More than half of Australians have followed advice they found on social media, with a quarter of them experiencing negative consequences

2CC Talking Canberra Radio - Australian Capital Territory - Stephen Cenatiempo

2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo

[Stephen Cenatiempo] This will probably not surprise anybody but a recent study into the use of social media for advice, found more than half of Australians have followed advice they found on social media, with a quarter of them experiencing negative consequences. Apparently there's a clear trend for sourcing everything from beauty and make-up to parenting advice on social media, largely due to time restrictions, and feeling embarrassed by face-to-face consultations. Well the Australian-born revolutionary new advice platform dedicated to connecting people with experts has launched an advice marketplace for Aussies to access true trusted and personalised advice anywhere, any time. It's called, or the organisation is called Anni and they've launched this on-demand wellness advice platform to combat ineffective and harmful social media advice, the founder and CEO of Anni, Diranne Lee-Renwick joins us now. Good morning.

[Diranne Lee-Renwick] Good morning, Steven, how are you?

[Stephen Cenatiempo] Very well. I guess the difficulty here is how do you actually ascertain that your experts are experts because people just call themselves experts these days which is the problem.

[Diranne Lee-Renwick] Absolutely! That's true and we've got a very robust application process that everyone has to go through. So an expert will apply for their profile, their qualifications and everything is checked by us and then ultimately they go through that process [of joining]. The most important thing is we have we actually check if they are a human, and that's quite important on the platform because we want to ensure that every Australian is connecting with an expert is actually connecting with a true and trusted human. So we identified them and once we're happy, then we released them onto the marketplace where they can go forth and start to help people.

[Stephen Cenatiempo] So how does; how do, the mechanics of this work? If I'm you know a punter out there that's looking for advice on a particular issue, how do I then engage with an expert or make that connection.

[Diranne Lee-Renwick] So if the first releases is an applications which is available on [the] Apple Store, and, of course, Google play, and as a member you download. It's free! You can search for your problems, you can browse the various topics which to date are beauty, wellness, parenting and sexual health we just expanded into. You can then look at the various experts which we've now got a couple of hundred; and ultimately you can then look at their schedule, and book a time. And we've got, just looking locally around you guys, we've got Claudia Green who is a clinical herbalist who is available and looking at schedule she's available from tomorrow.

[Stephen Cenatiempo] So you essentially book at and then make a, you know, video consult with her. Are you looking at expanding this beyond sort of wellness and personal type programs? I mean will the advice go further than that"? Or, or you're going to stick to that sort of, I won't say niche because it's fairly broad, but looking at those I guess health and wellbeing type areas.

[Diranne Lee-Renwick] So the whole platform has built so it can be expanded and the technology behind it means that we can expand into into any vertical area that we choose. We are focusing on the wellness area and at this stage we are focusing on Australian experts but the plan is that we take this globally which will give us, I guess, our experts and Australian professionals the ability to start sharing their skills internationally and then ultimately we will open up into new regions where we can have global global experts or global professionals throughout the world.

[Stephen Cenatiempo] Are you out there looking for these experts or are they coming to you?

[Diranne Lee-Renwick] Look a bit of both. We put an advert on Seek and on various forums. But a lot is word of mouth. But the platform has grown significantly, experts have doubled in the last month and the number of members has quadrupled since we launched the platform and mid-July.

[Stephen Cenatiempo] Be interesting to see how it all goes. Diranne, I really appreciate your time this morning! Magic, thank you! Thank you so much and thanks for your time. All the best Diranne Lee-Renwick, Founder and CEO of Anni. Look it seems like a good idea, doesn't it, to try and collate some of these, you know, fair dinkum expert so you can get some advice rather than, you know, maybe going with that previous caller went for her advice on Israel.

This appeared on 2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo, 2CC Talking Canberra Radio - Australian Capital Territory - Stephen Cenatiempo on November 2, 2023.

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