The Yahoo Social Accessibility Lab

Social Accessibility*Tweet #CSUNSocial w/Questions*

Monday, March 5, 2012Yahoo! Social Accessibility

Nate EbrahimoonSocial Media Manager

Yahoo! Accessibility

Monday, March 5, 2012

September 10th, 2010


The Yahoo! Accessibility Facebook page was born on September 10th, 2010.

September 10th, 2011


In one year we acquired 4,252 Fans.

March 1st, 2012

Monday, March 5, 2012Today we have 5,599.

100% Organic


Best of all, we have gotten to be where we are today 100% organically. Without spending a penny on ads.

Sh*t Sighted People Say To Blind People

YouTube


We attracted these users by offering them content within the field of accessibility that they are not used to seeing.Example: One of blog contributors, BFC, of mainstream, fun, entertaining, social content centered around disability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uk8pwEHMBE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uk8pwEHMBE

*Tweet #CSUNSocial w/Questions*

How do people see accessibility & disability?

How do WE change the way people see accessibility & disability?




Monday, March 5, 2012The answer to this question is they donʼt. The mainstream audience is not typically exposed to people with disabilities / accessibility.

Yahoo! Mail Accessibility Help PageMonday, March 5, 2012Before Y!A Social Media, external accessibility efforts from Yahoo! were found in Help Pages.Help Pages: Serve the purpose of Communicating information about a specific products accessibility practices to users.Therefore: Help pages do not appeal to the mainstream (disabled and non disabled alike). Do not address all users with disabilities. Instead, only addresses users that company focuses on.




Question: How do WE change?We:" Go where our audience wants to be! " Expose ourselves to the outside world because guess what? They donʼt know we exist." If our goal is to mainstream accessibility, then we need to go to the main stream. "

Social Media!


3 social media channels Facebook, Twitter, and Blogging

Facebook =

ConversationMonday, March 5, 2012conversations around content

Facebook Lingo


Facebook “Like Page”:

Fan club thatʼs hosted on Facebook. Looks and feels just like a personal facebook page. Except Facebook users choose to “like” a page and become a “fan” of a page as opposed to personal accounts where users become “friends”Owners of pages send updates to their fans, which shows up on the pages wall


The wall is your personal profile space where any content you publish is shown. The most used form of content within a wall is called a post or status update. A post can contain photos, videos, Polls, links, and/or text.

Fans have the option of interacting with the post. They can choose to:“like” a post to communicate their support of the post content. “comment” on a post to join the conversation around the post. and/or “share” a post to spread the content to their social community.

Twitter =

InformationMonday, March 5, 2012Twitter is an information hub. Itʼs where you go to share content and find up to minute news.

Tweet


Content begins with a Tweet:A 140-character message sent to Twitter via phone, the web, or a third-party applications. Tweet: Message you send out to your followers. Mention: Mentions always begin with an “@” sign. The same “@” seen in email addressʼs. On twitter itʼs how you direct a Tweet to another twitter user. Hash Tag: Allows twitter users to group multiple tweets by keyword. Works well for events and groups. Retweet: Think of this as forwarding an email. By Re-tweet you are sending a tweet by another user to your social community.

Blog =

Exclusive ContentMonday, March 5, 2012

Have your own voice. Determine a vision and publish content that fits within vision. Permanent vs. temp. Leverage social streams to promote blog content. Blogging is the closest relationship you will ever form with the outside world. Maintaining a blog requires much higher effort than a facebook, twitter, or similar page and itʼs 100% reflective of your organization.

BenefitsCommunicationConnectionMarketingProduct FeedbackPromotionMeasure

*Tweet #CSUNSocial w/Questions*

Monday, March 5, 2012Your organization can benefit from social media in



"hello, world"

Monday, March 5, 2012twitter tweets, facebook posts, and blog publications are an organizations way of saying hello world. Itʼs a way for an org to communicate with outside world. Internationalize your efforts.Constant reminders of your organizations accessibility efforts. Our social media audience is reminded 4-5 times a day of our efforts through social media. Again, these reminders come in the form of tweets, posts, images, etc. on our social channels.

Monday, March 5, 2012Communicates your efforts throughout your company. This slide shows one example of when social media allowed us to reach out to an executive at Yahoo! Blake Irving, Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!, Blake Retweets: “” In doing so, we observe top down support of accessibility.

Monday, March 5, 2012This tweet from Blake contibued through the Twitter Verse and reached Anand a Sr. Director, product manager of Mobile Search at Yahoo!Anand, product manager, uses his twitter handle to connect with Blake Irving, and show his support of making products accessible. Further showing accessibility support throughout the company.

Some rights reserved by The U.S. Army

Monday, March 5, 2012When people have questions, comments, complaints, etc. they go to twitter and broadcast to world. These People expect organizations to respond. Social Media is a strong force. Work with it or it will work against you. Put out small fires before they turn into forest fires. Orgs are now hiring people solely to monitor what people are saying in social media. Maintain a high reputation is crucial.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/



Connect The Dots

Yahoo!

Life After Spinal Cord Injury

Life Rolls On

IBM Accessibility

Monday, March 5, 2012Connect with other players in the field. Easiest, Most enjoyable, and effective ways to connect with key players in the field. players you most likely wouldnʼt have known about and wouldnʼt have connected with otherwise.


Monday, March 5, 2012Once youʼve connected you begin to build army of marketers. Social Media audiences are an organizations Marketing Military. How?

Monday, March 5, 2012Twitter example: Kevin Chao speaks loudly to his social media community in favor of Yahoo! Kevin enjoyed our product and wanted to voice his opinion. This is free and effective advertising. The next question is how effective can a tweet from some random person, in this case Kevin Chao, be?

Kevin Chao

Monday, March 5, 2012To answer this, itʼs helpful to know who is kevin choa? Who are his followers? How often does he tweet? How often are his tweets retweeted, shared, responded to? Who is retweeting his content? What does he tweet about? All these questions collapse to how Influential is Kevin Chao in the social media world around the topic of accessibility. This measure is called Klout.

Monday, March 5, 2012Klout.com is a free tool that crawls through a specified social channel to measure how influential that channel is, in the social media universe. The measure is a number from 1 - 100. The larger the number the greater the influence. Important tool in weighing impact of mentions and retweets.



Monday, March 5, 2012Facebook example of marketing military.

BenefitsCommunicationConnectionMarketingProduct Feedback

PromotionMeasure


Product Feedback

Monday, March 5, 2012Real life actual usage user experience. More realistic than user experience within labs where 20 people are put in a lab and observed. These are people on their personal machines in their comfortable environment.


Monday, March 5, 2012Organized promotional campaigns. Social media allows orgs to leverage the right channels to gain massive exposure.

Monday, March 5, 2012Example: Yahoo! Shine Thanksgiving we published a post from Parents helping Parents about the experience of Thanksgiving as the mother of a child with a disability. We reached out to our friends at Yahoo! Shine, who have over 1 million followers, and suggested a cross promotion. In doing so, we tracked the highest traffic weʼve ever had in a single blog post AND it was one of yahoo shines most engaging posts on their facebook page.

The post read.

The Yahoo! Accessibility FB page increased 2,424% in "Weekly Total Reach" Weekly total reach: The number of people who have seen content associated with your page during a one week period.

To recap, we took a disability related post and posted it to a massive mainstream media channel and saw a massive response. Further confirming the interest of disability related content via the mainstream. All of this done through a partnership with another social media channel.




Some rights reserved by Chandra Marsono

Monday, March 5, 2012Asking how many users with disabilities use a service or product is often times like asking how many of our users are wearing a green t-shirt. Social Media allows us to measure through audience count, engagement, and visibility

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chandramarsono/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chandramarsono/

Facebook Insights

Monday, March 5, 2012Measure results over 1 month period or weekly period. On this slide we have an image of our ʻusersʼ overview and overview of Interactions.

YouTubeMonday, March 5, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMyjVpag8os

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMyjVpag8os

Klout


Demographics

Monday, March 5, 2012Demographics. What demographics does accessible related information attract? From our page weʼve gained information about our target consumers. Top 5 locations:Gender of users in these locations: 67% Male to 32% Female. 1% unknown Age: 30% between 18 -3426% 25-34

Monday, March 5, 2012Great Example of an organization doing it right: Flex Watches.

Flex watches is an organization with a goal to raise awareness toward organizations and charities in the most mainstream manner. Selling attractive watches. They sell 10 different color watches. each color represents a different charity / organization. 10 % of profits go to charity. Sales are 100% centered around support of charity. Flex Watches uses Social Media Heavily

Monday, March 5, 2012The Social Channels around Flex Watches are right on point. One example: The photo contest campaigns Here they are engaging users and Connecting users with external partners as well as overall causes.

Monday, March 5, 2012Motivating people to connect and share their feedback by posting personal photos of themselves with their Flex Watches.


Measure: Of the x amount of photo contributions they receive they choose the top 3 and reward those people. spreading the message far and wide.


Another great example in the same space: IBM Accessibility Facebook Expert Hour. Invite Experts around an accessibility related topic to discuss with facebook “fans” for an hour. High engagement rate.

Getting Started*Tweet #CSUNSocial w/Questions*


Monday, March 5, 2012Research social media channels and find out which one(s) is best for you. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, etc. Commit to it and make it a priority. Itʼs going to be hard at first, but stick in there because soon enough it will pay off.

Connect with Others Players in the Field

Monday, March 5, 2012Share content Form relationships

Make Friends NOT Customers

Monday, March 5, 2012Be the friend that brings a lot to the table. Ask questions. Write posts that encourage engagementTalk about your efforts but donʼt try to sell them. Only brag when you have reason to. Quality over quantity. Focus on quality of friendship not quantity. Quantity will come after quality.

• Facebook: /YahooAccessibility

• Twitter: @YahooAccess

• Blog: Accessibility.Yahoo.com

• YouTube: /YahooAccessibility

• Flickr: /YAccessLab

THANK YOU


The Yahoo Social Accessibility Lab

Technology

The Yahoo Social Accessibility Lab