A Roadmap to Awareness

The Social Organization puts a huge emphasis on purpose throughout chapters 5 and 6.  Purpose needs to be more than just "to spread the word about ______".  The purpose of using social media technologies needs to be in depth, and have the ability to change or continue over time.

Take Child Life, for example.  There are countless areas that Child Life is involved in.  The overall purpose of the Child Life specialist? To help children and families overcome the most difficult time of their lives.  Well hello, that's a lot to cover! Is that how we're going to describe the need for Child Life in hospitals over social media? Absolutely not! There needs to be purpose and these purposes will be around forever as each new parent, doctor, nurse, person hears about Child Life.  Brainstorming is where this comes into play.  Here are very few ideas on what a purpose of a post, website, or collaboration would be:

• Teen Advocacy in children's hospitals that are decorated for young children
• Pain management/distraction
• Use of technology
• Individual stories reflecting on the CCLS

There are endless options on what to post about.  Collaborating, on the other hand, needs a consistent topic.  The same examples above can be used, but the collaboration would be continuous.  For example, if a collaborative technology was used strictly for child life specialists, they could share the ideas their hospital is coming up with, what pain management techniques are working for different types of children etc.  Also, a parent collaboration for support and information on disease, hospital secrets, and so on, can be shared.  

What a great example of how a CCLS can utilize a purpose roadmap - make a blog to help current or future child life specialists! 

A purpose roadmap will provide who the participants are, what motivates them to collaborate, how they interact, and potentially what they are collaborating about.  It would allow for growth of the social media environment to discuss new purposes, or add on to existing ones. Building a purpose road map has the following steps:

1. Preparation
2. Defining the community
3. Brainstorming purposes
4. Evaluating and organizing purposes
5. Documenting the purpose roadmap

With a successful road map, there will be sustained value overtime, providing solid footing to become a successful collaborating community.

Fire Up on the road to success!

PS: This girl's blog is downright amazing -  she forms connections to other blogs about child life and she attracts many types of people from parent to future child life specialist to a medical professional. Check it out here!