Better #36

Kia ora friend,

What’s the biggest thing standing between you and great social media?

I hear the same pain points again and again - not enough time, too many approvals, unclear strategy, risk-averse culture, and the constant battle for creative ideas.

So what’s the answer?

Well, I'm working on a little something - a new free resource specifically designed to help small teams do more with less - and your input will help shape it.

So I’d love to hear from you, either by hitting reply to this email, or by voting in my LinkedIn poll, which is live for a couple more days.

Thanks a lot - and have a bloody wonderful week.

Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

Today's interview is real, honest, and packed with insights.

Briar Edmonds is the Social Content and Channels Lead at Health NZ - and if we’re connected on LinkedIn, you’ll know how much I love their social content.

But what really stood out to me was how Briar and her team built such a powerful social media presence from scratch, delivering creative, high-impact work in one of the most complex and challenging sectors.

This conversation reinforced just how tough - and how rewarding - this work can be when you have a great team all pulling in the same direction.

Enjoy.

👇👇👇

Firstly, Briar, where do you work, and what do you do?

I currently work at Health New Zealand as the Social Content and Channels Lead. I’ve been a social media manager for the past 6 or 7 years, with around 13 years of communications and marketing experience overall. Prior to moving into communications, I worked in entry level policy roles. But then I realised that all the fun was being had in the comms and marketing teams so I moved there. I’ve worked for an agency and in house, and I’ve worked overseas and here.

And what’s your team set-up?

I have the best team ever. There’s a principal advisor who is my 2IC and knows social inside out (Simon Flanagan), a senior creative who is insanely good at coming up with creative ideas and concepts and seeing them through (Ramon Telfer), and an outrageously talented content creator (Shane Boulton) who focuses on videography and photography. We’re like a mini agency for social. I lead the team and pitch in on the tools as well.

You were responsible for getting everything up and running across a new, huge organisation, which sounds very daunting. Can you walk me through that?

It was really hard, actually, and really long - way longer than it should have been. When I started there had been one person prior to me for three months, and then I took over and the first eight months to a year it was just me doing everything (district social pages had someone managing them, but the overall national presence was just being looked after by me, plus I was supporting districts as much as possible).

We have our national, corporate social pages, but we also have 90+ pages in the districts, so the first stage was actually putting down the foundations. We didn’t have a national social media policy or guidelines. We had to work out what kind of management system would run underneath to do all our publishing and reporting. It’s so big that you can’t really rely on doing things through the platforms themselves. It’s not efficient enough.

Part of my responsibility was rolling Sprinklr out across the whole country - to all the district teams - and putting together the training to support people to learn how to use it, because the people in the districts were mainly comms advisors (but doing good things). So it was a big process of training them and also getting them on board with the change - bringing them on the journey of understanding the benefits of having this tool and how to get the most out of it.

So before we could even get to the stage of having a national strategy I was just trying to get everyone on the same page with how we were going to run things. But also getting to grips with who our audience was on the channels that we had, and figuring out how Health New Zealand even works [laughs]. Because even small things like answering questions on social was really difficult because there were no FAQs, or a place to find what subject matter expert does what, there was no process. It felt kind of like startup vibes.

And then a year in we went through a huge restructure, and it was at that point that I was able to give feedback and say, ‘Look, this is totally unmanageable with one person, if you want any good content, we’ll need a proper team’.

What was the content like at that time?

It needed work. A lot of it was a hangover from COVID 19 days where everything was a tile that said, ‘Do this’, ‘Do that’, ‘Be aware of this’, ‘Be aware of that’, ‘Wash your hands’ etc. We'd completely lost any kind of personality or human face to Health New Zealand, and no one really knew what the hell we were, or that district health boards weren't even a thing anymore. All the posts were very shouty and broadcasty, with lots of tiles and lots of branding and just not good social.

So once we got through that first restructure, I made enough of a case to the managers to say we needed a team, and was able to hire three really great team members. One of them is a super good videographer and photographer who is really awesome at making content. And then there's one who's really good at thinking strategically and coming up with interesting and creative ways of doing things. And then there's another guy who has been in social for 10 years and knows it inside out and is really good with what's trending right now and how to tap into that. They are all really bloody talented. 

How hands on is your team with the 90+ district pages? 

The team doesn't have to do everything, but we do sort of oversee all of it and report to leaders on what's happening and we sometimes support the districts to respond to things or jump in to help. There's quite a bit of process management. And then the districts might find that they are a bit stuck with certain issues so they'll ask us to help, because we can jump in and deal with a community situation if we have to. So we're kind of there to help and support as needed.

Districts do a great job though, we work together well. They also connect us up to so many amazing stories on the ground because they have access to them, whereas we have less access to the healthcare staff and patient stories. Partnership is absolutely vital, we need both sides.

How would you describe your strategy overall?

We use social to increase brand awareness, boost brand engagement and build relationships with our community, deliver effective customer service, and drive web traffic to info.health.nz. 

We try to humanise Health NZ and show that it’s actually a big team of humans who care. We build relationships with our followers through genuine, empathetic interactions, but also by putting out information that's clear, engaging and accurate. We try to build social licence with the public, so that they trust us more and maybe take on board the important stuff when we need them to such as doing the right things in an outbreak, or getting immunised. 

Alongside that, we are trying to influence certain areas of health in line with what the government wants us to be doing (health targets). So the content that we're creating is focused on the key strategic goals like prevention of certain diseases through immunisation, prevention of cancer through getting screened, focusing on healthy behaviours, mental wellbeing and the like.

What are your biggest measures of success? What dials are you hoping to move?

We aim to:

• boost engagement and reach, targeting a 2.5% engagement rate on average at a bare minimum, which we consistently exceed (that’s a rough public service social benchmark). 

• grow visibility and recognition of our brand, aiming for at least 5% growth in followers month-on-month across channels, which we exceed most months. 

• deliver the public strong customer service, aiming to respond to customer enquiries within 2 hours, and 2 working days at the very most. We achieve this most of the time, but there can be times around the country where resourcing is low and it’s not perfect.

• drive traffic to our new website, info.health.nz, consolidating health content from various sources to build trust and make it a one-stop shop for health information in NZ. We track growth in traffic from social media to our site, and aim to see a consistent amount of referrals from social content.

• improve sentiment towards Health NZ on social media. Sprinklr helps us track sentiment and manage all our social pages nationwide. We saw huge leaps in positive sentiment since establishing our current strategy. 

Sprinklr is a godsend and especially useful in emergencies, allowing us to post on any Health NZ page without needing to give out passwords. All channels are managed through one portal.

How much freedom did you have in setting and executing the strategy?

The mandate from the leaders was really clear. They knew we needed to completely change things and to be different and new and exciting, so they let us go off and do our thing.

When the team first started, they were all like, ‘I wasn't expecting to have this much freedom’, but we have quite a lot, which shows that when you trust good teams and allow them space to try things it really pays off. We've grown our channels exponentially in a short period of time and that’s down to having the right people who are allowed to do what they do.

We have needed to toe the line regarding what the government wants us to focus on, which is to be expected as we are here to serve the government of the day along with the public of New Zealand.

How many comments are you getting? I can imagine it’s a lot…

We deal with about 100,000 comments and questions a year nationwide, and it's getting higher because our channels are growing. Customer service is a huge part of the job -  almost 50%. And the process for getting sign-off from clinicians etc has to be right as we’re dealing with medical issues, so it can definitely take time. That's the part that people don't really see.

As a health organisation, how big is the issue of inaccurate information?

One of the foundational bits of work was a community management document, and there is a lot in there about misinformation. I learnt a lot from my time working in Covid-19 and the Covid vaccine space. I’d say it's almost an art and a science dealing with it. Part of that is putting out content that's accurate, obviously, because people can see that it's from Health New Zealand, which hopefully they trust. And the other part of it is addressing misinformation that we can see coming from people who don’t have a clear agenda. The art part is knowing when to jump in and when to not jump in, because it can just become a dumpster fire.

People are absolutely allowed to have their opinion, there's free speech, but info has to be accurate as well. So it does feel like quite a fine line that you're dancing, so having experience on the channels and knowing how and who to respond to is crucial. But it can get really murky. We've found sometimes it's better to ask people to DM us, and then we can have a bit more of a discussion there or find someone they can talk to. 

Because the other thing is, we can't give lots of medical advice on social media, because it's not the place for it. The advice is often ‘go and talk to your doctor’, or ‘ring the vaccination helpline’. It's often about de-escalating, helping people to the right places, and not getting into massively long, intense arguments. 

Is it worth it? Spending so much time in the comments?

Absolutely. Hearts and minds are probably better won in the interactions on social, and that's the part people don't always see, which can be frustrating. People think, ‘Oh, you guys just put out silly videos’. But in reality we're trying to get people on our side through sustained conversations - it's a whole thing we're planting, we’re growing a little garden here. 

In terms of that content (which I absolutely love BTW), you guys are putting your faces out there. How did you come about that decision, and what is it like?

Honestly, part of it was that we had all these creative ideas for videos and no one to be in them [laughs]. But we also worked out that the team is good at that sort of thing. It's really good in some ways, because we have been able to show a more human side to our channels and bring out some personality, which I think has definitely paid off in a lot of ways. 

The one thing I sometimes don't feel great about is just that our team is all pākehā people, so I would love, love, love to have more different faces, because I don't want it to be the ‘us’ show, because it's not. It should be about New Zealanders. At the same time, we run on a shoestring, so we're just basically doing what we can to give it a go and try things. Having a really good videographer has helped immeasurably. We are also lucky to partner with our colleagues in the Hauora Māori Services team who have helped us begin to make relationships and create content for Māori (which we publish through the Hauora Māori socials which we also look after). 

Do you have fun?

It’s actually so fun, and the team is so fun, which is funny because the environment at Health New Zealand can be really hard - it’s an inherently politicised space. But we have such a good team, and we're all in it for the right reasons, everyone is really creative and has strengths in different places. The team has come together in a nice little package.

You are probably one of the few people in New Zealand who's actually done a channels set-up on this scale. If you had to do it again somewhere else, is there anything you would do differently?

I think I felt at the time that I was doing enough work to bring everyone on the waka with me internally - showing how social works and the best ways of using it and how our setup was going to work. Having done it now, next time I'd probably spend more time presenting to different teams, showing where we've come from, the state of play, and where we want to get to. I’d spend more time explaining, ‘Here's what we need from you, here's what we can give you, and what we can't give you’. I think I probably didn't do that quite enough, and so that led to a bit of confusion at times as to the benefits of this new way of doing things, and why I was asking them to use this new system (Sprinklr).

Looking back, what are you most proud of?

Probably hiring a really good team. I’m super proud of that, because that's been the reason why anything has changed. And I think probably sticking it out from the start till now. I'm really proud of that, because there's definitely been times throughout where I've been like, ‘F… this is so hard, I'm so done [laughs]’. But seeing the importance of health for New Zealanders, and the importance of developing a good two-way channel to speak to the public and to help people - staying the course to be able to see that through has been really good. There's still so much to do, but I'm really proud of how far we’ve come.

Quick 6 with Briar Edmonds…

1. Strategy or tactics?
STRATEGY BABY. But also tactics. They’re part of a package deal.

2. Favourite platform?

TikTok all the way

3. Least favourite platform?
Twitter/X. It’s a dumpster fire. Closely followed by Facebook and then maybe LinkedIn for its cringe factor.

4. One public sector account to follow?
Wellington City Council! Also I love Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa (although that’s an NGO) and also Burnett Foundation are incredible and so on target with their audience.
 
5. One non-public sector account to follow?
Ryanair! So good! 

6. Something you wish you’d known earlier in your career?

No one really knows what they are doing - we’re all making it up as best we can. So be brave, speak up and bring your own authentic voice to the table - you bring something different to anyone else.

That’s it for today, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Please consider sharing this newsletter with someone you think might get value from it (honestly this is the best way to support me 🙏).

And I’ll see you in two weeks for more tips on how to get a little bit Better 👋