March 2009 Archives

I was discussing online communication plans with one of our clients recently, and I heard something that surprised me.

We'd like to use more social media, but we don't want to do anything if we're just going to be criticized for doing it wrong.  Everyone is so opinionated about how blogs and Facebook pages should be used, and we don't want to set off a bunch of bloggers criticizing our efforts.

That's right friends, there are many people out there who are reluctant to use blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. And not because of their security and privacy concerns, but because they are afraid of being criticized by the Social Media Police.

I've seen a lot of this "policing" related to Twitter lately so I'm going to focus on that channel to illustrate Social Media Police behavior.

I have heard two prominent "Web 2.0 Experts" recently criticize agencies that setup Twitter feeds to stream news updates.  The criticism came in two forms.  One "expert" thinks everyone on Twitter should be a person.  He says that the benefit of Twitter is to put a personal face on government.  Another expert thinks that Twitter must be a two-way medium.  If you aren't going to engage others, he thinks you should not share your information at all.

My first caution to the "social media police"... if you want to be an expert in a medium as fluid as social media, I think you need to be careful about stating facts with too much confidence. 

One fact I'm sure of: I like to get the official EPA updates from @usepagov in my Twitter feed (as do over 500 other people).  The real power of Twitter, for me, is that I setup a stream of updates that are of interest to me, but I don't have to monitor that stream like I have to monitor my inbox. 

Tim O'Reilly has a really good blog post here regarding what he likes about Twitter.  He stated his view on NPR's Science Friday program that the power of Twitter, for him, is that it's a stream of information running by his door that he can get in and out of as time allows. 

For a lot of people, Twitter is a more social channel. They might find the @usepagov feed to be too "impersonal" and one way.  Rather than criticize an agency trying to dive in and participate in a channel, I suggest that those who find a particular feed or approach annoying, just avoid it and let the collective wisdom of the crowd dictate how a channel can be used.  The benefit of social media is that it's easy to iterate based on user feedback and behavior so agencies don't have to get things perfect the first time. 

Different groups of stakeholders will gravitate to different approaches for different reasons.  Social Media uses that don't gain audience will eventually fade away, but not before providing a lot of useful learning to the agencies that tried them in the first place.

If your first instinct is to criticize an agency (or individual for that matter) for using a medium in a way you don't appreciate, you might be having a chilling effect on agencies embracing these new channels that is not unlike the chilling effect from overzealous privacy & security experts.

As I've been working with our government clients to encourage use of social media channels for public communication, I am currently most enthusiastic about three areas of opportunity, but I would love to hear other opinions:

• Widgets that allow our clients to easily share information from others and encourage partners and other agencies to share their information (see www.cdc.gov/widgets or www.fbi.gov/widgets.htm).  The FDA Peanut recall widget saw massive uptake.
  
  
• Point sharing which allows me as a citizen/stakeholder to post valuable content seen in an email alert from my city or on a web page from the State Department to my Twitter feed or blog.  This type of sharing is easier than putting a widget on my Facebook page and allows me to really focus on sharing the content that I find most interesting.
  
  
• Blogging... this is already an established channel and is proving incredibly successful in engaging users online in ways that are already making government (and citizens) better.
  
  

Other channels (e.g., Twitter and Facebook groups) are important and useful for engaging certain groups, but have real limitations as official channels for mass communication. The actual usage of social media channels for government information / public outreach continues to trail email dramatically in the same way that users express a strong preference for email as a professional channel and social media (and in Europe and young groups in U.S., text messaging) as a personal channel.

Take USA.gov as an example.

They saw 13,628 citizens subscribe to updates by email last month with the average sitting selecting more than 15 topics of interest.  By contrast, they have 431 total fans on the USA.gov Facebook Group page that it launched early in 2008.

We pulled together some additional information on email alert interest from citizens vs. Twitter in an earlier entry and the stats are equally as compelling.

Our observations about the power of widgets, point sharing, and blogging have guided our focus for improvements of the digital communication platform we offer our government clients.  Government agencies use GovDelivery to send hundreds of thousands of emails monthly promoting blog content to email subscribers, and we released discuss this email blogging capability in 2008.  We also have an exciting information sharing project underway that you can see in prototype form at this time.  We expect production release of these new sharing capabilities in May.

A headline for an article on the popular Mashable.com blog yesterday read: Social Networking More Popular than Email.  We wrote an article a few weeks back titled: Email Rules! Internet's Killer App Promotes Collaboration, Communication, and Content.

The Mashable.com blog article reviews some recent Nielsen Online Research that says that the percentage of Internet users using social media has now reached 66.8% vs. 65.1% using email.  We noted that Internet users in the U.S. spend over 80% of their time using email. 

Our focus is on how to interpret these trends in determining how government organizations should communicate with the public.  Luckily, this is not the kind of race where there needs to be a winner.  What these statistics really point to is that communicators have more ways than ever to reach the public.

There are several interesting comments on the Mashable.com article including:

I wonder if you took away either social networking or email, which would have a more devastating effect on society. Popularity does not equate to importance.

Social networking is the best way to remain connected

Did Nielsen release any frequency numbers on email versus community usage? Seems like that might be a more compelling argument if people are using Facebook everyday versus their email once a week. I have my doubts though.

Social Media is not a monolithic channel that is threatening email for dominance of the world.  Social media and email are actually highly complementary with each filling different roles in how we engage citizens.

In general, new channels serve needs that are not met effectively by other channels.  While email has many strengths and works well for official communication, long documents, and asynchronous communication, it is very poor at connecting disparate stakeholders together on issues of common interest and also falls short as a public content archive and group discussion mechanism.  For example, everyone has been part of an email discussion "group" or "List Serve"that became unwieldy.  Appropriately, we are seeing all of those types of discussions migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and Facebook.

All government communicators whether in government or in support organizations like us here at GovDelivery are working hard on engaging in new channels. 

What is really exciting for me is to see organizations ranging from Ramsey County, Minnesota to the CDC embrace the opportunity to learn how best to use new channels.  Overall, we've seen citizen interest in receiving email updates from government grow exponentially even as other channels have emerged. 

The most effective government organizations are engaging in all channels.  That allows you to cross-promote channels (e.g., promote your Twitter feed in your email alerts and vice-versa) and focus different messaging on different mediums.  For example, I love how CDC has made one of its 300+ email subscription options "Social Media Tools" and has built a base of over 15,000 subscribers in just a couple of months.

We see many mayors, governors, and other public officials engaging in social media as well.  If you are trying to build a sense of community around your local government, agency, or campaign, it only makes sense that you want more communication between your stakeholders and more ability to comment and repurpose content.

I have written about how email is a key hub of social media. GovDelivery has also just launched a massive information sharing project that will make it easier for government agencies to create widgets, mash together content from different agencies, and encouraging reposting of content into social media.

So, I don't have a horse in this race. 

I think that when new channels emerge they compete with old channels creating new opportunities for reaching the public and, in some cases, replacing existing channels but only where those channels were functioning poorly.  Where do you think things are heading?