Juvenile Diabetes Results Are Here

Juvenile "Type1" Diabetes

The purpose of this Juvenile Diabetes health campaign was to educate parents and youth about the dynamics of Diabetes. This campaign was also responsible for advocating healthy food choices and lifestyles for individuals who live with this chronic disease every day.

My target audience for this campaign did not change because our goal was to help better the lives of youth and parents of children who currently have Juvenile “Type1” Diabetes. However, I believe this campaign did raise more awareness for other individuals who were not aware of this disease.


Campaign Objectives:

• Raise Awareness
• Provide educational knowledge
• Engaging viewers to be interactive
• Not over doing the content on social media

The Campaign Strategies were followed through during this campaign launch, but it became extremely difficult to get users to engage in the posts and provide feedback. The post provided twice during the day reflected information about what juvenile diabetes is and how it affects a person body. Ways people can be more proactive with managing juvenile diabetes by taking their insulin properly, eating healthy, creating exercise plans, and so much more beneficial information.

The Juvenile Diabetes Twitter page (#JuDiabetes) was filled with interesting tweets about Juvenile Diabetes facts, history, questions to ask your doctor, and the opportunity for users to share their inspiring stories about diabetes. The social media platform took a lot of time to engage users and it became very time consuming to keep twitter updated on a regular basis. Getting users to get more actively involve with tweets and re-tweeting of the information was difficult because people are not as familiar with this disease. Our twitter account did not reach a lot of users because there was a limited amount of content in the posts about a disease that is so huge, but yet innocently overlooked by individual’s.

Meanwhile our campaign did not have as much interactive as we would have liked it to be, but we did have a few organizations such as the cancer society, jdrf advocacy, and diabetes association’s inbox for more information.  We also received information about their upcoming events and future ideas for the organizations to possibly work together on.

The Juvenile Diabetes Facebook page for this campaign was interactive and followed the original guidelines. There were appropriate statuses, posts, pictures, work out plans, and facts on Juvenile Diabetes. Viewers shared some of the information with their facebook friends and responded to some of the interesting facts listed about the disease. The goal for our facebook page was to make users more aware of the disease symptoms and facts, but also provide creative ways for our target audience to take back control over their lives in general.

There were comments on Facebook from parents who have children with Juvenile Diabetes and how some of the information was very beneficial to learn. Our Twitter had very little retweets and followers for sharing the Juvenile Diabetes campaign.  I struggled a lot with time management of posting information because I tried to change the times up to get youth and parents more involved since the original times did not work as well. The interactivity for both of these social media sites was not as high as we projected so it really hindered the success of spreading awareness for our campaign.

During the launch of our Juvenile Diabetes campaign our facebook account received over 50 friend requests and about 16 likes of different statuses on a lot of the information. There were also some sharing of different posts and information about diabetes which raised much effectiveness for spreading awareness. The twitter pages only had 4 followers and followed about 12 followers because we would have some people originally following the page in the beginning then suddenly leave from supporting the health issue. I think the lack of followers was due to only have a week to launch the campaign and the sites being so time consuming to keep up with on a regular basis.

Overall, the success of this campaign was measured by how many friends, followers, likes, comments, and sharing of information my sites received. I believe facebook received some pretty interesting feedback especially with people and other health organizations being interested with being our health campaign friend to advocating healthy lifestyles with living with Juvenile Diabetes. Although Twitter did not meet the appropriate success, I believe with full dedication and more supporters then the Juvenile Diabetes Campaign can truly grow. Although the campaign interaction was not the highest I still believe this was a great opportunity to help youth and parents of child with this disease take back control over their life day by day.

Take Back Control Over Your Life With Ju Diabetes

Juvenile “Type 1” Diabetes

Almost every knows someone who has diabetes. According to the National Diabetes Clearinghouse, an estimated 23.6 million people in the United States and 7.8 percent of the population have diabetes which is a serious and long-life condition for people to live with. Diabetes is a disorder of metabolism, basically the way the body uses digested food for growth and energy. Most of the foods that people eat are broken down into glucose, the form of sugar in the blood. Glucose is the main source for fuel for the body and for it to get into cells, insulin must be present. Diabetes means your blood glucose or blood sugar levels are too high. The three main types of diabetes are:

·         Type 1 Diabetes

·         Type 2 Diabetes

·         Gestational Diabetes



Juvenile Diabetes also known as Type 1 Diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which a person’s pancreas will stop producing insulin, a hormone that enables people to get energy from food.  It occurs when the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells in the pancreas, called beta cells. Without enough insulin, glucose builds up in the bloodstream instead of going into the cells. The body is unable to use this glucose for energy. This leads to the symptoms of type 1 diabetes and a person with this disease must take insulin on a daily basis to live.

The exact cause of type 1 diabetes is unknown and can be passed down through families.

The focus for this health campaign is to educate parents and youth about the dynamics of Juvenile Diabetes and advocate healthy food choices and lifestyles.  By campaigning for this chronic disease it will help increase awareness for Juvenile “Type1” Diabetes and help individuals take back control over their lives.

"Extended Ju Diabetes Logo"

The target audience for this campaign will be primarily youth and parents of children who currently have Juvenile Diabetes because this disease mainly affects children and adults at any age. Juvenile Diabetes comes on suddenly causing severe dependence by being injected insulin for life, and carries constant threats of devastating complications. 

Since, Type 1 diabetes is a constant challenge to manage this is a great way to provide educational information and ways to help balance insulin doses with this disease. Being healthy and participating in daily activities or exercise will make living with Juvenile Diabetes easier.

Objectives for Juvenile Diabetes Campaign include the following:

·         Raising awareness

·         Advocating Healthy lifestyles and food choices

·         Providing educational knowledge

·         Engaging viewers to be interactive

·         Not over doing the content 

It is important to communicate with Juvenile Diabetes viewers and give them the opportunity to speak out, ask questions, engage in posted stories, share common interest/feedback and keep them coming back for more information. Bringing awareness to Juvenile Diabetes is extremely important because it will help youth and parents monitor the disease accordingly. This will encourage people to have checkups on a regular until they have better control over their blood sugar. As the disease get more stable, they will have fewer follow-up visits and by visiting a health care provider it allows better planning a healthier lifestyle.

 

The two social media platforms that will be utilized in launching this campaign are Facebook and Twitter whom are very popular in raising awareness for this health issue.  By using Facebook, we are allowed to post educational information, healthy tips for improving your Juvenile diabetes status, creative workout plans, and management for insulin doses. Twitter allows us to engage our viewers in health information, monitoring of their diabetes, and ways take back control over their life by staying on top of their health.

                                                            

 The Juvenile Diabetes original slogan is:

Never Underestimate Diabetes, it’s happening “1” day at a Time! Fight for Healthy Change

The goal of this slogan was to get viewers to address and take serious pre-cautions when being diagnosed with Juvenile “Type1” Diabetes because it plays a major role you being able to function in daily activities for life. Sometimes you will have to take the fight of Juvenile Diabetes 1day at a time, but if you learn to manage and monitor it well then you will  receive healthy change.

Juvenile Diabetes Logo: 

This logo is a representation of youth and the parents of children being bold and being able to show signs of hope and courage against Juvenile Diabetes. The crossed gold ribbon represents advocates, youth, and parents working together to beat the odds of let this disease by taking control of their life back through better health and activity management. Also, Juvenile Diabetes extended logo shows empowerment for the "Type1" users especially children taking a stance to stay on top of taking their insulin because their life matters too.

Campaign Strategies include the following:

1.      Providing general and statistical information

2.      Expanding the usage of social media to actively engage users

3.      Illustrating ways users can make a difference

a.       Advocating

b.      Donating

c.       Telling Your Story

4.      Giving a closer insight of how effective Juvenile Diabetes can be if not carefully monitor

Being able to keep the content interesting and continuously flowing through the amount of posts and tweets being created each day will help advocate and raise awareness for our audience. The post will be executed twice daily, during 2:30p.m. to 3:30p.m. and again during the evening 8:30p.m. to 9:30p.m. The following times were chosen because youth are allowed to be educated during their class period times of gym class and given the ability to participate in healthy workout out activities during school time.  

Youth usually wind down during the evening around the following times and parents using are preparing the children for bed. So they have plenty of time to do research and make sure that their child is receiving proper insulin dosage and basically prepare the next day after the education lessons are provided.

According to the article, "How to Never Run Out of Social Media Content",” it states creating a calendar that determines exactly what an organization will plan ahead of time and the order in will in which social media platforms will be constantly updated. Through this calendar, the Juvenile Diabetes Campaign will display various types of content and creative assets that will help spread awareness for the disease. Some of the posts will include: 

·         Information on being diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes

·         Test and Self Examinations

·         Management & Monitoring Duties

·         Statistics and Facts about Juvenile Diabetes

·         Questions to ask your doctor

·         Inspirational Videos

The success of the Juvenile Diabetes campaign will be measured by Kaushik’s three metrics:

•       Conversation: Measured by the # of viewer comments and replied posts for each platform
•       Amplification: Measured by the # of ReTweets (#JuDiabetes) and # of shares of links or post by Facebook
•       Applause: Measured by the # of tweets being favored on twitter and # of likes per post on Facebook 

Through the following metrics it will also help keep track of and analyze demographics and the amount of engagement among youth and parents when viewing educational information on managing Juvenile Diabetes.

Twitter and Facebook Information:

Juvenile Diabetes (#JuDiabetes)

Juvenile Diabetes Facebook

References:

JDRF (2013). Type 1 Diabetes Facts JDRF: Improving Lives. Curing Type 1 Diabetes. Retrieved from http://jdrf.org/about-jdrf/fact-sheets/type-1-diabetes-facts/

Jones, Kerry. (2012, January 11). How to Never Run out of Social Media Content. Retrieved

from http://www.blueglass.com/blog/how-to-never-run-out-of-social-media-content/

Kaushik, A. (2011, October 10). Best social media metrics: Conversation, amplification,           

           applause, economic value. Retrieved from: http:www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-        metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-val

National Diabetes Information Clearing House (2012, April 4). Diabetes Overview - National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse. Retrieved  from http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/overview/

Pub Med Health (2013). Type 1 diabetes - National Library of Medicine - PubMed Health. Retrieved  from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001350/#adam_000305.disease.causes

Reddit

Read ALL ABOUT IT………What’s The News on Reddit

Reddit is a social media platform that allows users to post a variety of news items and links to articles, discussions, and social commentary that will then be voted on by other users. This type of voting is the main feature of this site because the more votes a user item receives the more their information will be displayed for others to see. Ultimately by the “Reddit Community determines which news items get to be seen by more and more users.

Once a user joins Reddit you are not able to change your username once you have registered and everything you post, link or comment on will always be archived under the users’ information. I know personally exploring Reddit I got lost a few times trying to navigate through all of the information because it was become a little overwhelming go from topic to topic. You can easily lose track of time spending so much time on social media site.

According to the Marketer's Guide to Reddit article, it discusses how users can make Reddit “your own” by customizing their front page to reflect interests of their own and the ability to get interesting tidbits of news that may not have been already found on other created sites. This way users are able to use subreddits to categorize their information into various sections depending on the topics posted. The most frequent subreddits will appear across the top of the page top of your front page and allow you to see exactly what you want to see.

Reddit is seen as a fairly large sharing community and targets the larger audiences. There is always excessive traffics and threads incoming on Reddit with all sorts of information constantly. If you are trying to have a successful blog or created subject on Reddit, it is good for some of the following topics:

• Survival and Motivating Stories
• Educational Sites
• Politics
• Food
• Fitness 

In my opinion researching a health organization and information was very hard to locate on Reddit because all of the profiles created are all over the place. It was just so much going on at one time that I got lost in various posts and discussions that were repeatedly occurring every second. If the posts of a organization is not interesting to other users or get voted on by the Reddit Community then it would likely not be publicized as popularly as other articles are. This would make it very difficult for health organizations to reach users and determine which users are really interested in their sites since the usernames are general submissions.

I can only see health organizations using Reddit as a benefit to promote new ideas for raising awareness in a creative way and adding links that are attached to eye catching videos about their organization. If an organization wants to attract users to an appealing event or present people with motivating fitness information to better their health then, I can not see Reddit coming in as a helpful resource to spread the news.

Overall, if your post or topic does get high voting rating then it makes it hard for your information to reach the “Front Page” which is the popular spot for people all across the world to review. Reddit is more a virtual site to connect with other users by posting a lot of information for others people to see and vote on basically like a popularity contest of interesting information posted.

Pinterest

Pinning & Re-Pinning into a New World of Adventure with 

Exploring Pinterest was more exciting than using my personal favorite social media site Facebook. I had no idea the many different possibilities and features I was able to use so easily. Pinterest basically works just like a corkboard, any information that you find of interest can be “pinned” to any virtual board and you can create a endless amount of boards as a user.

Through Pinterest users are able to connect with others by sharing content in a unique and visual way. The set up for Pinterest was pretty simple and very resourceful for providing information in forms of infographics (images), quotes, healthy eat tips, workout plans and so much more all in the form of boards.

Boards are created for users to pin things of their interest and share items about information they want other users to know more about. Once your board is successfully created you are allowed to follow users’ boards and get creative ideas from their home pages. The unique concept about pinning another user board is that when they pin new content then the updates will constantly appear in your Pinterest feed. This means that you will be updated on the new items pertaining to that topic from other users.

Health Organizations can use Pinterest to draw more interest and engagement with their organizations because they are allowed to put pictures with their related information. Pinterest is an effective way to provide health information in a creative way to users especially through infographics. 

According to the Department of Health and Human Services Department of Health and Human Services article,  it states that infographics are images that convey information both verbally and visually to users. There meaning is conveyed through these images which allow organizations to be different in sharing their information and meaning through various graphics.

Through Pinterest health organizations have the ability to:

1.      Clearly define their purpose

2.      Present clips from their organization events

3.      Pin photo and testimonials

4.      Create eye catchy boards with their organization services

5.      Pin for conversation

After exploring various boards on Pinterest I came across the HIV/AIDS boards as being very successfully and informative for users. This goal of this board was to get people to say “No to HIV/AIDS” by raising awareness of the disease and recommending helpful ways to stay protected. They have 204 pins and 1, 124 followers which is actually inspiring that people are trying to change the epidemic affecting the world so drastically.

The boards provide a lot inspirational sayings and protective methods for practicing safer sex. Statistics and facts are listed about what the disease as done to so many people in the world. One dynamic feature provided is the AIDS World Day that is held nationwide to raise awareness for AIDs and brings people across to celebrate and engage in commemoration for those who were lost to the disease.

The information provided is clear and well organized. Users can easily navigate through these boards and the infographics make the boards even more interesting. I would consider there pinterest overall to be very informative and great usage of creative images to engage people in saying No to HIV/AIDS and being protected.

Overall, Pinterest is one of my new favorite social media platforms because it provides users with a lot of information and you can basically research any board that you would like. I like really like the idea that once I pin information of interest to me then updates will appear in my Pinterest newsfeed. I am exciting for the features and creative methods Pinterest have already created. I look forward to seeing more and more success with this platform grow every day.

YouTube

YouTube is on Fire: the ability to put words, images and sound to videos.....

YouTube is a website that gives anyone the ability to put sounds, visuals, movements, media, and your voice to various videos. Users are allowed to upload and share various media such as pictures and videos with others all across the world. Through YouTube users are able to add movement, sounds and voice features to their pictures and videos that will constant interest to users profiles.

When using YouTube you are allowed to:

• Research your favorite music or television shows
• Determine who is providing the information for job offers
• Research the different images and tips on healthy eating
• Determine the goals of organization that they hope to accomplish
• Research how a non- profit organization works
• Determine ways to add sound effects and new features to videos

Lastly Research ways that you can contribute and do your part to help out!

YouTube is filled with so many features for a user to navigate especially for being a helpful media channel for health organizations. This medium always has a constant and interesting feed for users to see. According to the CDC Social Media Guidelines article,in order to develop successful video postings for health organizations to reach users they must do the following:

1. Clearly Define Their Objective: Highlight and clearly establish what you are trying to say
2. Know Your Target Audience: Determine who you are talking to and how the message will effective research those users
3. Determine Moderating Capacity: The ability to actively engage your users based on providing adequate resources and information
4. Create Promotion: Determine catchy ideas you will use to get your audience to view the videos
5. Establish an Evaluation Plan: Determine ways you will measure the success of the videos

One health organization that really benefits from utilizing YouTube are those representing the Alzheimer’s Association which has various active channels that have been since the early 2000’s. This organization has over 56,000 video views and 1, 409 subscribers who are currently following their channel. 

This particular video was established to give users information about Alzheimer’s Association Facts and Figures during 2013. According to the bio of the Alzheimer’s organization it states, “More than 5 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s disease in 2013. Everyone 68 seconds someone is developing the Alzheimer’s disease and there are more than 15 million caregiver available to assist people who develop this deadly disease. In 2013, this fatal disease will cost the nation over 203 million and is the 6^th leading cause in deaths.

In my opinion I believe this Alzheimer’s channel is very informative and did a great job in bringing more awareness to the cause and diagnoses of the disease. It gives very impactful facts and projections of how this disease will take a toll on Americans every day. Their target audience was clearly stated for users who may have family members or love ones experiencing this disease and helpful they can use to help fight the disease day by day.

Overall, YouTube was a phenomenal social media platform to explore because you can research all sorts of videos and information that provides an active talking session from those who have created the videos. You can be creative and add your personal touches to you and I think it is a great tool for health organizations to use to continue reaching people all across the world.