This document outlines TRICARE's strategy for social media engagement, including establishing goals, protocols for responding to different types of comments, and plans for monitoring, reporting, and evaluating social media engagement. It discusses TRICARE's transition from an exploratory phase to full integration of social media into its communications. The document is confidential and intended for the client.
1. TRICARE: From Exploration to Integration Jacque Brown, Senior Consultant Organization and Strategy This document is confidential and is intended solely for the use and information of the client to whom it is addressed.
5. Social Media Engagement Protocol * Action requires subject matter expert or leadership approval Express gratitude as appropriate if comments were addressed to TRICARE staff Express gratitude and forward as appropriate to build rapport within the community Accept content and express gratitude as appropriate Code Green Neutral/ benign comments Draft and post response from standard language Post standard response Reject content and send standard response directly to user Code Yellow Individual requests, media inquiries, and off-topic remarks Craft response from standard language and submit for approval before posting* Craft response from standard language and submit for approval before posting* Craft response from standard language and submit for approval before accepting comment and/or posting response* Code Orange General questions, misinformation, or emotional statements Do not respond; Report accusations and threats to the appropriate authorities Reject/remove content; Report accusations and threats to the appropriate authorities Reject content; Report accusations and threats to the appropriate authorities Code Red Inappropriate content INDEPENDENT TRICARE-HOSTED DOTMIL Category
Booz Allen Hamilton is a global strategy and technology firm with 23,000 consultants. We started recognizing the value of social media early on because of our work in the intelligence community. To date we have used the principles of openness, sharing, and collaboration to help more than 40 clients better connect with their audiences. TRICARE Management Activity was already using social media to reach its 9.6 million beneficiaries, but they wanted to improve the return on engagement and better address beneficiary concerns.
When we came to TRICARE in March of last year, the first thing we did was a baseline assessment. They were already ahead of many government agencies because they had been using social media since 2008. TRICARE had established profiles on a variety of channels, and they had quite a bit of traffic on their blog, averaging 25 comments per post. However, the lack of stated goals and objectives made it difficult to target activities, and without an engagement protocol they were bogged down in responding to user comments. I like to call this the exploration phase, where organizations get out there to see what social media is all about. They saw some value and wanted to take a more strategic approach to improve their results.
We introduced Booz Allen’s social media lifecycle approach to help TRICARE build a better foundation and begin targeting activities to get the most return for their engagement. We started with the vision, goals, and objectives and developed an engagement protocol to guide our activities. We also threw ourselves into monitoring TRICARE conversations online. We do informal monitoring daily and develop monthly reports to pass on to leadership. To help us further target our activities, we performed a comprehensive tools assessment to determine where our audience was engaging. Through the assessment, and through our evaluation of existing activities, we determined that Facebook was the best place to connect with our target audience, beneficiaries ages 18-34, and Twitter was the best place to engage with other military health organizations and military associations. We also developed key messages to common questions that we can use to quickly respond to beneficiary questions.
This is a summary of TRICARE’s social media engagement protocol We used a color system to classify user comments and determined how we would respond on a DOTMIL site, a TRICARE-hosted profile on an external site, and an independent site with no TRICARE presence.
Here are screenshots of their key social media channels, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. We’re consistently using the TRICARE username rather than TRICARE Health and TRICARE Tweets, and we’re using the official TRICARE logo. We’re working with the Web designer to implement profile templates that are consistent with TRICARE.mil. We can still do more to engage beneficiaries in two-way conversations, and we hope that our success so far will help us gain buy-in to actively request user comments.
This is a screenshot from our monitoring tool, Filtrbox, and a portion of our monthly report. We have developed exhaustive keyword lists for about 20 topics that enable us to monitor trends in conversation over time. The trending topics is the most important part of our report. For instance, we found a surge in conversation around obesity-related surgeries and passed the information to public affairs to draft a press release. We could then post the link where the conversations are happening to direct people to authoritative information on the topic. We recently hit our six-month mark since establishing our goals and objectives, so we developed a progress report and presented it to communications and customer service leadership to further engage other divisions and gain buy-in on our recommendations.
This is a draft mock-up of our proposed TRICARE Media Center. It will fully integrate our social media activities with our existing pressroom and TRICARE publications, providing a one-stop shop for updates on TRICARE information. The information box in the top right corner links the user to established customer service resources, and there will be a search bar that crawls all of TRICARE.mil. Some other improvements we hope to make in the near future are: Increased partner outreach Targeted campaigns for at-risk populations (one of our goals) Development of a crisis communication protocol specifically for social media
Here is my contact information. For official TRICARE social media questions, please contact AnneMarie Felicio, the TRICARE social media lead, at annemarie.felicio@tma.osd.mil.