10. MOVING THE AGENDA FORWARD: SOME TANGIBLE NEXT STEPS

People and organisations across the globe will continue to take up and use social media as their use and availability continues to grow rapidly.  This will happen whether or not AIDS organisations and funders concentrate energy on this area. However, those efforts could be supported, extended and made many times more effective through targeted programmes. This would require new or diverted resources being made available. We outline below some areas we believe would deliver the best return on investment.

If not now, when?

Invest in building capacity and sharing learning in non-OECD countries in where Social Media are taking off.

Our research shows that people and organisations in the South are only just beginning to use social media for social change purposes. From activity in the UK and US over the past five years, there is a growing body of evidence of how organisations and individuals can use new media effectively. New media itself makes connecting these constituencies easier and more cost effective than traditional capacity building activities since regional, national and local face-to-face activities are more easily facilitated and supported. Specifically, we suggest:

• Develop a social network / group within SNS for practitioners involved with aids2031 and associated programmes and commit resources to community management to help this grow as a knowledge and practice sharing hub.
• Establish programmes to test and innovate in SNS based outreach, bringing together people who work in Social Media with those experienced in working with young people in specific locations. The experience and good practice standards that youth workers bring to the table needs to inform enable application and programme development while enabling them to operate without having to scale a long social-media learning curve.

Research the known unknowns

While it is traditional for research reports to recommend new areas of research we believe that this area of work is both growing in importance and changing so rapidly that continued primary research is essential to be able to keep pace and identify the most promising areas for AIDS communicators to develop. Specifically, we suggest

1. Develop a social media monitor (research programme) focussed on HIV/AIDS education. This would aim to
   • Update and maintain the information we have gathered on our target areas; develop similar data sets for other locations of specific interest to the HIV/AIDS activists or where usage is exploding
   • Research in more depth and over a longer time period behaviour and usage patterns in non-OECD countries than we have been able to do in this first rapid study
   • Continue to monitor technological and business driven innovations in both developed and newer markets, reporting on their implications for Health Communicators
2. Develop a light-weight monitoring and evaluation framework to calculate the ROI of SNS based interventions
3. Develop a risk assessment framework for engagement with SNS⁹⁵

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.⁹⁶

Engage in a structured way with major players, particularly in the area of cross-media applications, including in mobile phone environments.

We note above the important trend within SNS of integrating broadcast and online media in multi-platform productions. Soap operas and community narratives is a format that has been used for development communications in Radio and TV. We believe that there extending this approach into SNS is a major opportunity. We also believe that there would be interest from major platform players, who have already shown their preparedness to work in the HIV/AIDS field and for whom such a partnership offers increased access and reach in critical developing markets.

Establish innovation funds to pilot new ideas for SNS based outreach and communications

As we note above, working with Social Media in particular and Web 2.0 in general requires a very different approach to traditional principles for engaging with technology. We argue that organisations and campaigns should engage with established social networks and this needs to balance working to a standard structured, managed framework with relaxing control in terms of content and engagement activities. Many of the most successful activities started informally, often with an “amateur” look that gave space to more informal conversations. Establishing funds, possibly channelled through competitions, is an effective way of encouraging innovation “at arms length

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