A simple snapshot of pictures at your chapter meetings can go a long way and acquiring new members, letting other people in the community who may be able to be a value down the road, letting them know what you're doing and why you deserve your organization deserves their support. Again, as a member, tell why this cause is important to you but help spread the message by tagging your chapter as an individual person or your department or national or all three but national is always there and very easy to tag. Use that at symbol if you're on Twitter and it also works on Facebook. We'll have all the addresses up here in a few minutes for anyone who hasn't seen them yet. I don't have anything printed but everything, these slides will all be available on DAV.org slash events. We'll also have them on Facebook and Twitter and I'm going to share here in a minute or two a private group that we've created on Facebook. They have a lot of resources for administrators of Facebook pages. Bottom bullet here, graphics, videos, links. You want something that your audience can do. Not just read your words but you want them to be able to take a next step and that's really important and we'll talk about that more in a minute. Here's your age breakdown. You can see usage is very high in every demographic group here but even still in the conversation that I've had here in the last couple of days a lot of people don't quite understand that social media is not just for kids in college or those who are still in the military. It's every age group and different age groups have different purposes of being on there and that's something important to understand but the bottom line is they're there and they want to be informed and they want to be engaged with. Facebook is the biggest social media, not just the biggest social media platform it's the biggest website out there. Billions are on there all the time. This is the cover image of our Facebook page and I guess earlier last month we surpassed 1 million likes on our Facebook page which we're very excited about. It took a little while. That's six years. You can see we have a pretty good curve here. It continues to grow. We decided I guess a couple years ago now to really make a concerted effort to start raising the number of people who like our page which has been subscribed to our page. At that time we were worried, I know I was worried, that we wouldn't have a dedicated audience if we started growing it and we were sitting at around 200,000 and when we'd share something we were reaching those 200,000 people who were engaging and they were really helping us and we were getting our message out there. But as we continue to grow, we continue to have a very active, very concerned audience. What you're seeing here, I know it's kind of the words especially are small but you're going to see the graphs. What this is, we're using video a lot more on our Facebook page. It's something I definitely suggest. Those of you who are already using social media for your chapters and departments, definitely consider using, use videos as often as possible and don't just take a video clip from YouTube and share that link onto your Facebook page. Facebook and YouTube are in a war for ratings, if you will. It's really for users and Facebook wants you to put the videos directly on their site. So if you upload those video files, whether it's your commander talking maybe a video clips from your convention or a conference or just a meeting, some of the service projects that are taking place out there, upload those video files directly to your Facebook page, to your page, not your profile, directly to your chapters page and you'll see a lot better results and that's been a good contributing factor to our rate growing audience as well. Here are the kind of numbers we're looking at at the national level on our Facebook page. This is in a single week, this was last week. In fact, the page likes there. I can't see because it's cut off on the screen but it's about 14,000 new likes a week right now. We are paying, we have a paid campaign to have advertising out there so people see our page who are not otherwise connected to our page. If the budget permits at your department level in particular that's something you may want to consider and I'll always be willing to help with that. But our post reach, we reached almost 6 million people last week and the key metric here is engagement. All the way to the right there, 400,000 people engaged with our post in some way. That means they either liked it or shared it or commented on it. They didn't just look at it and let it go floating down by. It actually got them to do something. Yes. So those are unique people. That's not the same person engaging with us a hundred times. Right? We have been working with Crosby Marketing which is an amazing firm that we've been working with at the national level and they've been a huge part of our growth being able to take us from the 200,000 up over a million and continue to grow. We hope to have more people liking us on Facebook than we have members in this organization. Pretty soon we feel like we can grow faster but of course we want the membership to grow as well but hopefully it'll work hand in hand. So when I'm selecting what content we put out there I look at three different things. I feel like every piece of content needs to do one of three things either the most popular one and the safest one is to instill pride. If they see your content and it's something they'd be proud to have on their page if it's be something they'd be proud to show their family or their friends it's going to do well. People are going to share it. They're going to like it. They're going to comment on it. And so there's a lot of stuff out there. There's stories, really positive stories about veterans accomplishing things overcoming obstacles clearly being honored. Sometimes it's not the veteran being honored it's us honoring the veteran. Those types of posts will certainly grow your audience and provide a lot of value. Second and probably the most common sense one is just to provide information. Provide information. This could be news about when your next chapter meeting is taking place about maybe when MSO is coming through. It could just be news about some new legislation that's passed through. Basic information. And it's going to be the middle of the road as far as engagement for you but it's a safe and very easy to find. There's a lot of news websites out there. You can simply provide a link to a Stars and Stripes article or a Washington Post article. Military times they cover a lot of veterans issues. Sharing those articles will keep your audience engaged they'll be ready and standing by when you need them for maybe for everyone to call their senators or something like that. And the third one and probably the biggest amount of people engaging with you is doing voc outrage. This is all times something happens. Terrible whether it's the VA making a terrible mistake or maybe a company like an airline disrespecting veterans or not paying attention to the American Disability Act. Things like that. I used to use this a lot more often but people get tired of it and you don't want to be that type. But when there's news out there it certainly works and certainly good content at times but again not too often. So I want to provide support. I want as many chapters out there as possible as many departments out there as possible to be on Facebook, be on Twitter, Periscope, these other platforms. And so we're bringing people together on Facebook and this private group. That's the URL you see up there which I'm not expecting anyone to write that down because search for DAV department chapter page admins and look for groups and just go ahead and request to be allowed into the group and within a day or so at the most, I'll let you in the group and we provide, we have a lot of talks in there, discussions on what's best practices and sometimes I'll outline some of the traps that are out there as well. And you can directly contact me through there as well. I've helped. We have about 250, almost 300 chapters that have Facebook pages now and I try to, I'm more than willing to provide continued support. I've helped about half of those pages get established and be happy to help your chapter do that as well. Christian Adams who is back in Cold Spring at headquarters in the fort there right now with a lot of live streaming. He does a lot of our live streaming and a lot of, he does the website dv.org. He also does our Instagram. This is a specifically exclusively mobile app sharing just imagery. If you have someone who likes to take a lot of photos, be a good platform to get onto and it's very easy. And contact me again or Christian Adams to get any support you need with it. Twitter is what we've been growing with the most in the last couple of years, especially this past year. You can see we're up over 30,000. I think over almost 32,000 probably tonight or tomorrow will be 32,000 followers on there. It is fast. Let me see if I... It's the fastest way to reach your audience and you can reach them as often as you want. With Facebook, you don't want to post more than two times a day, two or three times a day. With Twitter, you can tweet 100 times a day as long as what you're putting out there has some value to your audience. Twitter bought Periscope, which how many people here have used or at least heard of Periscope? Not many, but it's growing and I think by the end of this year a lot more of you have heard about it. I'm just skipping from here and simply taking your phone this becomes a TV channel if you will. You stream live and other people all over the world will pick it up with their phone live as it happens then afterwards at archives. It only lasts for a couple of days, but it's a great way... If you don't have the money to stream your chapter or your department meetings but you want people... There's other people who maybe they can't make it in and they want to be able to watch it as it happens. It's a great tool and it's all built through Twitter. We'll talk about it a little bit more here in a minute. Twitter has wanted to give a real brief explanation. For those of you who are on it, I apologize for getting to the basics but we're going to have a lot of new people on Twitter this year as well. It's limited to 140 characters. When text messaging first came around, your text messages were limited to 140 characters. It includes punctuation and spaces. It requires you to be very brief, very direct. If you want to include an image or a video or a link, you can do that and it takes up about 23 characters. You're down to a little less than 120 characters. You have to become a little creative. It gets the message out there quickly, especially once you start building followers. I've put this slide in here more for when we share this. This is kind of a step-by-step on how to actually send your first tweet, which buttons to push. This is what tweets look like. They look very small, brief messages. They're very rapid. They can be very easily shared by retweeting. This is what the backside looks like. After you send a tweet, you can see how other people are engaging with it. By the way, if you set up a Twitter account tonight and tweet, you're probably not going to get engagement right off the bat. But as you get it, you'll get people who can favorite it or retweet it, which means sending it to their friends or if they're following you. That's what our notification looked like about an hour ago. Yes. Yes, I'm sorry. Chelsea Augustine is Executive Director, Gary Augustine's daughter, and she's sitting right up front row today. We knew I'm working up back in the control booth, so I'm not able to tweet today. But we're getting the content out there that way. It doesn't always have to come directly from your account. If you have one person who runs your Twitter account and the rest of you are within that organization or tweeting, if you tag DAV HQ and you're tweeting here, I'm sitting in the back. I'll retweet you as long as it's something that we agree with in our message. If someone is tweeting that having so-and-so here's a waste of time or something like that, I probably won't tweet it because although, again, a lot of times we say retweeting doesn't constitute endorsement in a lot of ways it does no matter what you say. So these disclaimers don't work, but what Chelsea was tweeting were exactly the messages that we wanted to put out there. So I retweeted probably four or five different people who were in the crowd today, and I only knew they tweeted because they tagged our page, our profile, but not all of them. Chelsea used to be an intern with us as well. She's worked for IAVA in the past, but so that's who Chelsea is, but there were other people and actually Jim here as well. I just retweeted him a few times. I'm going backwards. Sorry, this is confused, not working. So again, here was a tweet that Chelsea did from this morning. She took a simple picture that kind of told a story, put some pictures or some words in there, put a quote and she tagged the at DAV HQ and our hashtag for the convention, which is protect veterans. We're using that because of the form that we're having on Monday with the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee and the secretary of VA will be back and DAV's position as well to make sure we have a strong VA going forward. This is an advertisement and you can tweet. You can tweet if you want to try to help get yourself more Facebook followers as well or if you get onto Periscope. Now Periscope is directly tied to Twitter. I had put a slide a few minutes back. Twitter bought Periscope. So anytime you post or you go live on Periscope, it automatically sends a tweet to all your followers. So these social media platforms working together is a very good strategy. And there's a lot of words here, but basically what it's saying is don't tweet something that you don't think your entire organization is going to be proud of. And as an individual don't tweet something that maybe you don't want your mother to read. But there's got to be some strategy behind it as I said earlier. So watch what's working for your chapter, for your department, change things up. Even if you have something working, you don't have to stick with it. You might be able to find something that's working better. I always reach out to me to kind of figure out maybe how can we make this better or why isn't this working. Frustration is early on. You will experience that and feel free to call me with it.