In this series, we’re interviewing several people who do social media on behalf of their associations. In this interview, we asked Sara Elisabeth Burson of the National Association of County and City Health Officials to give us the scoop on how they handle the work of social media management.

1) First things first: Tell us a bit about where your social media management role “lives” within your association. How is it integrated within the structure of the organization? Is it a full time position, or part of another role? What department are you in, if any? How large is your organization?

Social media is managed by a cross-cutting team that includes staff from various departments in our 100+-person organization. NACCHO serves 2,800 local governmental public health departments. Though there has been discussion about making social media a full-time position, we don’t have anyone officially dedicated to social media at this time. I’m a meeting planner and I also co-lead the Social Media team. I lead social media campaigns specifically focused on NACCHO meetings and conferences.

2) The work of social media often cuts across lots of different traditional silos. Describe the process of how you communicate and work with other departments. How supportive is the association as a whole about your social media role?

The social media cross-cutting team includes members from our four major program areas as well as web services and public affairs. Each member is responsible for communicating between their project team and our team. NACCHO management has agreed to consider pilot projects with well-demonstrated value.

3) Everyone is dying to know how you manage the listening and monitoring process. Do you use a dashboard? Do you use any paid services? Any tips to share?

Because we’re still in pilot-mode with most of our social media projects, we don’t currently have an organization-wide dashboard. The social media team co-leads do some ad-hoc monitoring using TweetBeep, Google Alerts, TweetFunnel, and Twitter’s main search function. The entire team shares an Evernote account to post interesting articles about social media and examples from our field. We don’t currently use any paid services, but have looked at the possibility of contracting out a private network.

4) Let’s talk about the “big three” – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Of course, it largely depends on where your members are – but have any of these proved especially useful for achieving particular goals?

We have focused primarily on Twitter, but use of all three services as pilot projects to determine our goals and realistic expectations. We recognize we’re not currently using any of these three to their full potential, but see value in them and hope to set goals moving forward.

5) How do you measure the success of any particular projects? I don’t mean specific numbers, but do you have a “system” for how to decide what to keep track of, and how to report progress?

We’re currently developing a baseline report to review our progress so far and give us a starting point to measure against moving forward. We recognize in this process the importance of setting limitations. For example, we don’t need to rank well in the Twitterverse at-large, but it would be very useful to rank well specifically in the public health sector. Overall, we’re much more concerned with quality than quantity, but quality is difficult to measure. We’re seeking useful tools for measuring within segments, rather than the Web at-large.

6) How do you bring stakeholders up to speed on what social media activities are going on (whether it’s members, other staff, the board…) – is it part of your role to teach people about social media? What kinds of things do you do (if anything) to help bridge the digital divide?

We offered a value training session to all staff, and we hope to repackage that training specifically for upper management in the near future. We offered a Twitter how-to session for staff and a Twitter webcast for our members, both of which were well attended. Most often, we create one-pagers to propose new projects or reflect on the progress of active projects. Recently, the Executive Committee approved a proposal to use Twitter. We definitely see this as an area with opportunity for improvement. Engaging staff and rallying them around social media would give all of our projects a boost.

7) Finally, tell us about a specific social media project you are particularly excited about, whether it’s in the planning stages or something you’ve had success with.

NACCHO’s H1N1 blog launched on November 7. This pilot project helped to gauge the value of blogging to our members and increase NACCHO’s visibility as an expert in public health preparedness. The blog focuses on stories from the field provided by local health departments, and features news and information items provided by NACCHO staff. The blog provides a forum to share stories of useful practices or other experiences from local health officials during their response to H1N1 and allows bloggers to comment directly on posts.

The readership averages 300 unique page views per week. Despite a relatively high readership, the blog has not generated very many comments.

We are starting to expand the perspectives of reporting and writing by including posts from additional workgroup members. Upcoming posts will include: preparedness and infrastructure issues exposed by H1N1 provided by the Public Health Infrastructure and Systems team, and H1N1’s impact on at-risk or disabled populations provided by the At-Risk Populations team.