#MEawarenesshour every wednesday on twitter

ME/CFS Skeptic

ME/CFS Skeptic

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
It thought this was an idea worth considering, as online presence seems like one of the most powerful assets of the ME/CFS community.

As I understand it, the main idea is to take one hour per week (Wednesday 8 PM London time), where we all tweet about ME/CFS so that it becomes a trending topic on Twitter. You could save some tweets you want to post during the week (for example about an interesting ME/CFS study that was published) and save them for that hour. That way, we could get the attention of people outside the ME/CFS bubble as ME/CFS could become one of the trending topics (and people, journalists sometimes look through these to know what's going on).

I don't know who to give credit for this idea of #MEawarenesshour, I just saw it on twitter where Mira explained it quite well.

 
I think it is a great idea and was very enthusiastic about the ME awareness account and hashtag in the beginning.
But got increasingly annoyed with all the videos by one person calling ME patients abusive towards other patients and researchers, and eventually I had had enough.
 
is there any evidence Twitter is effective at reaching people outside the ME community through using ME specific accounts and hashtags? With MillionsMissing the reach on Facebook was quite limited when stuff was posted on the page and the people following would like but really not very good at sharing. The biggest reach was through proactively posting onto general local groups. But even then given the numbers in the groups the numbers of people looking at the posts were still a small proportion. Tagging in people on Twitter with a lot of followers and more general hashtags might be more productive if the aim is to get the message out wide. Much as the local and national press coverage of personal stories can be hit and miss it seems to be stuff like that and having buildings lit up blue that the general public seem to register.

this is why the GWAS presents such a good opportunity for getting the word out about ME. There is a story to tell about recruiting 20k people. And it can be broken down for local and regional media - trying to get 1;500 people in North West or East of England to come forward
 
Last edited:
NelliePledge said:
is there any evidence Twitter is effective at reaching people outside the ME community through using ME specific accounts and hashtags? With MillionsMissing the reach on Facebook was quite limited when stuff was posted on the page and the people following would like but really not very good at sharing. The biggest reach was through proactively posting onto general local groups. But even then given the numbers in the groups the numbers of people looking at the posts were still a small proportion. Tagging in people on Twitter with a lot of followers and more general hashtags might be more productive if the aim is to get the message out wide. Much as the local and national press coverage of personal stories can be hit and miss it seems to be stuff like that and having buildings lit up blue that the general public seem to register.

this is why the GWAS presents such a good opportunity for getting the word out about ME. There is a story to tell about recruiting 20k people. And it can be broken down for local and regional media - trying to get 1;500 people in North West or East of England to come forward
Click to expand...

I don't have evidence but I have an art page on both twitter and facebook and can say the use of hashtags on twitter can be quite powerful in reaching new audiences. People use hashtags to search for what interests them. Facebook unless one works the post and/or shares posts to groups it generally goes nowhere. People on facebook don't share much to there personal pages unless its a pic of a cat or a quiz on if you were a potato what kind of potato would you be...;). Twitter on the other hand people retweet often. Follow each other. Some months according to twitter analytics I have had tweet impressions of 63k+ (with a following of less than 1000 people at the time) which basically means the tweet has shown up on someones timeline that many times. Gaining followers is also quite different than facebook. If I spend 15 mins a day simply looking up say, #oilpaintings, and liking them, I can easily gain 10 new followers.
 
Last edited:
Problem is not all are singing from the same hymn sheet. So do we really want more exposure of the 'squabbles' and divisions within the community?
Personally, I would like to see more attempts (possibly behind the scenes)at cohesion across the various groups to produce a clearer set of goals.
 
Sly Saint said:
Personally, I would like to see more attempts (possibly behind the scenes)at cohesion across the various groups to produce a clearer set of goals.
Click to expand...

Agreed, but with the way the condition has been (mis)diagnosed I think we're unlikely to get that. Maybe when research is much further forward, but not now.

Also, there are people who have been diagnosed who have been told and genuinely believe that their condition is down to past psychological trauma. Some of these folks don't want medical research, they actually do want more of the same, even though it hasn't cured them so far.

We might attract more people, but equally we might spend a lot of personal resource arguing in pointless circles.

I don't know how we can change that.
 
It's ME awareness hour tonight at 8PM London time! Hope you can all join us this evening.

I suspect many patients will like the experience because there's a feeling of brotherhood and a connection with other patients, a bit like when you go to an actual demonstration.
 
Last edited:
Patients made some beautiful posters to raise awareness:

83360440_168954987755500_6476458718388027392_o.jpg
 
Michiel Tack said:
82213395_168955054422160_7297139566069153792_o.jpg
Click to expand...
It’s great to get help with design and sorry to throw in criticism but just pointing out that the background on this one is rather busy and using that for the text makes the characters a bit fuzzy to me. Given there are known visual difficulties with ME perhaps the text can be reconsidered? The other version isn’t as busy and less fuzzy. Maybe putting a border edging the characters would help with definition.
 
NelliePledge said:
It’s great to get help with design and sorry to throw in criticism but just pointing out that the background on this one is rather busy and using that for the text makes the characters a bit fuzzy to me. Given there are known visual difficulties with ME perhaps the text can be reconsidered? The other version isn’t as busy and less fuzzy. Maybe putting a border edging the characters would help with definition.
Click to expand...

I agree. I don't have ME, myself, but that combination of visuals behind the text and the radiating sun graphic looks like the scintillating visual migraines I occasionally get.

In relation to visual "noise" on web pages, I've never been able to understand why some ME orgs and blogs use cascading graphics on their pages. TYMES Trust does or used to do this, with the dandelion seed head graphic floating down. I've seen ME blogs with butterflies drifting down the pages. Graphics that cascade from the top of web pages make me feel nauseous and with my graphic designer's hat on, it's not good design.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom