Diapers, cots, prams, bottles, soft toys, baby clothing, teething gel are just a few thoughts that spring to mind of an expecting mom. To enrich parents and parents-to-be more about baby stuff was the SABC Education Baba Indaba. The Baba Indaba was designed to inspire new moms to delight in their pregnancy, bring fresh ideas to parents, stimulate toddlers and entice kids with various essential, interesting and fun products.

This annual event was held in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. On 23-25 July the CTICC was the venue where parents, babies, toddlers and tweens were entertained, inspired and encouraged to discover a world of fun and education with a variety of exhibitors. For the first time in South Africa the Kids Indaba, which focuses on children between the ages 6-12 years, was part of the already well-known Baba Indaba.

Among the necessary new-born products, nutritional and healthy food, educational cartoons and maternity fashion shows, was Bridgetown’s very own Reconstructed  Living Lab (Rlabs) to stimulate the children via computers. Rlabs was determined to take Social Media Surgery to the younger generation, who were eager to interact with technology. Rlabs aimed to increase the understanding of technology and to educate the children between the ages of 6-12 years about various educational sites, children from as young as three years old were playing games on the Wii, X-Box and the PC’s.

Most of the children who passed-by showed an interest either by pulling their parents towards Rlabs or running towards a pc or the games projected on the screens. They were knowledgeable as well about the internet and exchanged their favourite sites with the Rlabs team.

Technology has weaved its way to the very young ones and to enhance the phrase “…if you can’t beat them join them,” Rlabs encouraged the parents to embrace the ever transpiring evolution of the online world by introducing them to sites beneficial to their children’s development.

Two of our team members Craig and Brent was out in Johannesburg for 3 days to do training with MobieG. The purpose of this training was to equip  the MobieG team to use  JamiiX, the web based tool allowing you to manage multiple conversations from different Social Networks and Instant Messaging platforms. Jamiix is the platform witch MobieG will do the mobile counselling from. The training also covered the topics “Art of Mobile Counselling” and “The Mind Of a Mobile Counselor.

The launch of MobieG mobile counselling service was on Sunday and to get access to their services click  here “Caring in a non caring world”

It has been one month since we’ve re-launched our Angel support service a partnership between Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs) and MXit. Since then the service had over a 100,000 subscribers with just over 47,000 regular subscribers. Organisations who are working with youth should consider the use of Mobile phones as part of their programmes and below you will find reasons why:

- Most of the users of the service is youth (82% aged 25 and younger)
- Our LIVE mobile counselling service on average receives 200 queries per hour with approximately 92% being identified as youth.
- Most youth request further support, but prefer having it via the Mobile medium. Even when we recommend centres to attend or websites to visit they want a solution that they can access via their mobile phone.
- We’ve developed Mobile virtual support sessions with experts or professional counsellors and achieve 100% referral rate compared to 26% when referral is telephonic and/or face-to-face.
- Most youth are expert mobile phone users and would be able to transfer relevant information in required formats (text, audio, video, images)
- Youth tend to promote mobile services faster and easier to their friends/buddies/contacts via their mobile phones.
- The average number of contacts/buddies/friends youth will actively chat to daily is 19 (based on mobile interviews with LIVE conversations). Most youth would have more than 50 contacts/buddies/friends in their Mobile Instant Messenger (MXit).

As we are continuously trying to improve our Social services through the use of mobile phones, it is advisable for organisations working in this space to start considering the more active use of mobile phones.

AS we continue seeing the rise and growth of Social Media accross various industries, it is clear that we are seeing large volumes joining the bandwagon. Below we share some of the statistics proving that Social Media is still breaking ground. How long this will last will depend on how its being used by businesses, non-profit organisations, governments, communities and youth at large.

Facebook:
- It is estimated that Facebook has reached over 500million users.
- People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook and the average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
- More than 500,000 active applications are currently on the Facebook Platform
- Approximately 250 million users log into Facebook daily
- More than 100 million active users currently accessing the site via mobile technology.

Twitter:
- Twitter indicated that it has more than 190 million users tweeting with more than 65 million tweets a day. (South Africa has 55,000 active twitter users as indicated in a recent study.)
- The use of an open API ensures that 75% of Twitter traffic is generated from outside of twitter.com
- Approximately 65% of the world’s top 100 companies have a twitter account
- Twitter’s search engine gets more than 600 million queries a day. Monthly, this is proportionately more than Bing and Yahoo.
- There are more than 70,000 applications currently using Twitters API

MXit (South African based Mobile Social Network):
- More than 20 million users in South Africa growing at 4000 new users per day.
- Estimated 25 million users log into MXit daily
- Approximately 350 million messages are share via MXit per day.

The above is just an indication of how Social Media is still growing and being adopted by users hungry for sharing and engaging via the web and increasingly more so via mobile.

Latest research by RLabs and the JamiiX Mobile Drug Counselling support system provided the following evaluation:

- In practical terms, the advisors have the capacity to help more people (n = 27) in a two-hour session than advisors at helplines (n = 4).20 The DAS system aggregates the conversations for the advisors, allowing them to respond to the requests more easily and faster.
- The DAS system enables multiple advisors to assist during a given session.
- When an advisor does not have the necessary experience or skills to deal with a case, it can easily be transferred to someone with the necessary skills.
- The advisor receiving the reassigned conversation can view previous conversations with the client, so questions need not be duplicated.
- The advisor can refer a person in need to any other organisation, and maintain a help directory of available services.
- The service proved to be particularly useful for families of drug users, and they were offered family sessions and help if required

The full research paper was publsihed in the South African Family Practice journal.