Facebook Analysis: Support for Churg-Strauss

Facebook Analytics

Churg-Strauss, also known as "Eosinophilic Granulomatosis" is an autoimmune disease without a known cure. More so it's something a person very close to me has been struggling with for years, with little advancements being made,  However, finally this summer some medical studies are beginning on this disease, but without awareness and support these studies remain extremely small. Therefore, that is why I created my Facebook campaign, "Support for Churg-Strauss, in order to help raise awareness and hopefully gain support. I utilized photos of what the disease looks like under a microscope, which looks interesting with it's bright color and pattern, and tried to make the name of the page stand out.

Looking back into my earlier blog when first creating this page my My mission statement and persona's were as follows:
Mission statement:
Churg-Strauss syndrome is an uncommon disease that deals with the inflammation within blood vessel walls, and it currently has no cure. “Support for Churg-Strauss” is an outreach page dedicated to raising awareness to this rare issue. By providing information, highlighting resources, and tracking updates on potential breakthroughs we hope to make this issue better known to the public.  Effectively uniting anyone who is interested in the cause. 

Personas

Persona #1) Stephen is a 42 year old man, a little under 6 months ago he began deal with severe issues pertaining to his sinuses and asthma. Finally after giving in and going to a doctor, he was diagnosed with Churg-Strauss syndrome. Stephen now is browsing the internet for information and resources so he can better understand this rare issue. 

Persona #2) Lacy and Travis are young parents with a 6 year old son who was diagnosed with Churg-strauss. They have exhausted all of the resources they could find, but hope to track any developments pertaining to finding a cure. Even more so they hope to find someone else impacted by this syndrome to talk to their son. They feel having someone who is also dealing with the syndrome would be great for their son to ask questions and see, that with proper care, it is a manageable disease. 

Persona #3) Sarah is a 24 year old who spends a lot of her time on Internet, especially facebook. Always looking for new stories to read she always finds her way to interesting articles on the internet. She also browses the articles her friends posts of Facebook. Through this she has become aware of several organizations and been a part of several volunteer projects that have happened throughout her community.

Keeping these ideas in mind I created my short and long descriptions of the page hoping to attract those who may suffer from Churg-Strauss themselves or those who may want to help in raising awareness about this issue.

Page Likes

After the creation of my page I encourage Facebook friends and class mates to engage in the page. In the first month I achieved 53 likes, however though I kept encouraging those who liked the page to engage and share the posts, the page likes unfortunately did not rise, and I actually had a one "like" loss in March putting my count to 52 and holding. It is a decent amount of people to push information out to, however I was disappointed that I could not garner anymore likes outside of its initial creation. 

Page & Tab Visits:

While I created a Facebook ad for fun which looks like this:

I did not actually pay to put the ad out there- though I felt like narrowing down the audience to what I was hoping to attract and pushing ads out to them would have generated more attention to the page. 

So my page was then visited by those who liked the page

My page was mostly visited by other Facebook users, with one finding the page through my blog.  My "Info" tab was viewed a couple times throughout this project, but most of the traffic came from other timelines. 

Total post reach:

I did not pay to boost my posts, on average depending on the time of day I was able to reach at least over 10 people, my highest reach being in the mid 30's. 

Support Churg-Strauss Fans:

75% of those who liked this page were female, and 25% male. A combined 77% fell into the ages of 18-34. I think this is a great age range as I would hope young groups would be more proactive in wanting to raise awareness. This age range and gender lean fell into at least two personas I created. However this rare disease most commonly appears in those in the 40-60 age range, so it would have been nice to get more of a fan base from that side of things in order to gain some support there. My likes also spanned 10 different states and even one from Japan. While I realize most if this comes from those who moved to St. George from a different state or country, it still give the page an opportunity to reach into those states if it connects with the social networks of those who liked the page. It did not look like this networking happened but I believe if still has potential to branch out which is a good sign. 

Support for Churg-Strauss Fan Reach:

As I said before I did not actually push out my Facebook ad, which I feel may have increased the reach. Several posts did not make the reach I had hoped for even though I tried to utilize different "hot spot" times to post. However my reach was able to expand to those which were outside of my "fans" which shows this page had potential to expand to those who are curious. 

Support for Churg-Strauss Fan Engagement: 

Fan engagement was undoubtedly the biggest and most heartbreaking challenge for me. It was difficult to take a serious, rare disease, and try to create engaging posts. I tried informational pages, links to things being done, bright colors, light humor, pictures, TV references, and videos. I challenged people to share the post, like the post.....do anything with the post...yet none of these really stuck. I think while the large young fan base has the potential to be pro active it is another step to get them to actually create an environment where they inform themselves about it and want to do something. 

With so many large diseases and issues that already have achieved support and have ways to easily get involved such as with ribbons, and walks, it is harder to create a movement off of something less well known. 

I clearly did not find the right tactic to create this movement, and get people to engage. So I will likely take more time to see what might work as this is something I'm interesting in keeping up with, especially as studies begin.  I did manage to receive at least 1 like per post, rarely there was a comment, but nothing enough to generate any data for me to display here. 

Post Types & Engagement:

Going off of what I have written above, these are my post types and engagements. I utilized several different posts but out of 52 people my average reach was 23 with photos and 19 with links. Even at the highest of 23, that is not even half of my fan base. While I did get a couple likes and shares I did not engage more than 5 people on any one post. So overall these numbers were a little discouraging, but also gives important feedback that I need to keep looking for another tactic to try, hopefully something will stick as I continue. 

Individuals Posts & Engagements:

Looking at the demographics of those who most visited my page as well as different times to post I tried to create a variety of things to check out and hopefully get some involved with the page. The post introducing what Churg-Strauss was garnered the most attention with 11-12 people engaging in the post. Others aimed at what can be done to help, or stories of those living with Churg-Strauss had 0-1 involvement. My own created pictures seemed to draw even more attention than found videos or links. I am not positive as to why, but it certainly was interesting and I am still trying to understand what the best way to push out this information is.
Interestingly enough I found the the posts I made myself on power point seemed to attract the most attention. I feel like this may be because the information was right in front of the viewers at that moment. They did not need any additional attention and were short enough to gain some interest. 

Summary

This assignment has really helped me understand the workings of social media on a much deeper level. Targeting demographics, and creating engaging posts is a challenge that needs to be seriously thought about before moving forward. 

I feel like picking a "raising awareness" topic brought in it's own struggles too. It was difficult to find a balance to find what would bring people in.  I feel like I could and should have posted more, posting more frequently likely would have pushed posts into some news feeds that it had not appeared in before. While I kept trying different tactics, post more often in different ways could have helped solidify what would reach people enough in order to want to do something.

Overall however, I feel I have learned a lot through this process and would like to continue this page. Gaining support for Churg-Strauss is something I am passionate about and I would love to apply what I've learned through this to be able to reach and expand this awareness project further.  

Contextual Anaylsis: Draft for review

Garissa University Shootings and Social Media

*Disclaimer* due to the heated debates that occurred on social media over this topic I have included several screenshots of direct quotes from news comment forums to illustrate my point. A handful of them contain harsh language and …in reality it was hard to find many that didn’t...

On April second, an attack by Al-Shabab gunmen in Garissa, a Kenyan university dorm left 147 dead and another 79 wounded, (Source). Collins Wetangula, a survivor, mentioned that these Islamic extremists specifically targeted Christians saying “If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot”. The gunmen also were chanting “’Sisi ni al-Shabab’ – Swahili for ‘We are al-Shabab’” as they raided the dorm. The initiator of the attack was named to be Mohamed Kuno, “a headmaster at a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Garissa Kenya until 2007….he joined the militant group Hizbul Islam, which in 2010 merged with al-Shabab”(Source). This attack marks the fourth in a row, having been a radical Islamic attack every month so far in 2015.

This tragic attack however has had an interesting response over social media outlets everywhere. Instead of sympathy for the fallen, most of the emotional responses range from intense rage and racist commentary, to battles about religion, and others intellectually trying to understand the extremists and circumstances. In all cases however, there has been a lot of misleading information. Making it extremely time consuming to shift through news stories, posts, and links in order to find credible sources to back up the facts that are being claimed.

Let’s take a moment and look at the background of Islamic extremists, to better understand the physical context. Radical Islam can be seen not only as a religion but a culture, political ideology, and in several ways a form in which to distribute power. Within it the leaders are often highly educated, such as the case with this Kenyan University attack. A former CIA counterterrorism specialist, Marc Sageman, found that, in terms of terrorist recruitment, it is a middle class phenomenon. “This result was confirmed in Britain by the MI5 report, which found that two-thirds of the terror suspects…were ‘from middle or upper-middle-class backgrounds”(Source). These facts shine an entirely different light on the situation, as social media outlets such as “Reddit” and “Facebook” try to push the idea that the majority of their recruitment comes from the poor and uneducated that are easily brainwashed, which does not seem to be the case.

This then brings up several questions as to how, if they come from decent backgrounds, can so many turn to violent terrorism? Rik Coolsaet a Belgian scholar, leading studies based on Muslim Radicalization found that “Religious orthodoxy starts from a quest for identity…Political radicalization starts from opposition to injustice. The former can develop into a challenge for social cohesion….a smaller number eventually ends up in using violence as their preferred tool of political action” ( Source ). Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, also brings up the point that “Apologists would tell us that militant Islam is a distortion of Islam, but that is not true; it emerges out of the religion, constituting a radically new interpretation” (Source).

A UN report claims that “More than 25,000 foreign fighters from 100 nations have travelled to join militant groups such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State...The number of foreign fighters worldwide has soared by 71% between the middle of 2014 and March 2015” (Source). The UN utilized social media in order to look into threats by and recruitment of those involved in the Islamic State.  After attending “finishing schools” in Syria and Iraq, these foreign fighters are then scattered all over the world. In a study done by the Gallup organization they found that “Jihadist teorrism became a phenomenon in the West starting in the early 1990s as an extreme political response to the presence of Western soldiers in Islamic lands”(Source).

In an article done by the bbc (Source) they focused on one Radical Islamist fighter who escaped into Syria while on bail, Siddartha Dhar, who had spoken openly about his support for Radical Islam and defended brutality saying “Now that we have this caliphate, I think you’ll see many Muslims globally seeing it as an opportunity for the Koran to be fully realized”.

Bringing all this back to the horrific Kenyan dormitory attack, it’s clear that the idea of radical Islamic groups are in fact taking opportunities to fully realize the brutal aspects of the Korans doctrine. Being utilized as both a tragic display of force, as well as religious persecution.

An al-Shabab spokes man, Sheik Ali Mohamud Range, told the press over the phone that the attack happed because “Al-shabab considers Kenya an enemy in part because the country sent troops to Somalia in 2011 to fight the group”( http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/70-killed-hundreds-rescued-after-kenya-university-attack-by-al-shabab-militants/2015/04/02/0c554516-d951-11e4-ba28-f2a685dc7f89_story.html ).  

Looking at it from the aspect of religious persecution, it has been found by( Source  )that “ Approximately 70% of Kenyans are Christians…6% are Muslim”. With the dominant religion being Christianity, this attack by the minority religion holds a lot of weight. Also to the radical Muslim communities Christianity is often associated with the west, a force trying to invade their lands. Therefore this attack illustrates Rick Coolsaets argument that these acts of terrorism are a statement of political action, as well as a display of power.

In terms of emotional and social response resulting from this story, social media played a particularly interesting role. The news stories that did cover the story did so broadly and briefly. A few paragraphs were dedicated to the stricken and devastated community, friends and families of those lost. Yet that was about the extent of the social media response in terms of focusing on those impacted by this attack.

While the story was breaking there was a lot of incorrect facts that were being spread. So several of the social media interactions were initially trying to dig out the real story and weed out misleading ideas. Shortly after these responses however “thought germs” quickly spread. Thought germs being when those on the internet begin to heatedly argue with an opposing idea, and like minds stick together to bash the opposing view. This became very prevalent as arguments against religion, racism, politics, took storm in the aftermath of this shooting.  Several people began to argue about different facts and viewpoints, even utilizing facts of this tragic case to move their own personal agendas forward.

First, when the story broke there were several incorrect facts being spread across social media outlets. An example of this comes from a discussion forum on reddit.com (Source)

As you can see the comments are ranked by “Up votes” in which people may raise a comment up or sink it down “down votes”. This misinformation was quickly raised to the top of the forum, while the correct information was not even given 1/10^th of the same attention.  Therefore illustrating how social media can quickly spread incorrect facts, and while there are often those who weed out the false information it receives far less attention.

                In the light of the Kenyan University shooting, many on social media rushed into heated debates about religion also. Upon reading through the comments and posts on this attack, the arguments about religion were by far the most prevalent. Several comments, rather intense and even appalling in nature, created debates that ran on for pages.  Yet overall, there appeared to be a split as one side attacked Islam, and others tried to defend it. Such as this example from (Source ).

Others taking opportunities to focus on ideas of Christian persecution. As well as the negative actions the Christians have taken in the past. Thus comments ranged from,

to

And everything in-between. Even still others took this time to shine light on how all religion brings nothing but violence. Though in most cases these arguments did nothing to help those in Kenya or really idea to a change. Emotional responses in terms of religion, were largely hateful more than anything as each fought to put their two cents in. Religion however was not the only topic up for debate. Politics, and pushing personal agendas played a huge role within the arguments over social media too.

While news outlets took to avoiding this aspect, focusing more on the attack itself. A majority of the social media response from the general public took the path of blaming the American government for the attack occurring in the first place. Several took advantage of this attack strategy to specifically target President Barack Obama. One example of this comes from a forum under "Big Story's" coverage of the story (Source). Stating things like;

Even taking it a step further on social media outlet, Twitter, (Source),as to claim that Obama was related to the mastermind of the Kenyan attack, Mohamed Kuno.







Along these lines, while there was outrage that America had not done enough to prevent the attack it soon turned to looking at what was being done politically in the aftermath. In terms of looking government action there were several that felt like the US government had not done enough. Those on the Sky News forum (Source) forum brought up ideas like:

Therefore, while the outrage is clear, and there those that question what kind of precautions can be made so tragic events such as these do not occur again, it seems like most of the burden fell on America. Hardly anything was said throughout social media on the actions of the Kenyan government in the aftermath of the University shooting, nor was there much in terms of discussions on what could be done to aide them. Rather most of the commentary was centered towards Obama and the lack of government aide. This caused emotional responses of nationalism outrage and arguments on how America should or should not be a part of every country suffering terror attacks stemming from religious and political unrest.

The political concerns did not quite end here however, there were some who even took this attack to forward their own political agendas. Such as interactions that occurred on the comment section of the National Post’s (Source) coverage of the story. When Liberal Canadian politician Justin Trudeau came under attack for supporting Islam because he wants the Muslim vote.

There were no reliable sources to back up these claims. However, it shows that even in the midst some on social media take opportunities to shift stories to meet their own agendas.

Overall looking at the psychological and social contexts, there was a large amount of content to shift through. The comments of the general public brought forth far more information and debates than the news stories did. Making this story more directed to citizen journalism and they took and twisted the story in several different ways.  However while there were emotional responses concerning true facts, religion and politics this attack was more used as a small point in a larger argument. It opened the floodgates to personal “thought germs” but never really focused on the attack itself and those impacted by it. Leaving the emotional response to be more of anger about the broader aspects of it rather than sympathy for the act of terror itself.

In regard to temporal reactions this story unfortunately has little to no impact. The Kenyan University attack was covered the front page news of a few large news sources for a few hours on the day it happened, April 2^nd 2015. While others covered it even more briefly, a citizen of the UK noted on a Sky News forum (Source)that they were





In the days after the attack, while families and the community were still grieving. Yet, unless one had heard about it previously and searched for it, the story was nowhere to be found. Just another horrific attack that was buried after it's five minutes of “viral” spotlight. The debates the stemmed from the story did hold steam for a frew days after the attack but as people got tired of either arguing in circles, or agreed with one another those died out too. Though it did not lend much to the story itself and it quickly fell into the background while the debates heated up on other topics. In conclusion, acts of terror like this, stemming from radical islam no longer really reach the general public on a large scale. Even if we do happen to catch the story while it is hot, we have become desensatized to them. Even the debates the stem from it leave the actual story behind and focus on a broader scale. However with such a huge response from social media, it’s clear that a paradigm shift is wanted in terms of stopping terror, but we would need to remove the extreme emotional biases, and come up with logical solutions for any change to start. This, however is unfortunatly likely a long way off.