Making the link

Increasing numbers of aged care professionals are using LinkedIn to connect with like-minded people, engage potential collaborators and advance programs or organisations.

Lara Calder
Lara Calder

Increasing numbers of aged care professionals are using LinkedIn to connect with like-minded people, engage potential collaborators and advance programs or organisations.

Lara Calder had a problem.

The principal of Sydney-based Calder Flower Architects had a unique project on her hands and she wanted expert feedback and input.

The project was to design a home for a Vietnamese family whose mother had dementia and the eight adult children wanted a safe place for her to live, without the need for residential care.

“We do a lot of dementia specific environments that are part of a bigger facility, but to do an individual home customised for someone with specific cultural references was unique,” Calder says.

The commission was to design a home for the parents, plus a live-in carer, but which could also function as a family home on weekends and accommodate up to 35 people for lunches and family occasions.

The problem was, Calder had consulted the standard sources of information on dementia design but wanted additional information on the unique aspects of her project. In particular, she wanted new ideas and input.

The solution was, Calder discovered, the social media platform LinkedIn.

Though she had initially set up her LinkedIn account a year previous, it wasn’t until the process of re-developing the Calder Flower website that her web developers advised Calder to increase her LinkedIn activity and build her network. “I developed a pretty big network – about 400 people.”

Accessing that network, Calder posted a comment on her LinkedIn page briefly explaining the Vietnamese dementia home project and inviting industry feedback. The reaction was immediate.

“We had a lot of very positive responses,” she says. “I had quite a long dialogue with a consultant in dementia environments.” Interior designers and landscapers also got in touch, offering their services. The project has a reasonably tight budget, so the offer of expert services through a likely research capacity, without cost for the client, was most welcome, Calder says.

Lara Calder used LinkedIn to "crowd source" expert feedback.
Lara Calder used LinkedIn to “crowd source” expert feedback.

“It’s so encouraging when people are genuinely interested in a topic and want to share their knowledge or contribute some of their expertise,” she says.

“It’s come from many directions – people I know and people I don’t know, people I had met years before but not spoken to since. I think the potential of LinkedIn is actually amazing.”

Amy Barratt-Boyes
Amy Barratt-Boyes

Calder’s use of LinkedIn to effectively “crowd source” expert feedback demonstrates the potential of the social media platform and helps explain why 15,000 Australian aged care professionals use it, according to Amy Barratt-Boyes, a social media expert.

She says LinkedIn is an effective tool for connecting with like-minded professionals; it’s the go-to place for engaging potential collaborators and sponsors or for advancing programs or organisations.

Further, she says usage of LinedIn has “sky-rocketed” in the last six to 12 months, after substantial changes and improvements were made to the platform.

“They made it a lot better for people to use, it’s much easier to engage with and the usage has just increased,” says Barratt-Boyes, who is a social media marketer at Melbourne-based PR and marketing agency Ellis Jones.

She points to research which shows there are over 40,000 Australian health professionals who are members of LinkedIn, predominantly in senior management. Some 15,000 of those are aged care professionals, she says.

“LinkedIn is instrumental in engaging with aged care professionals and those within the business sector who contribute to the growing aged care community in some way.”

Barratt-Boyes says there are over 4,500 members of Australian specific aged care LinkedIn groups, which makes LinkedIn “the most widely used social media channel for the Australian aged care industry.”

She says that these groups, which were once full of spam, are now a good source of sharing and interacting with relevant stakeholders.

Louise Forster
Louise Forster

That’s an opinion Louise Forster also advocates.

Forster, the training and workforce development acting manager at CommunityWest, is one of the individuals behind the ACORNS – Young People Interested in Aged Care group on LinkedIn. The group, which has 215 members, is an outcome of the Young Leaders in Aged Care program that ran from January to May 2013.

“I’m in my mid-30s and I realised there’s a big gap when it comes to young people who are interested in getting ahead in aged care. There isn’t much support or advice out there,” she says.

The ACORNS group is a space for young people interested in aged care – whether its young professionals, those studying nursing or allied health, or students from fields like business and management who are considering what industry to work in.

“Providers can also tap into it and have that conversation with young people to find out what they want and to promote what they do.”

ACORNS recently had its first meeting in Perth, attended by 22 interested young professionals and workers. Forster says LinkedIn was central to the group’s creation and to organising the initial meeting.

“It was key to finding people who were interested in the discussion… We used Eventbrite [the online event registration platform] to create the event page, but we promoted it through LinkedIn and Twitter. We sent direct messages to the 215 people in the LinkedIn group.”

While the majority of the ACORNS LinkedIn group is Perth-based, the forum has also attracted members from other states, as well as the US and the UK.

“I posted something the other day about intergenerational conversations and linked it to the fact that we had recently had our first meeting, which was very much on that topic,” Forster says when asked about the typical activity on the ACORNS LinkedIn page.

“Another member posted something about life changing art – it was a visual exhibition of art made by older women. Stephen Kobelke, ASCWA chief executive, posted recently to say he had free tickets to a women in leadership forum if any ACORNS members were interested – and someone took up his offer.

“Someone else posted because she was upset a palliative care hospice had been closed and she wanted to share her shock… Another day, a member posted about new government scholarships for not-for-profit leaders.”

Sharing ideas and views on the ACORNS LinkedIn group.
Sharing ideas and views on the ACORNS LinkedIn group.

Forster suspects LinkedIn will be central to the group in the future. “I’ve just sent out an evaluation and that will be interesting to see what people want, because we have geographically diverse people so I think the online community aspect will be key.”

When asked why LinkedIn, as opposed to the other social media platforms, has proven most successful for ACORNS, Forster says: “It’s just so easy to contact people. It’s been so useful… And because it’s not selling a thing; it’s more about having a discussion place, getting a dialogue happening and people contributing and sharing ideas and opinions.”

Lara Calder similarly says she prefers LinkedIn over other social media platforms because of its ease of use and the opportunity it presents to facilitate discussion.

“It’s a really comfortable space to talk informally about formal business matters. I will continue to use it to test out other ideas and make contacts,” she says.

“It’s definitely growing. Like myself, a lot of people are relatively new to it and are sort of testing it out to see what it does. Certainly, people are engaging with it more and more. It’s quite exciting.”

Tags: acorns, ellis-jones, lara-calder, social media, social-networking,

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