NetSafe

Creating a social networking page on Bebo has bought benefits to our organisation, with little extra stress.

www.bebo.com/netsafe

We realised that social networking sites are where the teens are and that is probably where they feel most comfortable communicating, rather than calling or emailing us. So we decided to set up a page to increase our accessibility. It is working in terms of teens contacting us through bebo, and the fact that we have more of a presence in a teen space. It was about a week before we got any serious queries but from the moment we added other groups we received comments from them.

The beginnings

In September 2007 we decided to create a page on Bebo. This site was chosen as research shows that it is the most popular site for young people in NZ. We decided on a plan jointly with the Education Team and Contact Centre staff. We set up tasks that needed to be done before we made our page public and started inviting friends. These were to decide the image we wanted to present, create a skin which in our case had our number and name on it, create blogs and polls to put on the page and to write the “about me” section of the profile.

Making the page

We made decisions on the text that would be going on the page and assigned people to undertake the required tasks. We already had rules about our publication and website text and formats (our identity) so we adhered to those as much as possible. In terms of font, bebo has a standard font which we used, but the colours and icons we used followed our brand identity.

Making the pages “skin” was the Contact Centre’s task and the content of the page was done by the Education Team. The content involved things like blogs and quizzes. Once we had the content and the page completed we went live in September 2007. The next task was to add friends; this was done firstly by adding organisations we could find on Bebo with whom we are associated.

From this came “friend requests” from other organisations and individuals. We then added friends who were friends with our current friends. This makes people look at our page and whenever we add friends it always results in other friend requests.

Keeping the page up to-date

Bebo is easily kept up to date with the “what’s new” section changing to include recent events in our organisation, such as the “NetBasics” when it was launched (see www.netbasics.org.nz). It is important for us to keep the page up to date as it generates more “views” each time things are changed on the page. This is because all of our friends are advised when we change anything on our page. It is also great to add friends at least every month as the trends show we always have the most page views at those times.

Problems

As we are adding people we don’t personally know- which we advise against for individuals - we were bound to receive some harassment or inappropriate comments. When someone adds us as a friend, we check out their page and if they aren’t obscene or too inappropriate then we accept as our friends. We want to be accessible to as many people as possible. If we didn’t accept someone who had a swear word or something slightly inappropriate on their page then we wouldn’t have any youth friends at all! Some annoying comments have been left on the NetSafe page. Luckily we moderate our comments before they go on our page (pre-moderation) so we can delete what we do not want to show up on our profile. We have had no abusive comments just annoying comments that are more silly than harassing, but because we are pre-moderating we can delete the comments before they appear on our page so no one actually sees them.

Benefits

Now we are much more accessible to youth. We receive private messages from people needing help to which we can respond. Bebo also gives us a great place to conduct research on this age group through the use of quizzes and blogs. Please be aware of the ethical concerns around this. For example don’t ask them emotionally distressing questions or questions which may be too personal, or questions that could make a person identifiable. You will need to consider your organizations ethics around surveys and research.

We are also able to communicate with other organisations through Bebo, see what they are up to and message them if we need information. We found Bebo a great advertising tool when we launched NetBasics. We put the videos on our “video box” and people left comments saying how cool they were. We also added msn to “ways to contact us” which means we now get queries through msn.

www.bebo.com/netsafe