Social Media: Are you drinking the Kool-Aid?

There is no denying that Social Media (SM) is a major talking point for public and private organizations. At the surface of this discussion is an army of statistics that tell us that our online habits are changing in profound ways. Just under the surface lies confusion. Should your organization be involved in SM? Why? What are you trying to achieve? How will you know when you’ve achieved it?

The Devil is in the details – or the lack thereof. Typically nobody talks details; we hear the same “SM is a conversation and you’ve got to be part of it” or “the conversation is already taking place whether you’re participating or not.” Great, but you’ll need more than a clever line and a YouTube video to convince your board that SM engagement is the right use of scarce resources – don’t be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of SM without ever learning how it can help you with our organization’s mandate.

SM as a phenomenon has been around long enough that it’s time to shift the discussion from the esoteric to the practical. It’s time to add some rigor to the discourse.

Are we all suffering from shiny toy syndrome? Yes, but only because decision makers tend to lack a deep enough understanding of the tools and how they can be used. There is good news; currently public and private organizations are using SM in amazing ways with tangible results. Not just big companies with consumer products but public organizations without brand names, products, or heavy communications budgets.

It’s not just about best practices for the sake of best practices – these organizations are increasing efficiency, saving money, and reaching their stakeholders in ways that are tangible and measurable.

What is SM to a Public Sector Organization?

At the 30,000 foot level Social Media is a natural human behavior enabled by new internet tools. At the operational level Social Media is a new channel for communications. What differentiates it from other communications channels is the participatory or ‘two-way’ nature of the medium as well as the low cost of engagement.

Some major benefits include:

Cost: Relatively cheap way to reach your target audience. Facebook, twitter, and blogging are all free applications. Even advertising on Facebook is cost effective.

Segmentation: Do you want to talk to adult males who live in Nunavut and support a cancer-related charity? High penetration rates and unprecedented data points make Facebook the ultimate segmentation tool. Average cost per click in Canada is 66 cents.

Engagement: Unlike television, radio, or print, SM allows for a higher level of engagement through stakeholder participation. Comments, sharing and ‘liking’ are all ways for stakeholders to become advocates.

Sharing: SM is primed for word-of-mouth. What makes it both risky and rewarding is the scale that is possible. Sharing of content via stakeholders’ individual networks allows it to be distributed far beyond your original list of followers.

Authenticity: Today’s consumer/citizen is a jaded to marketing campaigns and distrustful of advertising. Proper execution of a SM strategy has the opportunity to penetrate this outer barrier to reach stakeholders and even convert them to advocates.

Measurable: There was an old saying in marketing, “you’re wasting half your money, you just don’t know which half.” In a digital world you have more control based on rich metrics. Run a magazine ad and you can only hope that people are looking at it and acting on it. Run a Facebook campaign and you are measuring who clicked on the ad and who shared it with their network.

Employ rigor in your approach. Understand the market around you. Every organization has unique opportunities and risks associated with SM, so vital for a sound strategy is the importance of understanding where your organization sits within the market. Then decipher:

What your communications goals are and how SM will help to achieve them What segments you want to connect with – stakeholder analysis What the right level of engagement is given your budget and resources What the opportunities in SM are for your organization What risks are associated with SM What tools are available and which you should use What is the best way to ‘sell’ SM to your senior management?

This can be tricky – your first step is making sure your strategy is based on solid research, but the second is communicating how SM is going to benefit your organization’s mandate. Rather than trying to educate your executive and board about how SM is the future of communications; a better approach is to find an organization which is similar to your own and show how their SM investment has benefited the mandate.

Donna Kell, Manager of Public Affairs for the City of Burlington used this approach when ‘selling’ her strategy to her management team. Donna looked at other municipalities who had used SM effectively. Calgary, a leader in social media among municipalities, had recently used it in the lead up to the construction of a high-profile $22 million footbridge. Donna showed her board how SM played a critical role in engaging residents, developing messaging, and dealing with crisis communications. Donna took this process one step further by inviting the individual responsible for Calgary’s campaign to participate virtually in her presentation to her executive. Donna helped her management team see the concrete benefits and got the green light.

Executing on your strategy: A few insights

The Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) is a model for SM execution: Christian Riel, Manager of Public Relations and Outreach Communications at CIHR was faced with a big problem. His advertising budget was cut from almost $100,000 to $40,000 and he needed to find a way to continue growing the association’s profile with less than half the funds.

He turned to social media – using a combination of common sense, consistency, and a rigorous measurement and reporting process, Christian was able to meet his target and show his management team exactly what their investment in social media returned. His process was so successful that his executive increased his budget by almost 300 per cent.

Christian’s advice to organizations:

Start modestly but start now Focus only on useful content not all content Collaborate Listen, respond, integrate Use common sense

What do you do if you don’t have dedicated staff? Social media is not as time consuming as you’d imagine. Christian Riel suggests assembling an informal working group; he started by walking around the CIHR offices and recruiting volunteers who had an interest in SM. He then tasked each volunteer with maintaining one element of the strategy. Christian estimates his ‘volunteers’ spend about 2 hours a week maintaining the effort.

The ‘Risk’ in SM is largely based on its dynamic pace

Social media is by nature dynamic and relevant. However, the need to feed new content into its channels at a pace that often outstrips internal communications approval processes can increase the potential for a communications ‘Gaff.’

The CIHR deals with this issue by re-purposing content from other sources that is either unlikely to cause any problems or has already been approved. About 95% of their content is re-purposed from another source and they also leverage partner organizations for content creation, removing some of the burden associated with keeping the sites relevant and dynamic.

Facebook: Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation

A Facebook site isn’t useful for every organization but for public sector organizations it can be one of the most powerful and cost effective communication tools available. Facebook has over 500 million users worldwide and over 17 million in Canada – that’s more than 50 per cent of the population. Now, here’s the point: these 17 million people have posted a massive amount of data allowing for segmentation based on geography, ethnicity, age, sex, music and film taste, hobbies, books read, sports watched, illnesses suffered, causes supported etc.

Don’t let your Facebook site become a mirror of your corporate website. The CIHR’s Facebook page is entitled “Health Research in Canada” which allows them to incorporate content from sources outside the CIHR. If you want to appeal to people you need to make sure your page stays relevant and dynamic. The CIHR’s page is about health research in Canada, not about the CIHR – the difference is small, but it means everything.

Twitter is more limited than Facebook but it has a role to play

Twitter is a service that lets you post thoughts and announcement in 140 characters or less. My experience has been that Twitter is a more difficult concept to communicate than Facebook and this is likely indicative of the relative usefulness of the tools. Twitter probably won’t have a massive impact on your communications program but it does provide a few useful services. Statistics indicate that about 50 per cent of new twitter users abandon their account within a month of initiation.

Twitter is an effective listening tool and can most effectively be used to monitor the activities of your stakeholders. You may be interested in the activities of a number or people and organizations within your stakeholder ecology. Keeping up with these activities is a lot easier when their thoughts and activities are collected centrally and limited to 140 characters or less.

Twitter is often about tactics

Remember Christian Riel’s volunteer team? They have a dedicated member who monitors the twitter accounts of important federal ministers and their staffers, allowing the CIHR to stay in the loop with minimal effort. Twitter can also be used to monitor the accounts of journalists who cover your industry/sector. Journalists are heavy twitter users and monitoring their feeds can present you with opportunities to earn your association or organization publicity.

In the same way that you use Twitter to monitor others, using twitter allows your stakeholders to monitor your activities, keeping them abreast of what you are engaged in on a day-to-day basis.

Blogging

Blogging can be a useful activity but often requires a larger time commitment than other forms of social media. The most useful function of a blog is giving stakeholders access to the people whom they would not have had access to otherwise. It can also be an opportunity to show thought leadership.

Caveat: A blog should NOT be indistinguishable from a press release – people expect a certain degree of informality and candor in a blog. The biggest risk associated with blogging today is a dead blog. Visiting a blog and finding that the most current posting is months old is not good for your brand. If you can’t commit time or resources, an alternative to blogging is to put your thoughts into a newsletter or white papers.

Final thought

The whole point in establishing an online presence is to make yourself findable and available for when it’s time for your new client to find you.