For the United Nations Development Programme, a global development network supporting countries all over the world, the daily challenges are not minor. Poverty, gender inequality and education are typical challenges this nonprofit seeks to solve on a daily basis. But as Sebastian Majewski shared in yesterday’s webinar, there is the opportunity to put an end to these challenges once and for all. How? With social media.

Sebastian’s thought starters:

• Listen – Find the conversations and understand them. Use a social listening tool that enables you to identify the conversations in an effective way.
• Determine the channels – Find where conversations are happening. This could influence where you engage and where you start new conversations.
• Determine influencers – In these conversations there are heroes leading the charge, making change, and developing a community of their own. Who are they? These leaders can play a role in reaching your goals and finding them is a big leap forward in making change.

The UNDP recently celebrated its 100th International Women’s Day and with the influence of social, it was a natural decision to tie social in to the special day. The UNDP looked at chatter around the event days before it occurred. They set baselines for the conversation and the landscape. From there, they studied the conversations during and after the event, which enabled them to establish key takeaways. Here’s a snapshot.

• Video was a strong mechanism for engagement. Views and comments of the International Women’s Day videos went above and beyond expectations and that approach can be a platform going forward.
• The bulk of conversations were dominated on Twitter. This opens the door for UNDP to listen, engage and focus their energy in that space.
• Take chances! Try video, venturing into different channels, etc. and see what hits.

The big question that came out of that webinar, to me anyway, is the potential for social. Is it truly powerful enough to end world issues? With the combination of people coming together, the desire for change and the technology to connect, the opportunities are endless.

But I’m not the only one with questions. The webinar had some great inquiries from the community and are now posted below with Sebastian’s answers. Also, here are some helpful links from yesterday’s session:

• Webinar recording
• Case study

Heather Read: With social media networks only providing limited geographic information how can you reliably target your communications or listening program to a specific local community?

Thanks for the question, Heather. Using the example of the International Women’s Day, we assumed that nurses and midwives in Africa are important stakeholders in that issue arena. Skilled attendance during childbirth has emerged as a critical issue in recent years in attempting to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Almost half of the total maternal deaths each year occur in sub-Saharan Africa where the lifetime risk of a woman dying from pregnancy related causes is estimated at 1 in 16 by comparison with an overall average of 1 in 2800 in ‘developed’ parts of the world (src: WHO).

Our aim was to identify active organizations through keyword search rather than using the geographic information provided by the dataset. Crawling the dataset and searching for keywords, such as “maternal health”, “midwives” or “reproductive health” helps you to related posts. You can also prioritize posts by calculating the engagement level and conversation reach of the posts. By doing that, we were able to identify important stakeholders around the issue of maternal health. From there, you need a qualitative approach to identify specific local communities, which means you will have to take a look at the posts.

Bart Byl: What kind of penetration does social media typically have in developing countries? Do you just focus on engaging the influencers who do have access?

The digital divide (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide) is an important issue and a limitation for our research. While most of the content is produced in the USA, the developing world is catching up quickly. Mobile technology is far more developed than Internet connections. Working closely with NGOs and the civil society helps us to identify groups that are very influential. However, the digital gap will shrink over the next decades.

Nicholas Ledner: Have you started cultivating any relationships with any of those influencers?

Yes, we are actively cultivating relationships with influential stakeholders. The approach is to add value to their work. If we work with the example of the midwives, we try to highlight relevant work, reports, statistics and events to especially those groups. In my opinion, that kind of communication is more effective than targeting those message to the general public. First, the targeted stakeholders appreciate the content we provide and second, they are strong in diffusing the content to a wider audience.

Yes (hi folks), how do they deal with folks who don’t use English?

The official languages of the United Nations are the six languages that are used in UN meetings, and in which official UN documents are produced. They include Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian and Spanish. Since we are just getting started with Social Media Monitoring, we are not able to produce the datasets in all languages. Radian6 does offer the opportunity to search in different languages. In practical terms, you need to create a topic profile for each language version and use translated keywords and terms.

Tags: Social Media, united nations