A service-oriented approach to public sector social media strategy
Abstract:
Organisations that employ a marketing-driven, broadcast-oriented communications strategy have chosen a path of minimum relative risk. However, organisations that actively impel a service-oriented approach to social media will achieve a higher level of engagement. Even so, it must be understood that there are important risk factors to consider when executing a social media strategy, just as there are issues that must be addressed. From related experience in the provision of strategic and operational advice, it is apparent and necessary for organisations, especially those in the public, not-for-profit and social sectors, to plan for a service-oriented approach. Also, this must be implemented with diligence and dedication to ensure that each organisation gains the necessary benefits of proper communications. In addition, possible problems must be foreseen, and addressed with proper remedies to ensure that that the ‘voice’ of an organisation has enough capacity to do well in the all-important job of interacting with a growing, demanding and giving online community.
Introduction
Quite rapidly, social media has become an essential part of the communications toolkit for private sector companies of all sizes, from local restaurants and boutiques to large multinational corporations: Facebook for customer engagement; Twitter for announcements and PR; Groupon and Foursquare for deals and location-based services… the list goes on. Basically, the managers and drivers of brands have learned how to adapt their existing communications efforts – previously unidirectional, broadcast-oriented campaigns – into sophisticated, long-term engagement strategies that can improve customer satisfaction, increase sales and offer a significant competitive advantage.
For public sector and non-profit organisations, however, social media can prove to be a much more difficult tool to adopt. Limited resources, in terms of time, money and knowledgeable staff, can severely hamper an organisation’s ability to create and execute a proper and effective social media campaign. In addition, political obstacles, conflicting organisational priorities and excessive risk aversion can stand in the way of developing a coherent communications strategy. Since it is much more difficult to measure the progress of a public sector organisation’s communications goals (such as increasing issue awareness, changing constituent behaviours and raising more funds from individual donors) compared to those of a private sector company (such as increasing sales, improving market positioning and influencing brand perception), public sector organisations have a much more difficult time in justifying the necessary investment in social media, particularly given the aforementioned severe resource constraints.
Despite these challenges, it is clear that there is no longer a question of ‘if’ public sector organisations should begin using social media – it is only a question of ‘how’. Organisations like UNICEF, Amnesty International and others have established a powerful presence on Facebook and Twitter, and have been able to engage with new audiences in ways that were not possible in the days before social media; but success of this kind requires more than just a Facebook account, a Twitter feed and an energetic college intern or two. Communications success of this type requires a new approach to communications thinking.
At Flashing12 Communications, we advise non-profit organisations, public sector organisations and United Nations agencies on how to use social media and other technologies as part of an overall communications strategy. Often, we have been called upon to assist organisations that are just starting to embrace social media for the first time, or are struggling with adapting social media into existing communications infrastructure. Regardless of the size, sector or focus of these organisations, we are frequently asked the same three questions (or some variant thereof) by client organisations that are expanding their use of social media. Specifically:
1. What social media platforms or tools should we be using?
2. How much do we need to commit, in terms of risk and resources?
Our approach to answering these questions is heavily informed by a practice known as service science, an interdisciplinary, human-centred method for designing and improving services. Since social media platforms differ from traditional communications tools in their dependence upon direct and indirect interaction with friends, followers and constituents, the use of these platforms more closely resembles a service interaction than a broadcast medium. Consider that social media-based audiences no longer respond to blunt-force pleas for donations via Facebook, nor are they as likely to respond to a call to action simply because it arrives in their Twitter feed. Users are demanding more reciprocal relationships with the groups to which they subscribe, and seek two-way interactions that provide them with value.
According to Professor Emmanuel Fragniere, of HEG Geneva’s Service Lab, the key component of the service relationship is the notion of ‘coproduction’, with this being the process through which both the service provider and the service consumer work together to create value. For example, the expertise and experience of the travel agent is combined with the desires and preferences of the vacationer to create the perfect holiday getaway. A similar principle applies to the use of social media by organisations: by providing something of value to the user (whether it is expertise, information, or some other tangible or intangible offering), the user is more likely to increase their responsiveness to, and connection with, the organisation.
We will attempt to illustrate this method by applying our service-oriented approach to answer the three questions stated above.
What social media platforms or tools should our organisation be using?
When we discuss the adoption of social media platforms with our clients, often we find ourselves talking about the so-called ‘big names’ – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – and then moving on quite quickly to how (not whether) to adopt those platforms. Many organisations rush to assume that participation in these platforms is both necessary and desirable and, in the process, often ignore the smaller platforms, such as Quora, Pinterest, Google + and others, while committing themselves to unsuccessful or even damaging efforts on the larger networks. Frequently, this reflects platform-centric thinking that works backwards from identifying social media tools that are successful for other organisations with different audiences. As should stand to reason, this approach might not meet the needs and preferences of their own followers.
A service-oriented approach to social media assumes that a key part of the organisation’s strategic priorities is to provide value to its audience. With this assumption in mind, the most important questions to ask, in the first instance, when choosing what platforms to adopt are:
We will look at the three questions and address each one below.
Who are we, and what do we want to achieve?
Hopefully, this first question can be answered by the organisation’s own mission and vision statements. Social media will offer little help to an organisation that lacks a clear vision or a coherent organisational strategy. But this question is worth revisiting during this process – possibly by way of a formal communications audit – as it will offer the organisation an opportunity to reflect on whether its existing communications infrastructure serves its mission and strategy, and whether any internal adjustments need to be made before proceeding to a new way of doing things.
Who is our audience, and what do they want?
Usually, there is a gap between what managers of an organisation think they know about their audience, and what is actual and true. In the old days of primarily unidirectional, broadcast-style communications (for instance, printed mailings, TV and radio advertising, online ads and email blasts), organisations could be somewhat forgiven for falling out of touch with who their audiences are, and how they live. But in a landscape where competition is fierce – whether for gaining attention, engagement or donations – organisations can no longer afford to make false assumptions about the very people that they are trying to reach. This is to say that taking a ‘megaphone’ approach to reaching core audiences is problematic in modern times.
Essentially, effective use of social media demands an approach that is based on co-production in bringing together the needs and goals of the organisation with those of the organisation’s constituents so as to create value for both parties. As suggested earlier, few organisations – particularly in the non-profit, social or public sectors – have sufficient resources to make use all of the major social media platforms aggressively and comprehensively. Furthermore, to do so blindly – without knowing what platforms are the best fit for their organisation and their membership – could prove to be a waste of time and manpower.
So how does an organisation learn more about its audience? Constituent research is not a task that can be done once, then checked off the ‘to do’ list; it is a continuous process, and very much a way for an organisation to check in with its membership periodically. It is also a process that has both quantitative and qualitative components, and that uses both formal and informal techniques. Consider the most basic – yet still very effective – components of a constituent research effort. Three simple queries need to be considered, as follows.
Who they are
What does the organisation know about the most basic demographic characteristics of its membership? Age, gender, geographic location, job sector, job position, interests and years involved with a current issue are just some of the vital details that can help to shape a social media strategy. This information can be gleaned from new member registrations, website sign-up forms, event registrations or even surveys. Questions should be simple, straightforward, and return facts as answers, rather than receive opinions.
What they think
Reaching out for the opinions, suggestions and even criticisms from membership can be a painful task. Even so, it is absolutely necessary to do so (in this regard, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn recently referred to feedback as ‘a gift you don’t always care to open’). Website polls, email surveys, and ‘man on the street’ survey research at events and other gatherings can offer key insights into what the organisation’s constituency cares about. This form of feedback can alert the organisation’s leadership to upcoming trends or burgeoning threats. Best of all, the simple act of asking these questions lets the audience know that the organisation cares to hear the answers.
What they do
How many new members registered this year compared to last year? How many of these new registrations were the result of referrals from existing members? How much money was raised this year? How many new visits were there to the website? Did any of them check out the news alert page that was set up? There are several measureable indicators of member behaviour, some which require no more than Google Analytics, Hootsuite or other web dashboard software. Some types of metrics require a little more spreadsheet digging, but the chances are that organisations have a great amount of useful information lying around that can describe what its members actually do, regardless of what they may say they do or say that they want to do.
Once an organisation has explored at least these three types of information about its members, it can ask (and hopefully begin to answer) more meaningful questions about how it can best serve its members by using social media. Analysing cross-sections of the collected data can reveal opportunities for expanding into new social media platforms, or abandoning platforms that aren’t producing results – for example, surveys that suggest a demand for a mobile app combined with weak Facebook traffic data. Collecting and analysing information over time can reveal trends or patterns, or show the effects of particular campaigns or one-time phenomena. To provide additional context, conducting short, semi-directed interviews with individual constituents can offer different – and sometimes deeper – levels of insight into how, when and why an individual member interacts with the organisation.
When any entity takes the time to learn more about its user base, it has a much better idea of what tools and platforms to deploy. If the audience wants – and can commit to – a high level of engagement and interactivity, then Facebook might be the right call. If the organisation’s membership is interested in curated photo content, then Pinterest might be a better use of resources. However, if a constituency looks to the organisation for breaking updates on a particular issue or service, then Twitter may be the best choice. Consider the case where one of our United Nations clients discovered that the reason a particular social media campaign in Ukraine was failing to achieve results was that the target audience had very little access to the Internet via computers and, instead, used mostly mobile phones and SMS messaging. Basically, without knowing who the audience is, and what they want, organisations run the risk of making costly, wasteful assumptions that will have a negative effect on critical decisions.
What do we have to offer our audience?
When organisations first begin to embrace social media, the temptation is extremely strong to use these tools purely as a way to mobilise audiences and ‘get them to do things’. Share with your friends! Retweet this to your followers! Give money! Post your own photos from last week’s rally! ‘Like’ us! This type of behaviour reflects the leftovers of broadcast thinking – for example, send them flyers, email newsletters, as well as calls-to-action, and hopefully they’ll react. In stark contrast, a service-oriented approach to social media forces organisations to look beyond a loudspeaker-and-audience model to one of genuine give and take, and thereby authentic engagement through the generation of shared value.
In addition, once an organisation has taken the time to learn about its audiences, it can then look back over its assets to see how it might be able to provide value to its audience through using social media. Often, its audience is composed of various different stakeholder groups, sometimes with wildly varying interests; knowing what these interests are, and what content your organisation has to offer to each, is the key to selecting the right social media tools for the job.
Of course, it is not always that simple. There can be structural, political or organisational obstacles to providing certain kinds of content to constituents. For example, one of our clients, a Geneva-based United Nations agency, had rolled out its Facebook page and Twitter feed shortly before hiring us, having not had much of an idea beforehand of how these new tools were to be used. The organisation was feeling pressure to establish a presence on these platforms. However, there was no existing strategy, or formal policy, for how to proceed – nor was any new staff capacity allocated for the task. The job of setting up and maintaining these streams was laid at the feet of those who already had a full range of other responsibilities within the communications department.
When we began working with the people at that agency to develop a strategy for making the most out of the new platforms for community engagement, we learned that their personnel faced a major obstacle: They were forbidden from retweeting, reposting or sharing any content that did not originate with (or was not solicited by) the United Nations. This meant that one of the key advantages to social media – indeed, a key part of the ‘social’ nature of social media itself – was off-limits to them. Clearly, this restricted the use of their Twitter feed to that of a loudspeaker with which they could ‘announce things’ and ‘denounce things’, but really very little else could be done with that medium.
With the set of assets and limitations uncovered in the process of our review, Facebook seemed to offer a more appropriate set of options. In order to work around the most significant obstacle, we looked carefully at who comprised their existing user base on Facebook, and what they were doing. We found that most were silent, and not very involved. But an active minority was posting personal stories, questions and opinions related to first-hand experiences with human rights and discrimination around the world. These members were looking to the organisation, not just for things like announcements and press releases, but for answers and expertise – with these being two things that this particular UN organisation was uniquely positioned to provide. Accordingly, our final recommendation was for the organisation to focus primarily on Facebook, as well as to give their audience access to the entity’s vast store of knowledge and expertise in pertinent issues through scheduled Facebook Q&A sessions with UN experts, through themed awareness campaigns, and also through the periodic posting of case studies, plus stories, that prompted real discussion and engagement.
What do we need to commit to, in terms of risk and resources?
The costs of running a social media campaign, comically, are almost lopsided. For instance, it costs literally nothing to create a Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or any other kind of social media account and begin posting. It also costs nothing to envision a grand social media ‘strategy’ consisting of a coordinated network of Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, blogs and user-submitted video galleries, with all of these components powered by a few energetic (and unpaid) interns and loyal volunteers who do the work of posting, tweeting, curating content and managing the small empire of online communities.
This utopian notion of a cheap, sustainable social media strategy is corrected by the high cost of labour and risk associated with deploying a sustainable social media engagement strategy. The benefits of using social media for communications are fairly clear: broaden it to reach new audiences, to deepen relationships with existing audiences, to wage campaigns and to respond quickly to events, as well as to raise funds in ways that were never possible before with traditional media channels. However, the tradeoffs are less easy to calculate, and can carry much greater consequences for the organisation. For instance, just witness the landscape of half-abandoned Facebook pages, dormant Twitter feeds and campaigns-gone-wrong that ended up costing more in damage control than any benefit that any of these vehicles could have offered.
Without a doubt, organisations should think about the costs and risks of expansion into greater social media engagement as though designing a service, rather than as rolling out an additional, simple communications campaign. This is because social media creates complex relationships and interactions between the organisation and its audiences, which is the very benefit, and also the danger, of using it. Consider, here, how posted content provokes reactions, produces unexpected consequences and generates network effects that can incur costs and outcomes for the organisation far beyond what was ever planned at the beginning of a campaign.
Resources – knowing what it costs to get what you want
What does it take to run a Facebook page or a Twitter feed? How much time, how many people and what kinds of skills are required to run a crowd-sourced fund-raising drive or an online contest? Every organisation, every campaign and every set of tools used requires a different level of allocation of time and manpower.
While there is no easy back-of-the-napkin calculation, it is at least possible to describe and discuss some of the different – and most essential – lines of work that are involved in various levels of social media implementation in order to offer a rough estimate of the minimum amount of capacity required to do so.
Research and monitoring
Social media is a powerful research tool; for issue-based advocacy organisations, it is essential to keep abreast of trending topics and influential contributors via Twitter, to monitor discussions on Quora or to follow the comment threads of similar (or opposing) organisations on Facebook. Social media monitoring via tools such as TweetDeck, Radian6 and HootSuite can serve as an important feedback mechanism that offers a glimpse into the things that people are saying about your organisation, the effectiveness of your ongoing campaigns, and the current events and discussions relevant to the issues about which you care.
Just as an individual might punctuate the work day by scanning headlines of news websites, organisations should periodically browse through and search social media sites in order to identify the leading topics and influencers in their particular sector. In addition, an organisation should continuously monitor the progress and feedback of its own currently running campaigns, and analyse web traffic and the click-through rates of posted links and ads, as well as measure the relative uptake and distribution of the organisation’s own content by other users or organisations.
It must be said that the task of monitoring and researching social feeds belongs to everyone with a communications responsibility and function within an organisation, as it should also belong to anyone holding a senior management position. The reality, unfortunately, is that much of the monitoring work is tasked to just a few individuals (or even just one person) who, usually, is or are the same individual(s) responsible for maintaining the rest of the social media functions. That can lead to obvious overload, and ineffective outcomes.
Posting and curating
The second most basic social media functions include posting new content and curating new or existing content. Virtually everyone reading this chapter has published at least one piece of content to at least one social media platform – be it a comment, a blog entry, a tweet or a Facebook posting – so we do not need to spend much time on the particulars here. Still, it is important to consider that in most organisations, posting a single piece of content usually means following up with cross-postings on other social media platforms. For example, an announcement about a major event would need to be posted on Twitter, Facebook and the organisation’s blog. This can be facilitated – and, to some degree, automated – through the use of social dashboards like HootSuite. Even so, effort still needs to be put into packaging the content for each of the targeted media.
Content strategy and curating, however, is how organisations apply service thinking to what, otherwise, would be flat delivery of compiled content. Suppose that you are the social media manager for an animal rights organisation. You represent a variety of different stakeholders, including veterinarians, pet owners, animal control workers and public health officials (not to mention the animals themselves!). Your organisation compiles a variety of content types, including research, photographs, case studies, videos and opinion essays, with these being original and collected from other sources. If all of this content was simply published to the web and social media in the order that it was released (which is generally how blogs work), it would lack context, priority or any of the added value that comes from meaningful filtration. In comparison, newspaper publishers curate news stories so that the most important events of the day are located at the very beginning of the publication; the rest of the stories are also curated meaningfully into sections that are easily located by the reader. Content curating for social media works along the same principle and is the process through which organisations apply their expertise and implicit knowledge, via social media, as a service to their audiences. (Note that two very useful resources for learning about content curating strategies are Beth Kanter’s excellent blog (www.bethkanter.org) and the book Essentials of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane.)
Both content publication and curating require time and talent. While most people are able to learn how to post content to social media platforms, effective content curating requires a highly organised person with at least a basic understanding of content strategy. Once started, the process of content curating itself is an ongoing process linked to publication that requires little additional effort. Even so, the process of developing the initial content strategy that will guide the principles of curating (what types of content the organisation is interested in posting, how it is organised and displayed, and the rough editorial schedule) is periodic and can take days, or even weeks, at a time.
Community management
So, your organisation has a well-organised set of social media channels, a blog and even a mobile app. You have decided on a content strategy, and have started posting content. Now what? If your organisation is taking a broadcast-only approach to social media, posting content and moving on to the next item, then there’s not much else to discuss – it is a low-input, low-output approach that is likely to yield a relatively low level of engagement. But if your organisation is interested in deepening engagement with its audiences, and broadening its reach, then additional effort must be spent on interacting with the communities that it has created on social media platforms.
One of our clients, an international NGO focused on early childhood education, had recently received survey feedback stating that its membership was looking for more interactivity from the organisation’s social efforts than was provided just by press releases and fund-raising appeals. In moving the efforts of this entity towards a more service-oriented approach, we slowed down their editorial calendar slightly, and gave their social media coordinator enough time to go back over the comments and activity from earlier postings. Then the coordinator began acting as an intermediary for audience Q&A, seeking expertise from her colleagues, and responding to user questions and comments as the ‘voice’ of the organisation. This led to much more active discussions and participation by existing members, and even led to more of the organisation’s postings, tweets and blog articles being shared with non-members than had ever occurred in the past.
Community management can be every bit as resource-intensive as new content creation. Still, it can also be every bit as important. When there are so many automated news readers and content aggregators out there, why spend time going to an organisation’s Facebook page? The difference is in the notion of added value, of interactivity and participation. In a word, it is all to do with service.
Crowd-sourcing, contests, apps and other campaigns
Thus far, we have not explored an exhaustive list of activities – far from it. There are many other ways of deploying social media that are well beyond what was mentioned above. Many of these other tactics – such as video streaming, online crowd-sourcing, Facebook and mobile application design, to name a few – require expertise and commitment beyond that which most organisations in the public and social sectors can be expected to maintain internally. But since events, campaigns and crises do occur, it is important to plan and budget ahead of time for when that kind of competency and capacity are needed.
Risk – understanding the tradeoffs of social media
At Flashing12, generally, we are of the opinion that for organisations employing social media, more commitment to engaging with the public is better than less. Of course, there are exceptions, but we believe that the more users feel they are obtaining something of unique value from the organisations they support, the more authentic and stronger is their attachment to those organisations. Nevertheless, the benefits of engaging with the public come bundled with some very real risks, and it is critically important that organisations understand and accept those risks prior to proceeding.
Organisations that employ a marketing-driven, broadcast-oriented communications strategy have chosen a path of minimum relative risk (assuming the organisation itself is relatively non-controversial). The organisation creates all of its own marketing materials, and is able to control its message more tightly. It can choose not to respond to controversy by refusing press conferences or declining to give interviews. It does not have to defend itself in its marketing materials.
On the other hand, organisations that engage actively in a service-oriented approach to implementing social media are exposed to a far wider set of risks in exchange for a much higher level of engagement. For instance, think about the fact that disparaging or even slanderous comments can be left on the organisation’s Facebook page. Also, discussions among commenters, or contributors, can spiral out of control and cross over into other media, and even into the mainstream press. It could take only a single misstatement or misconstrued remark made by the organisation on one of its social feeds to spark coordinated campaigns by angry members. You can imagine that an angry, torch-wielding Facebook mob can result in irreparable damage to an organisation’s reputation.
A few rules of the game are as follows:
Some people are not going to like you (nor ‘Like’ you).
One of the first risks that an organisation must accept when entering the social media ecosystem is that, with each layer of interactivity allowed by the digital world, an organisation must relinquish an additional level of control. For example, one of our clients was struggling with a Wikipedia page that it had set up to address an extremely controversial matter of international political affairs. Wikipedia benefits from its strong brand recognition, search-friendly design and huge user base. However, as the name suggests, it is a wiki and user-fed, and is particularly vulnerable to acts of vandalism, as well as other unproductive mischief. In this particular case, our client’s page was repeatedly altered by someone who had a specific political agenda to include factually incorrect assertions and inflammatory rhetoric. Thereby, the organisation’s goal of publishing its content on something that was deemed to be social ‘neutral territory’ was subverted by the very attributes which drew them to use Wikipedia as a platform in the first place.
Another major risk factor to consider is how to handle online feedback. It is easy to handle positive feedback (when we’re lucky enough to receive it). Yet what about criticisms? What about accusations? In some cases, answering an angry commenter can show that the organisation is willing to listen to its users, to collaborate and even to admit fault, if at all necessary. In other cases, responding to a comment, or providing too much information, can feed a fire instead of extinguishing it. Some consumer brands, such as the online shoe retailer Zappos.com, has a policy of attempting to answer and resolve every comment or question on its Facebook page, and doing so regardless of how negative (or even incoherent) the feedback might be. This gives its customer base the constant and strong feeling that the Facebook page is a real service community and one that is truly customer-focused. Other organisations, such as political and advocacy associations, might see excessive risk in responding to user comments – and, in some cases, might shut down commenting altogether to prevent the spread of damaging narratives or coordinated campaigns by any related opposition.
With the Internet, social media traffic moves at a blindingly fast pace. A bad story or opposing campaign can gain steam almost instantly; so, too, does the temptation to respond with equal speed, as there can be an overwhelming urge to do something. Even so, responding too quickly to a threatening trend on Twitter or other social platforms can be just as dangerous as responding too slowly, and if an organisation does not have a policy in place for dealing with an online media crisis, it can find itself saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. It is for this very reason that, in order to prepare for the unexpected, organisations should establish a proper chain of command for crisis communications, which determines who is responsible for the nature and the timing of any necessary responses. This chain should include senior communications personnel, or other managers who also have a good understanding of how social media actually works – and not just people who are skilled at spin.
Three things to remember when it’s already gone bad are:
Finally, one of the most important risk factors to consider when executing a social media strategy is who the organisation chooses to manage their social media platforms. Is it the unpaid intern, here only for the summer? Is it the already-overwhelmed communications and marketing staff? Is it an external consultant? It can be forgotten that the social media outlets used by an organisation become the voice of the organisation itself. So choosing the right people is a critical layer of risk management. Given that most people can learn how to use social media tools in a short period of time, it is not essential for a social media manager to be tech-obsessed. Still, it is very important to select someone with good writing skills, good analytical ability, a strong level of Internet awareness and (most importantly) good judgement. They should understand the character and values of their organisation, and be able to engage users as its ‘voice’. They should have a sensitivity to emerging trends, and be self-directed enough to research opportunities so as to increase the influence of the organisation, and the level of engagement with its stakeholders. Additionally, and essentially, the organisation should make sure that its ‘voice’ has enough capacity to do well the all-important job of interacting with a growing and demanding online community.
How do we measure success?
By now, we have addressed thoroughly the notion that engaging in a social media strategy (particularly one that is service-based) requires a significant commitment of resources, such as those related to time, labour and risk. Naturally, the first question that most organisations raise after getting started comes out as something like, ‘Is it worth it?’
For businesses, the question of the return on investment (ROI) in social media is more easily answered than for public and social sector organisations. For instance, ROI is calculated by measuring how well social media activity is in converting online behaviour into tangible sales and increased customer loyalty. This can, to a degree, be tracked to specific online campaigns and content. For example, a retailer that publishes a special code for a promotional rate on their Twitter feed and Facebook page can use the code itself, or a specially coded link, to track how many people used that code, and how they arrived at the purchase page. This allows the effectiveness of campaigns to be measured.
Social and public sector organisations do not have this luxury. How are organisations that are dedicated to influencing behaviours, increasing awareness or changing public policy supposed to measure the real impact of their social media campaigns? Unfortunately, many organisations decide to focus too much on the available metrics – such as page views, visitors, ‘Likes’, retweets and so on – as a way of determining success. These metrics only offer a very shallow view of user activity, and yield very little insight into whether the campaigns are achieving any actual success. Worse still, focusing excessively on Klout (klout.com) scores, numbers of followers and other metrics can create a poisonous set of incentives that lead to chasing numbers for their own sake, sometimes at the expense of the organisation’s reputation or credibility. For example, in 2011, Microsoft Corporation received an extremely negative reaction when it pledged to donate $1 to victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami crisis for each time that a tweet from its Bing search engine was retweeted. This kind of thing happens when organisations focus more on simple metrics than on a holistic, service-oriented view of user relationships.
Instead, when engaging in a service-oriented approach to social media, the focus should be on a more qualitative analysis of the relationships that the organisation has with the users themselves. What is the interactivity like with the users? Are they commenting and retweeting? What are they saying? Is user activity generally linear in nature, steady and consistent? Or does it appear to coincide with events or certain types of content updates? What do users think? (Again, surveys and open-ended questions help here.) Have donation drives and calls-to-action been more or less successful over time? This kind of assessment model is less formal, less data-driven and less scientific. But it reflects a trial-and-error approach that is more in line with the service provider relationship – one that is human, customised and often inconsistent – than anything to do with an industrialised model that regards people as machines.
Conclusion
In summary, we are far along the path of accepting that social media has potential benefits for organisations, including any that operate for the benefit of the general populace, or the folk who are disenfranchised, downtrodden or damaged in some way, of which there are far too many in each instance, and more besides.
For public, not-for-profit and social sector organisations that strive to achieve their worthy objectives, and thus give something to the community that they aim to serve, as well as that with which it is engaged on a much broader front, it is vital that the related communications strategy is strong. Social media tools are the unavoidable key to giving any organisation the means to do so, and to know that it can make its voice heard above the hum, mumblings and noises that invade modern life.
Based on solid experience of users, it must be said that organisations engaging actively in social media through the use of a service-oriented approach will fulfil their worthy ambitions more so than can be achieved otherwise.