 Testing. Hashtags. YouTube. Interwefts. Sorry. Hi everyone. Just trying to get some tech set up. So my name is Martin Alderson. I'm CFA's digital media manager. So I've been at CFA for almost 10 years now, 10 years in October. So I've been with CFA right through the whole journey of social media. Because really 10 years ago when I started at CFA, social media pretty much didn't exist. I'm sure there wasn't that pervasive as it is today. The idea of this session is to just really, it will mainly be quick questions and answers from you guys because the feedback the committee, the organizing committee had was that they would just want some practical advice on how to do social media and some of the concerns, questions that people might have. Let's introduce my fellow panellists here. We've got Stefan from SES. Big round of applause. Thanks. And we've got Ryan, he's one of my colleagues at CFA. He's on the Upway Library. So these two, a lot of the questions that you may have probably relate to your brigades and so on, so Ryan's probably the expert in that. He runs a very successful brigade page. I'm more focused on the state level social media stuff. First of all, I thought it would be interesting to know, just to get an idea of in the room of how many of you have brigade Facebook pages, how many of you use social media as part of your community engagement? That's great. That's a good lot of people. I mean even a couple of years ago, I would have a lot less people doing that. We have seen a big surge in the past couple of years from a big surge and the number of brigades setting up pages at CFA. I think what we'll do first of all is hand over to Stefan. I just want to give you a brief on the situation of social media at SES. Stefan. Hi everyone, thank you for having me. I am as advertised, Stefan Dladibig. I'm the Manager of Emergency Management Communications at SES and we look after social media and other things. So is there anybody here who's here to sort of look at this from base principles in terms of how do I get started on social media? Yeah, awesome. Policy process is pretty simple in terms of if you as a unit want to get involved in social media, if you want to set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account or anything you can just contact Emergency Management Communications and we can help you out. And then from there we have a policy to sort of set the direction of sort of what you should do and what you can't do and that sort of thing and there's also a page on the extra net which has all the cool photos and that sort of stuff. So the idea is to make it super easy and if you haven't done it before we're pretty happy for you to just call us and say I would like a Facebook page and we can make a Facebook page and hand it to you in high five and everything. The broad philosophy I suppose of social media at sort of that state level of SES that we look after we have a state sort of the Victoria SES Facebook page which we run which pipes the warnings from our sort of automated warning system straight onto the page and we also use that to sort of promote what units and the services doing around the state. And then on Twitter we have a sort of SES news one which is the human being typing about it saying this is the cool stuff they're up to today and then we have a separate warnings Twitter account which people can subscribe to which is just fed by that sort of one source robot thing. Whenever we put out a flood warning or a storm warning or an earthquake warning it will automatically post that to that account. Because on Twitter people are pretty cool to just sort of scroll through and use it as a sort of news delivery update service whereas on Facebook we're really looking to sort of engage with the community and hang out with them and stuff. I suppose the vibe is you know primarily as in all things we're hoping that people will use our Facebook page as a forum in which to get warnings and that they will like the page engage with it so that when there's an emergency and we need to talk to them and we've got really important stuff to say they'll be there and they'll be listening and they're involved. Obviously the way that we do that, I think we heard Dan talk yesterday about this idea that if you go out to the community and go we would like to talk to you about important safety messaging and the flood warning sometime they're probably going to go yeah cool story bro and go off and do something else but if we create sort of a lot of Facebook pages which talk about who we are and how awesome we are and we are super awesome at a unit level there's lots of cool stuff happening. We sort of, I don't want to say trick people but we bring them in and say look hang out with us we're a part of your community let's be cool and then they're there and then when we need to talk to them we've got an audience. Success. Thanks Stefan, round of applause for that one. Yeah so just a quick round down on CFA similar sort of setup at a state level as Stefan says I'm sure you're probably aware the warnings are all automated through the one source one message warning system and we monitor social media on a Friday night five but also some amount of hours monitoring as well and there's 24-7 support there so if there ever is a major issue that you're encounter with social media that you become aware of through your duty officer you can contact the CFA media person who will contact the social media person and we can provide some support and advice if you ever need that. At CFA how many brigades roughly are we aware of? I think there's about 260. 260? Yeah. So we're about 260 brigades that we're aware of if you want starting up all the time. This the process is as long as you have the go-ahead from your brigade management team there's no reason we would encourage you to get on social media and start using it to engage with the community so I remember even that I was doing social media for the state but it still took me a couple years to persuade my own brigade management team to set up a brigade Facebook page so there was a bit of reluctance in the past and it's very much just dependent on how you have in your brigade to have people who are confident in social media and who are also able to persuade the brigade management team that it's not so scary and that's a really useful tool to use for community engagement. One of the big resources that we've set up just a couple of years ago is a closed Facebook group excuse me a closed Facebook group for social media managers we have over 600 people signed up that closed Facebook group which is a really good resource hopefully some of you are on it it's a really good resource for asking questions, getting advice and getting support we also have procedures and guidelines available on CFI Internet there's also guidelines on the CFI news and media site on the use of photos and videos which often come we also have a draft policy that's just waiting to be approved by the boards hopefully in the next few months you'll have a new updated policy as well to provide some guidance that's more related to the legal aspects of social media and the potential risks and disciplinary things that can happen if you're silly and do silly things but I think often those concerns are overestimated I mean we've been running social media and CFI with almost 390,000 people following reaching millions of people very rarely do we come across any major issues that we have to deal with every night again we have to deal with so I think are there any questions? I'll start taking some questions good, a few hands going up that's good yeah look it's about 20% of what all of you guys said this morning I really don't understand I don't for one know what a closed Facebook is there's an assumption with the whole social media concept that everybody understands the jargon it's the jargon that puts me on I don't know what most of the things refer to I don't know what the implications of those things are and the significance of those things are and the impact that they're going to have on the people that I do know I can identify my audience but it's the assumption that everybody has this type of device or this type of thing I need to come here to learn some of the wording and understand what these words do the significance of those on the people that I'm trying to communicate with and not let you assume any longer that I know more than about 20% and I'm the intelligent person of what this whole subject is about yeah that's great that's exactly what this session is about so thanks for calling us up on that certainly no measure of your intelligence if you know the social media link or not so yeah apologies for that that's exactly what this session is for and exactly what the questions and answers are for I think that's a good one for Ryan first of all just taking that point Ryan can you, do you want to give a bit of a run down on what Facebook pages are and what groups and open and closed and that sort of thing yeah so basically a Facebook page is public it's public everyone will see it and there's nothing you can do to stop the public from viewing it if you want something more private which is a group you can make your own group set it to private and you could have only your brigade or unit members part of that group so you can discuss anything and it's a private forum for you to talk about anything that you might need to talk about training or turnouts or anything and everything so a page is what you want to do and what you want to set up for the community because they will be able to view everything that you post whereas that group is something more internal use and Martin mentioned the group that we have for social media managers and certainly if you have Facebook I'll welcome you to join the group and it's a good space for people who don't understand you know people who understand very little about Facebook and even those people who have it nailed down can go in there ask questions talk about the issues they face and ask advice from over 630 subject members that we have in there does that help? So taking it back to the very basic level I mean the reason that we do social media is that it is so many people do use it it's a really effective both in number of people you can get to an awesome cost cause it costs nothing really to set up a page and engage with people that if you're providing content that people find useful if you're providing information that people find useful you'll find that through the very nature it will be shared and a lot of people will get that information if you think you know the effort that goes into and obviously we have to keep doing all the face to face things and everything else that we do we think the effort that goes into arranging a meeting or doing some leaflet drops or things like that a good setup in social media you can reach those people with that information very quickly and very easily so that's a very basic level what the benefits of social media are Yeah so I before I worked at SES I was a and I first encountered social media through that and newspapers were super terrified of social media because it's just everybody has a newspaper now so it's helpful to think of social media there is it's difficult to talk about without the jargon it's sort of like everything we do in emergency services but don't stress out if someone talks about hashtags and it feels really weird just Facebook for example is a channel to talk through it's like the phone or the newspaper or something as a brigade or a unit you can create a Facebook page which is effectively your sort of front page of your newspaper which you control and are the editor of and can just go here's what I want to tell my community today and that's really valuable specifically for the work that you guys are doing out in your communities where you are a member of that team who has their best interest in heart and is able to talk to them in a way that I can't because you know them and you are part of them so it is sort of cutting out the middleman of everything else because you are able to just write hey everybody we're having a meeting at 10 o'clock and it would be really cool if you all came and instead of having to go to the newspaper and convince the journalists to write that and they write it in three days and then they put it out but they sort of misspell your name and everything you have the ability to just put it out on Facebook and Twitter it's all just everybody publishes whatever they want and everybody else signs up to read the stuff that everybody and they like publishes and then they can comment on it and if they really like it they can share it to everybody that they follow and in that way information propagates throughout the thing so if that's the concept in your brain everything else can sort of flow from that and I would encourage you if you're interested in social media but just sort of don't understand it or you haven't had experience with it because it is a really weird esoteric thing if you've never seen it before you can create a public profile you can create it in not even your name just fill out the basic stuff follow a couple of people they're really set up to just take you through the prompts and stuff so you can do it sort of privately and in a way that will not impinge your personal reputation or anything and just click all the buttons you can't break anything and that really is the best way to start learning the lingo of the thing We'll take a few more questions and I would encourage you to even specific questions about what is a hashtag what is a Facebook group any other search questions very happy to take Could I just first of all challenge the assumption that everyone's on Facebook this is a way of getting in touch with everyone, I live in a fairly small rural community with a high proportion of retirees and the people that we want to get to aren't on Facebook but putting that comment aside now we started off thought we were very adventurous of having a website and now we have a Facebook page Is there any independent value in websites these days what are the relative merits of websites versus Facebook pages Well, I think it's about you know people, the problems I see a lot with people on social media is as you say the idea of just saying social media is a big deal so I need to get on social media so let's do it and then in six months go well no one's listening and we don't really what are we trying to do so I think as I say social media is a really powerful channel these days but you are correct in that it's the same as everything else it's the same as the newspaper and the phone you're never going to get everybody with one thing, sort of from our level we're looking at putting things out on every possible channel just to try and get everybody but if you start from what are the messages that we're trying to communicate to our community and then roll it out from there so social media is really good if you want to be conversing with people they're really good to build trust and to put a human personality on the message that you've got which in this sphere of work that we're here to talk about today is really valuable because you're able to go this is me, I'm a person I'm giving my time to keep you safe that's a really valuable message websites probably have more valuable in terms of presenting more nuanced longer messages or static information so if your unit has standing appointments or information that never changes and that sort of thing but have a look at sort of SCS and CFA both have pretty like big state level websites with a lot of information on them so have a look at those and you would probably you don't need a website if there was stuff not covered there that you really wanted to hang out like if you're just looking to say you know we exist and we're doing good work and here's what we want you to know do that on Facebook with the added advantage that they own all the infrastructure and you don't have to web design it and that sort of thing I think that's a really good question and it's something I've been thinking about that the problem with websites are that they're quite difficult to maintain and often when we see all the time you might have someone in your brigade who's a bit of a whiz on the web and they'll set up a website but then a couple of years later they have to brigade so at a date you know social media is much easier in a way you know if you get on there and you figure out how to use it it's really quite simple to use and simple to maintain much easier than a website so unless as Steph had said at my brigade the website is mainly you can even think of what the website's purpose is the website at our brigade is mainly from members and it's you know meeting minutes and things like that so that's sort of admin of the brigade it's a good, can't be a good place to do that but as regards engaging the community and getting community information out there I'm not sure that you want to do that on a brigade website because you've got your social media and the stuff and said you've got all of the community safety messages and the resources available on the state website so personally I don't think websites are worth the effort anymore to be honest yeah definitely from a brigade standing you know AppY has a website it's actually quite embarrassing it's really old it's just got basic static messages you know address our phone number and a few other bits and pieces and for us it's not really a concern because our facebook page is updated daily or every couple of days when someone from the community has a question they message us or comment and we get back to them as soon as we can so yeah a website is good for static information but as far as actually engaging the community it's about social media so if you've got something great leave it up but personally from a brigade or unit level I would put that focus into Facebook guys I've just got three quick questions what's the name of your closed facebook group you've mentioned a number of times CFA social media managers CFA social media managers I think we should write that down and I believe the link is actually facebook.com slash groups slash CFA social I think I'm right if you just search for CFA social media if you search for CFA social media it should come up in the search one of the problems that we've got is that our facebook was set up a while ago a couple of our administrators have gone now how do we get our administration back so it's a more technical question and it's also a closed group at the moment can you open that up immediately to a public group okay so if you've got a group is a group and it if it basically you don't have a page so you want to start and you want to get a page you want to start from scratch and get a page because that's what the community will interact with keep your group for an internal thing we hear often about members starting pages and groups and then moving on and no one having any access unfortunately you really need to try and get hold of those people and ask them very nicely that they add you so we can go through all the boring details afterwards as far as how you add people to become an administrator on a page or a group but if you cannot get hold of those people unfortunately you would need to start from scratch it's always a good idea to have at least a couple of people as administrators on your page in case one person does go or it takes the head staggers it's hard to do things you don't want to do so even if someone is not that active on the page someone who you trust is well trusted and is likely to be around for a while and isn't likely to be disappearing off anywhere it's always good to have that sort of person on the page as well as a 17 year old recruiters in the social media I wouldn't just leave it all in the hands of that person it's important to keep in mind that these you get the quiet life from Facebook for example because they own all they'll update it and do all that sort of stuff but it is also their architecture so if all the admins go away you will have to talk to Facebook which can be a bit arduous so I'd encourage you to have two or three backups if that would be possible a few more questions along the frontier if we can come along after this one hi the name is Simon from Emerald Fire Station this can be a two part question the first part can be a bit of an internal advertising and the second one is the best way of doing it I'm going to start off with a minute from my side a lot of you would have seen some diaries on your chairs when you first got here these are the fundraising community the diaries that Emerald came up with now we're trying to get all the brigades to like us or share us if I need to help on their Facebook sites so the more they sell of these the more money each brigade makes now at the moment the way that this sometimes a little bit of advertising but the way that this works the diaries are $20 and wherever the general public buys these they will nominate which brigade they want their $5 donations to go to share this on their Facebook the more that we sell the more you make we've got at the moment the Emeralds CFA Facebook bit of advertising did you get that live? I mean seriously I'm new at Facebook what is the best way of trying to share this all around Victoria so all brigades are trying to share the same message well the first thing that popped into my head would be going into our group and say look guys we've got this offer share it around to your communities and let them know that if they buy one of these fantastic diaries for $20 you'll receive $5 another way on top of would be to contact News and Media and we could put an email or some communication out to as many brigades as possible because it is a great idea to fundraise and then on top of that as well would be to run Facebook advertising from your own brigade page targeting people in you could stick with your own area of Emerald or the hills Melbourne, Victoria all the whole country Facebook advertising is a really effective way of getting a message out there it's really economical but again I would probably go through all of those boring details with you afterwards thank you I think also it's all about the content if you're sharing stuff with people that they want to share so if you want to think about can you do a video other photos that you could share that might catch people's attention so it's all about trying to get some content that will actually grab people's attention and they'll share it on social media that's really the core trick to it I would echo that from in terms of like we've got a good network like a really supportive network of SES units having Facebook pages and if someone does something really awesome it tends to get shared around so sort of half a dozen of them and we as sort of the Shangri-La awesome goal of the state SES page is to be sharing sort of a digest of all the coolest stuff that's happening at a unit level that's the best content that exists so it is sort of that infuriatingly simple but complex thing of just do really cool stuff and present it well and people will go oh interesting click, that's the thing just a query it's on a slightly different note as an incident controller I've got some reservations about social media it's got as good points and I used it myself a little bit and there's no problems with the official Facebook pages and so on so it's a CFA SES big poll my big concern though is the unofficial sites that established in just about every country town I guess where someone can set up a website and then when a emergency develops and we've had it happen in our area a number of times there's information put on this particular website that is totally incorrect and no one, there's no real why of controlling it as an example when the 11 year old boy Luke went missing on the edge of Lake Yildon at Easter this year there's a Facebook page established to support the family in the search and there was a lot of misleading information published on there there was a lot of local problems we had some fires in the area back prior to Christmas and the game there was false information put on these particular pages what can we do about this see the problem is anyone can go and establish a Facebook page they can call it whoop whoop local news or something and then it's well known and people look at it and it just escalates and escalates and the people that are controlling the situation has got very little control about what's happening it's a common issue and you're quite right there isn't a way that we have of controlling it as in in the past I think people's minds will contact Facebook or will tell YouTube to take that video off or will tell them to shut that page down so the only control that we do have is being really active on social media so that people know where the official sources are and also monitoring so monitoring being aware of what other community pages do set up and working with them generally these community pages quite a lot of examples in Tasmania and other places where communities have filled a gap because there wasn't official social media happening and generally they're good intentioned to share information and do the right thing so if we are aware of that through our monitoring and we have a credibility and standing in a large community already built up on social media as the official channels then we can influence that conversation we can get into those channels we can share the correct information we can correct misinformation and that's really it and it is an effective way of doing it because people can see it's like a person that follows you is like a vote saying yes I trust this person so if we've built up that credibility you can't get misinformation corrected quite easily but it does require you to be active on social media and to be monitoring and to be comfortable with getting into the conversation and correcting information but as I said very rare occasions do you ever hear about groups or people deliberately trying to share misinformation it's normally well intentioned but if you can educate them and show them where to get the correct information normally that will help does that help a bit? and then there is nothing we can do about people going on and sharing information as they are breaking any laws which they generally aren't Quick question I have to say up front that I've got an IT background you talk about social media but all I've heard so far is Facebook Facebook Facebook is it the only solution? No it's not Can we add some other words? We have Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest Tumblr, Snapchat That's why we do talk about it I am for the biggest and the best channel for engaging people at the minute That's really the answer I think I was after If it's the best way of going There's no real question at the minute it's Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with the three channels really we say it's worth investing time in at a state level because we need to be ahead of the game we'll be keeping an eye on the other channels that spring up and other things that are happening there's all sorts of you go through a hundred different things that are happening but until they start to get some traction and people start falling it's not worth us spending the time on it so Facebook number one Twitter probably number two and Instagram as the third channel and even Instagram is number three it's more of just a fun way to connect with your community it's certainly not a space that you would use for warnings and advice and things like that but yeah, I guess the focus really here is Facebook because it takes a lot of time to manage social media properly no one has a lot of time so focus on Facebook if you've suddenly found that you had a lot of time to devote then you would move into those other areas yeah, it's certainly the experience at SES that the majority of people who are having the discussions that we want to be involved in are doing it on Facebook at the moment and given the sort of finite resources we're putting a lot of efforts into Facebook we do Twitter as well but sort of a secondary channel and it sort of goes back to the figure out the message and then where's the best forum to do it which is why Facebook's become a thing if in a year's time everyone dumps Facebook and goes exclusively Snapchat or something which don't ask me what that is, I'm not really sure but then we would move there but certainly at a or brigade level we talk a lot about Facebook because yeah, given our experiences we would suggest that's probably the default in terms of if you wanted to do social media but didn't have a compelling reason to not do another one that's probably going to be the most traction but if you decided that your message was something else to a different, you know, if you were looking to talk exclusively to a very young audience or something you might look at sort of Instagram or something else just to give you an outline on the stats I know you're quite right, not everyone's on Facebook but a very high percentage of people that aren't on Facebook, I haven't seen any stats recently but the number of people that use Facebook of all age groups this idea that it's just young people doing it is nonsense and it might have been at the start but it's not now so there's a whole art demographics that are about 66% female and spread over all age groups on our page so yes, there would be more people in urban areas generally using it mainly because you've got the good internet connections and so on but every demographic, every area there are people using it it's not even about if you're using it a lot of people get information from their kids who are on Facebook so during emergencies it's about getting the information out there and whatever channel we can the story that the Queen's and Police tell during the cyclones in 2011 was that the elderly lady sheltering under a table listening to the wind up radio and getting the news from the radio stations but the radio stations were getting the information from Twitter from the Twitter that Queen's and Police are putting out so in reality that lady listening to the radio under a table has no idea what Twitter is but she's getting her information wait after they will always love you man as you can see a media emotional connection I wasn't expecting that wasn't expecting such love so it's not even if you're not on social media there's benefits you know all of your communities on social media there's also lots of stories of people in emergency areas not aware of what's happening not having the information and in relatives even international children who are overseas phoning their parents and saying there's a fire down your road and they don't know about it so that social media you may not be on social media but you'll benefit from that information being shared Hi I'm Kelly Stoner from Bricefing my question is you talked earlier about the automated prompting of warnings onto your Facebook page is that just the state page is that something that can be set up to a local brigade page the reason I'm asking is my biggest fear of sharing any type of warning information at any stage on a local brigade page is my availability and my brigade's availability to update that I work four days a week I work and not on social media so yes from an SES perspective we do not ask any unit or even our regional officers to publish warnings because as you say you are sort of making a promise to the community it was really hard to keep I would not expect anybody to have the capacity to share every relevant warning as it came up in real time because you know I don't do that I don't do it forming so we if units want to develop their sort of local online presence into a bit of a warnings plant like if they want to be talking about that stuff we encourage them to share it from the state page because it does it continues that link of information so if someone comes to your page and sees this warning you can build context around it to say hey here's a warning here's why you should know about it and you can be very clear of like we're sharing this but it comes from there because certainly our messaging around this space is you can follow SES on Facebook to find warnings and you're right there's a risk there that people go oh cool I'll find my local Facebook page and I won't get a warning one of the disclaimers that we have even on our page is you know and you should have on all your brigade pages this page is not monitored 24-7 and that for warnings you can direct them to probably the emergency website or the emergency social media channels which are just setting up that's a bit of an information you may not be aware of but the emergency are established on Facebook and Twitter channels as well so all that's a good challenge to follow for all emergencies not just agency related stuff and in my experience a lot of the anxiety around social media is that idea that once you turn it on you will be drowned in a torrent of people demanding that you are available at 3am every morning and you guys are already often quite available at 3am for the community's needs you know but you can defeat this through honesty so as Martin said even our pages which have paid staff monitoring them a lot of the time just have really clear messages on them that are like we're not looking at this all the time our Twitter account which pumps the robot warnings says very clearly on there no person looks at this you won't get a response and that's fine so you can quell that anxiety if you look at this and go look we'd really like to do it but we're worried that we're only going to be able to respond to comments during training on Tuesday between 6 and 9 then just put up there like we only respond to comments between 6 and 9 and if you want if you're looking for this go over there and people will be quite accommodating of that I just wanted to address earlier concern about inaccurate information on Facebook I know at least a few of my friends have had people do things like duplicate their Facebook pages and you know it got pretty stressed out about that because someone is pretending to be someone else and then of course giving inaccurate information but to Facebook's credit they're actually quite good if someone is actually putting out inaccurate information they really get on it and you know they'll slam those people and they'll block them off Facebook so if people are putting out inaccurate information you can actually contact Facebook and they will respond so a few years back it was very difficult because they only really had staff in the States but now they have a lot of staff we do have direct contact with Facebook staff in Australia and New Zealand quite a few staff as well so if there is ever an issue of impersonation then it's a serious issue to do with your brigade someone said I think brigade page and was putting out fake information contact us and we'll be able to make those contact with Facebook and get those pages removed if they're deliberately fake just because you don't like some information of someone's publication Facebook won't remove that Facebook can't be the arbitrator of what's right and what's wrong in the sense of information but if someone is blatantly pretending impersonating your brigade or impersonating you they will do something like that Hi Sharon from Monash I'm just wondering in your opinions are you aware of any successful Facebook pages and what is it that makes it successful? As in units of a brigade so we're doing good work? Yeah units at unit level and you know just is it something that they're putting out that seems to make it very successful they're getting a lot of likes the communities at work? At Upway Fibregate our page is very popular has a very high level of engagement after this session I'm running a session on advanced Facebook and going through all of those little things that make a good page great which is what it's called so yeah but really it's got to be relevant whatever you post has to be relevant to your community think about why should they follow your page? If they should only follow your page so when there's a fire or a flood then that's boring they're just not going to do it so you want to be timely you want to post content as often as possible so long as it is relevant and engagement with your community through that page is a two way street so you've got to post good content but then when they respond and ask questions you need to engage with them again respond to them and be a service through Facebook to help them with anything they need I think if the the SES units I see that do really well on Facebook and there's ones that do consistently well and there's ones that have like some of their content is amazing I would say it's authentic honest and it's awesome and it's fun is the thing so the units that consistently engage really well with their communities are units where if you look at their Facebook page you cannot look at it and not come away understanding that that's a group of human beings who are meeting once a week to train and they really care about what they're doing and they're having fun is the thing don't try to be a business you're a group of people united by passion to make your neighbours lives better and that's really powerful stuff so you guys are playing with like a really stacked deck in terms of how to create good social media content because your existence is so amazing like you're not going how do we make Coca-Cola seem interesting to diabetes people like you don't have to do that you just have to go here's what we're up to you know Diabetics it was a long night it was a band everything but it's a thing so like if the unit unites for an evening to do sort of road crash rescue stuff just getting photos of it and people smiling at cameras and that sort of thing like big bright pictures of volunteers in uniform with their like smiling can't go wrong and just someone talking like I am a person this is what we are doing and this is why we are doing it and also if anything you do ever involves in any way put it on the internet yes cute animals always work but you're exactly right if you love going to training every week then show that through photos and your messages on your page you know we can sometimes you know we know what training is like every week we know what your brigade unit life is like our facebook fans don't know that so even posting something about a meeting could be interesting but you have a lot of fun and that's I mean you may think what's the community education value or the community preparedness value in that but the point is you can't just constantly preach to people you have to you know have a bit of fun get them interesting fun stuff as well so and by doing that you're building up credibility you're building up followers so when you do have to give them some really important worthy information they're going to say ok fair enough I'll listen to this because they're not just constantly preaching on me if you want to do like a really quick and dirty recipe for a unit or brigade facebook page set one up post three things a week make one of them a safety message written in sort of human being speak like hey don't drive through floodwater because one fact don't do it one time a week get one member get a good photo of them get them to write what's their name how long have they been a member why did they join and what do they like to do and just put that up and that stuff's great and then do one other thing which these guys will say what it is so we could spend a whole session on this sort of stuff which is exactly why Ryan is doing a session directly after this one on those sorts of tips those sort of real practical tips about how you can make a good facebook page better so the people that have facebook pages are about to set them up thinking about it certainly worth attending rand session one more question I'm afraid does anyone else with other questions after speaking afterwards one way that you were talking about websites versus facebook page and you're not very keen on websites what we did we regenerated our website made a brand new one but we actually included the facebook page as well to scroll not everybody's into facebook but they're into websites with vice versa so we actually put the facebook page on our home page on our website so therefore they got both both worlds can we get one more quick question then if we have time to answer that's a good point and facebook is so easy to update content you can't embed on websites which means that there's new stuff on the website all the time as a modern facebook user I get the impression from you guys are speaking and what I've heard before that facebook pages need to be updated pretty much constantly to keep people alive my question is how many enthusiasts do you need in a unit or a brigade to keep your facebook page going and how long do these people last because some of them are going to be enthusiasts on social media and they're going to go off and lose interest in the cfa or the secs and do something else so that's my question yeah great question it could just be one person depending on how enthusiastic that enthusiast is they could do the whole lot there might be burnout we say update regularly if that's once a week then that's once a week but if you can do it once a day or twice a day then that's excellent but at least do something and if it means you can only do something once a week you can only find content that often then that's better than nothing but certainly I hear a lot of people saying well what lieutenant what officer should manage social media because what does it fall under if you've got someone who's keen to do it and if they want to do it and they understand the basics give it to them and I think that's all we have time for folks Steph and Rana we all have our standard cfa and secs email addresses m.anderson.vonderhorst what's your format in secs media at secs if you have any social media so you can certainly send us questions there or you could message our facebook page of course we'll go on secs link or you can speak to us afterwards or you can play us love songs and your phones as well ok thanks very much so one more round of applause for the three guys up the front here fantastic session thanks for answering more questions so it's now morning tea time so you can access morning tea at these stores please note it is a very short break and there is plans for a photo as well but please make sure you have picked your session ready to go at five past one of the six options at five past eleven thank you