Why influence, not RoI, is vital for local government social media
Posted under: This article was first posted over on Helen’s blog and on US based government social network Govloop. There is some fantastic and useful feedback on both pages and on Twitter (see below) – including from the author of the book that is featured.
On the whole, UK councils are doing a nice job of using social media – possibly we caught on early because we’re used to making the most of tools that don’t cost much. ‘Fair play ‘ as we say here in Wales, we’re doing getting better at engaging. But there’s loads of room to improve.
Many organisations are still in the ‘broadcast’ mindset and some still have to convince their public and their management that social media is more than people talking about their breakfast.
Over Easter I read Mark Schaefer’s book ‘Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing‘, a great book that looks at why tools like Klout will become more important as the world gets more social.
Thinking about Mark’s book I’m quickly becoming convinced that increasing digital influence is the aim that will be the standard for local government and the residents and the businesses it serves.
I’ve blogged before about my mistrust of the quest to prove Return on Investment (RoI) on public sector social media. It’s influence we should be striving for.
‘Influence’ is a bit of a scary term for council communications in that it might have connotations of control or manipulation but in this context it’s about being relevant enough for people to respond to want we say, and making content interesting enough to make people take notice and understand councils and their communities.
Image from Flickr by Sean MacEnteeWhy RoI is out
So, before where I go onto influence, lets revisit the problem with RoI in local government social media.
Firstly, local government is there to serve people and so looking for 'returns' isn't necessarily ideologically aligned with our work the same way it is in business.
Even if we argue that returns don't need to be financial, it's still difficult to pin down what we want the return to be: people being better informed, increased goodwill, engagement, being more approachable. These are all important but are effects that can't be easily or truly measured with numbers and stats.
The term 'investment' is also tricky. One could argue that having officers engaging effectively with their communities is actually a return, am aim, as well as an investment.
Also, social media is often free to use but takes officer time and understanding. Financial costs are those of any added electricity or Internet usage. Since this is social, our audience talk back and take part long term conversations and build relationships if we do it well. So it takes an equal investment from those who talk to local government using social media. If our stakeholders invest the same amount of resource, we can see social media as just the tools we use to communicate now, like meetings, and phones. I've not heard of many organisations measuring RoI on their phone use, or meetings.
My last thought on this is may be a bit controversial but here's my hunch: those people who insist on measuring ROI for council social media just don't get social media. So they mistrust it and they mistrust their staff. We should be past the stage of justifying its use by now.
My guess is that CEOs and management who use social media well don't ask staff to prove what the benefits are. And, back to the point about phones and meetings, they don't ask for RoI reports on things they do use well like email or speech.
Influence
As far as terminology goes, 'influence' makes a bit more sense when you consider its synonym 'authority'. We are local authorities and we want our communication to have 'authority' in that it has high credibility and currency.
Aiming for influence is far more important that measuring return on investment.
Although the book looks at websites like Peerindex and Klout for scoring people and organisations, it's not the measurement and social scoring that I think is entirely relevant for councils - it's the concept that everyone has an opportunity to be influencial.Online influencers don't need to be powerful or a celebrity in the offline world. This means there is a flattening of those traditional hierarchies in and around government that have been a barrier for access to many.
I've always considered social media as a place for engagement, sharing, networking, learning and entertaining and community and the book inspired me to see those qualities together as one notion of influence.
I'd argue we need to be working to make our councils more influential using social media. So the emphasis is on becoming good at being part of a conversation, and effort is spent on enhancing people's experience and knowledge of the council - not being good in order to show a measure of how well we did.
The book points out that in order to gain a high score in the social media influence scoring website, we need to be influential not just by having lots of people liking and following us but by being able to create meaningful content that is credible and can be amplified by other influential people in our networks.
Instructions from Mark's book for gaining influence are a recipe for allowing people to understand government better. He teaches that information should be RITE: relevant, interesting, timely and entertaining.
If all content we produced was RITE, we wouldn't need to justify what we do with measurement. The content, and reaction to that content would speak for itself.
I'm as guilty as the next council officer of letting stuff go out there that might be boring or irrelevant to many of those who read it. I need to work on getting that right before I find some elaborate system of RoI.
So why influence, not ROI?
Some argue you need to measure to evaluate to improve. Monmouthshire Council's blog recently talked about not just doing things better but doing better things. I think the time to evaluate will be after we rethink what we do. The world is getting used to this new form of communicating and I believe that measuring, say, the number of clicks on links from an RSS feed from our website's news area - that's trying to do things better. Focussing on doing better things might be to use our network to ask what people want and then work on getting our content RITE so people actually care about what we say.So there are my thoughts - I'd love to hear what you think, let me know in the comments or on Twitter and cheers for reading.Social media conference in WalesI bought Mark Schaefer's book after I heard he was coming to Wales (in fact, to my hometown Newport!) to speak at the Online Influence social media conference planned for September and it sounds like a top event. You can read more details about it from Tony Dowling (@radiojaja) on his blog here.
Twitter: more than talking about your breakfast
Here’s a piece taken from Helen’s blog about the value of Twitter for networking and information sharing.
There are still a load of people out there who dismiss social media sites like Twitter as being where young people LOL and ROFL and talk about their breakfast.
Yes, some of us OMG and make banale pronouncements.
But here are some of the arguments I make to the Twitter naysayers* (yes, they still exist!).
1. Let’s stand up for small talk. It eases the path to meaningful communication and we all do it to some extent face-to-face. One of my favourite people who talks on social media, Joel Hughes, has pointed out that it doesn’t just happen on Twitter – if you could measure the amount of quality information we share on the phone in comparison to chatter and small talk then the ratio would swing in favour of the chatter.
2. We don’t have to engage with small talk. With Twitter you only have to respond if you want to. We don’t have that luxury face to face or on the phone. We’ve got to come up with something on the spot: “Oh really, it’s raining lots out there is it? Well, there we go eh. Welsh weather huh? What a nightmare. Can’t wait for the summer – if we ever get one!” etc.
The difference is that in our offline lives, people we’re not keen on are harder to get rid of. The bloke at the bar droning on about his car and how his band could have made it big – he can’t be quickly and conveniently blocked or unfollowed. An overdeveloped sense of politeness, a fear of physical or verbal harm at your rejection of him or just the fact he might be nice/vulnerable under the obnoxious exterior means we nod and give full attention.
And that eats into the time we want to spend talking and thinking about cool things with cool people.3. Twitter lets us talk and listen to lots of interesting people we would never have had access to. A good analogy is one I saw on saw on Quora – the Twitter/crowded pub example from Peter Kay:
“It’s like walking into a pub and being able to hear everybody’s conversations without anybody realizing you are there. You can choose which ones you listen to and which ones to ignore. If you want, you can join in too.”
4. Twitter gives you access to things that interest you that you wouldn’t have known about.
On Twitter, we don’t try to condense very complex issue into 140 characters. We link to spaces where thoughts and information are expanded upon.
If you follow people who interest you, people you admire – you can learn from them, from the links they share. These people will take you to places online and off line that open up a world of debate, data and entertainment that can enrich your offline activities and knowledge.5. To finish off, here’s a quote from m’learned friend Esko Reinikainen:
“If you are still one of those people who dismiss social media on principle, then you can count yourself among those who, in the 1960’s with the phone, and in the 90’s with email, failed to recognise that what could have passed as a fad has in fact become completely mainstream. The consequences of not accepting that a communications shift has already happened are a potentially crippling competitive disadvantage. It’s also why your kids look at you funny.”
Other posts on the value of Twitter (which I found on Twitter):
From Dan Slee’s blog: CASE STUDY: ‘I’m showing two colleagues Twitter. They say they don’t get it…’
Alan Rusbridger: Why Twitter matters for media organisations
Chris Frede: Twitter Is Just A Fad Anyway ….*If you are one of those people who dismiss social media you’ll probably agree with Andrew Marr that bloggers are ‘inadequate, pimpled and single’ and you won’t even be reading this. (By the way Mr Marr, I am not inadequate.)
Photo by François Meehan
To follow or not to follow on Twitter? Are you part of a community or are you aloof?
Here’s a post on the benefits of following people on Twitter taken from Helen’s blog.
One of the hundreds of things that are great about using social media is the capacity to build communities.
An organisation has an opportunity to find out what people think about what it does, what interests them in general and be able to respond by providing content that is useful and relevant.
Using Twitter, by following back those people who look like they have an interest in your organisation (as well as following accounts that your org is interested in) you will have a better functioning Twitter presence. [I’m not talking about auto-following here but active following.]
Why follow back on Twitter?
It’s useful to get to know your community and what makes them tick. Real people run your account and real people have relationships with each other – they listen and respond to what people have said to them or about them.
By not following someone who has a legitimate interest in your organisation you are giving out a message that you’re not interested in anyone who follows you. If you want to make your organisation approachable then it helps not to be aloof.
Some people only follow people who follow back – not everyone does this but some people see Twitter as a place to have conversations so will do a cull of those who don’t follow back after a certain period of time. By not following back, you may lose an audience for information you want to share.
Content – by following people you can come across great information to retweet. There are other ways of course, by using search terms on key words for example but actually looking at what your people are saying now can give you great information to share.
Why not to follow back on Twitter
You don’t have the resources to have a Twitter account where you engage with people – your team’s too busy. If you’re just tweeting from an RSS feed from your website and using Twitter to broadcast there’s no point in following back. BUT: what’s the point of a social presence that’s not social?
You don’t want to be seen to be endorsing a dodgy outfit – what if it turns out the tweeter you followed is not a legitimate business or is a racist pressure group? BUT: you don’t have to follow an account you’re uncomfortable with – however the likelihood is that there won’t be many of those. So, if you find out someone is unsavoury, unfollow them. Nobody would expect you to be accountable for what other people do on Twitter.
You don’t want your home feed to be a load of stuff you’re not interested in and you won’t be able to keep up with it all. BUT: you don’t have to read every tweet in your timeline and there are ways of managing content such as lists and keyword searches. You’ll have a better chance of coming across something useful if you follow a wider range of tweeters.
How to do Facebook REALLY well in local government
Here’s a case study blog post about how Monmouthshire County Council‘s youth service has used Facebook to revitalise the way it communicates with kids and teenagers.
Profile
URL: https://www.facebook.com/MonYouth
Likes: 1,013
Established: Around April 2010
Moderated by: Dan Davies of Monmouthshire County Council’s youth service
The reason it is fantastic is because it’s being used not just as a way to push out messages to young people in the county (although it does do that): it has become the hub of all social activity, has saved the service money and is a genuine example of using tools to serve a purpose not just doing Facebook ‘because we should’.I met Dan Davies, a youth worker, about a year ago after I’d spotted lots of activity going on in his Facebook page. I went to meet him to run through our social media policy and guide and I thought I’d give him a few tips on how to get the most from social media.
It turns out he was an avid Facebooker and he’d already used his skills and his connections with schools and kids in the system to create a great page with, then, about 500 young people talking to his department and each other. Last week I met him for an update and to look at applications like Hootsuite to make life easier – he told me some brilliant stuff he’s doing that puts his page ahead of anything like it I’ve seen. This discussion I had with Dan answers the question ‘what about offensive and inappropriate posts?’ and highlights how letting talented staff do their thing pays off enormously.
Dan, how many kids do you work with?
We have five youth centres and staff in every secondary school – mainly kids come to us because they want to, it’s not a compulsory service. We work with young people aged 10-25 but our main core focus is 14-19 year olds which is roughly 3,000 people.
On-the-ground youth work can’t be replaced – they come to our social media channels after face-to-face contact. First they have to come on a trip with us, then they have photos taken and uploaded to Facebook and they get involved that way.
Who runs your Facebook account?
At the moment it’s just me but we are planning to get a team of young people in our ‘Roving Reporters’ project eventually primed to be gateway for all our social media.
Could you give a brief description of your role?
I work with challenging young people – supporting schools in tackling challenging behaviour and engaging young people with education. So for example if a young person finds a lesson hard to engage with we will work with that person one-to-one and in lessons to get them where they want to be. I also work in the community outside of school hours. I am responsible for web development and using social media has become a part of that.
What made you think Facebook was right for your service?
Every October we work with police to take pupils to Thorpe Park at Halloween. We used that trip to ask 350 young people from across Monmouthshire ‘do you use Facebook?’. We got 100% of people saying yes. It was clearly a good avenue for communicating and the whole project is about communicating with people in a way they want to be communicated with. I’m a Facebook user myself and I was confident I could make it work.
My personal feelings were that we wanted to safeguard people on Internet and we wanted to get a message across to communicate in a safe way – where better to do that than on the Internet?
What kind of stuff can kids do on there?
We are completely open, anyone can post photos or whatever. I’m administrator – staff send me stuff and I post it for them if it compliments our activities or delivery of services.
If, for example we have a project launch we would post a video to get people interested. Young people will help with the making of that video and then they can tag themselves if they’re in it, ‘Like’ it or give opinion on video or project itself.
At activities I take photos and post a photo album – they tag themselves which will appear on their profile.
I use Facebook for organising proms – in the case of the Caldicot School Leavers Prom 2011 I set up a separate business page and every student in that year (bar three who don’t have Facebook) ‘Liked’ it. All ticketing is done through Facebook: I use Paypal going to the community group bank account for the prom tickets so they can all buy tickets through Facebook. Everyone (235 people) bought ticket at Caldicot – if they didn’t use Facebook they got their friend to buy it. When they bought a ticket they were on the guestlist and I IDed them on the door using their Facebook profile picture.
I can keep up with how many are buying and I’ve wasted no time distributing leaflets and saved on printing costs.
Our Health Alliance recently sent ten questions and asked for 500 hundred responses. I posted a Survey Monkey survey at 5pm on a Monday and by the next day at noon we had 416 responses.
I also use Facebook groups for football clubs to promote discussion. A Facebook group is a constant meeting. I get the captain to add all team-mates and we ask questions on where to go using polls. The closed discussion is great because their experience is about bonding and sharing and promoting the team aspect.
What kind of steps do you take to manage unwanted content?
Well, they can untag themselves in photos and if they comment that they don’t like the photo is instantly taken down. This has happened one or two times.
With inappropriate or abusive posts I’ll post saying it’s unacceptable and have the post removed. It hardly ever happens – only about two times can I remember abuse, and it was banter gone wrong – ‘you look ugly in this photo’ that kind of thing. Language on Facebook can be more relaxed than we normally allow for and if someone says something is shit then its constructive feedback which we take on board, but I have to delete it. Our young people hardly ever swear – they know what we do, that it has a tie to schools and know they need a level of formality.
I hate it when businesses or profit making organisations advertise on our wall, I don’t approve those posts and they remain hidden – I will only promote something like that if people ask by email and if it’s involving young people and enhancing their lives. In those cases I’ll send the company an email saying if you’d like to promote something please email.
Young people are always eager to help, and I have a knack for identifying people interested in certain areas who will take a leadership role and they’re happy to be on board. Getting teachers’ trust has meant we have a rapport that adds trust in the service and credibility.
Did you encounter any problems or issues that you had to find solutions for?
It was first set up as information giving service only – people could only read and they couldn’t comment. I took a risk and enabled comments, enabled people to post on our wall to share information. It was phenomenal. With feedback it became interactive and then we needed a moderator to filter appropriate and not appropriate content. We use a filter with a list or terms that would make a post hidden and it works really well.
As a council we can’t publish photos without consent. For trips and events I modified forms to include social media usage.
When you set the page up, did you refer to the Monmouthshire County Council social media policy? If so, what was helpful and what was missing?
A few months after I set up the account I consulted with you in the communications department and ensured I was working within the parameters laid down by the council and we luckily do have a lot of freedom to use social media.
There were IT restrictions – social media websites were blocked when I first started so I had to do it on personal equipment – so on my phone at work or my own laptop out of work hours. I had to be make sure I was allowing young people to communicate safely and I felt I had to be careful what we said as managers followed us on the page.
The social media policy wasn’t too restrictive and gave us freedom and when all staff got access in January 2011 it was a big relief to access pages in work hours in our offices . It meant I could encourage more users to join in and I could do more. More than that it gave credibility to the work I do and it meant I had backing from the Chief Executive and management. I wasn’t worried about comments of ‘why are you sitting around on Facebook all day?’ as people were more aware of the importance of the role.
Do you think Monmouthshire County Council is more supportive of the use of social media to engage people than other authorities?
Definitely, I’ve read about other councils who aren’t allowed to use it and are very protective over what happens online. We have realised this is how people communicate and posters and letters just aren’t up to scratch any more. Social media comes with policies and procedures but we need to tackle these issues and get on with it. All councils will need to become more permissive.
What’s the return on investment when using social media?
Here are some thoughts taken from Helen’s blog on the principles of measuring ROI relating to social media.
I’ve noticed a bit of Twitter debate on what the return on investment (ROI) is for social media in the public sector. Here are a few of my thoughts on the principles of measuring ROI relating to social media.Background
Where I work in Monmouthshire Council we’ve given all staff access to social media since January this year. I can confirm that the county didn’t come to a halt while officers and councillors updated their Facebook statuses with what they were having for breakfast.
Quite the opposite in fact. Gradually, staff are coming to see the potential for networking with professionals and citizens across the world. I’ve noticed since January about 50-60 new people join Linkedin. There they are sharing ideas, picking up knowledge from groups and re-establishing contact with colleagues from previous jobs. Linkedin is an easy one – people see it as a place to do business and the fear around ‘what people get up to’ is not as strong with this network.
Yammer is picking up pace, more staff are looking at making information easier to consume by making short films for Youtube and we’ve got councillors and staff showing the world what they’re all about. A number of Facebook pages and Twitter conversations have been established run by people skilled in their area and able to engage with their audience in an easy way – they’re talking to people who they might never have had the chance to before. Yes we’ve made some mistakes and not everything we do will be ideal but it’s all been happening with good intentions and no cash cost.
We know communication is no longer just ‘us’ broadcasting messages to ‘them’. Our organisation’s culture is rapidly transforming and we are getting better at being open and part of a new world where ‘the people’ don’t just have a voice but are they ‘one of us’. Social media has been a small but important part of that.
Before I get onto ROI…
What about why we use social media? The motivation: it’s the right thing to do. To open up channels of communication to let people talk to us and to listen and respond – as public servants we don’t leave our personalities and values at home and if it feels like a good thing to do it’s a good start. Personally I want to be a valuable part of my communities and I think the people I serve would be also empowered by this.
ROI = (Gains – Cost)/Cost
We can’t look at the ROI of using social media (as we wouldn’t with email or face-to-face contact) but we could measure ROI of what we communicate using social media.
What would we consider to be a gain? A council does so much – the visible things like bins, and schools and the harder to see services like protecting vulnerable people and economic development. The gains we’d want to see from say leisure centres – increased membership of gyms, more active living – are worlds apart from the returns we’d want from a community set up for foster carers – strengthened relationships, more confident and informed care.
We’re like a thousand businesses in one and we’ve got a tonne of different communities of interest and of geography. I’d argue we’d need to measure according to the objectives of the person who initiates their use of social media.
In the public sector the real investment for us is trust of staff and of the people. The main questions I’m asked about social media are about staff time-wasting or abusive posts from residents. In terms of giving access to social media, it seems we’re a rarity in local government for treating staff as responsible professionals who want to do a great job.
Is engagement an investment? I’d say it’s a duty. But more than that, being approachable, simplifying information and gauging how people feel takes time and skills investment from council officers. But all those things are also returns. Who doesn’t want a reputation for being approachable, for their information to be good and to have a connection to the people they serve?
Metrics
The problem is that ROI measurements can be easily manipulated to suit the user’s interests and even with good intentions they give subjective results.
In PR we used to use Advertising Value Equivalants (AVEs) for when our messages were published in the media. They were rubbish. We used this system which is looking at how much editorial would have cost if it had been a paid-for advert. Then that cost is multiplied to account for the fact it has more credibility to the reader than something that has obviously been paid-for.
Basing measurement on the cost of an advert not on the value of the information to the citizen is odd:
A newspaper ad nobody relevant noticed that cost £1k really has a value of nowt. A press release that gets used as a story in a newspaper in this case would be 4.5 (if that’s the multiple you’re using) times the value/cost of the ad. So either £4.5k or nowt.
For social media, let’s not apply a similar mindset to how we deal with this social and human contact.
Why measure?
What is the reason to measure? What will we do with that data? If it’s to improve how stakeholders engage or to improve services fair enough. If it’s to convince people of the value of what we’re doing I’d argue we need to more closely look at the culture of openness and convince people to buy in to the notion of a networked society. It’s like trying to measure the efficiency of our use of email or phonecalls (but that’s another story).
Just because we can’t measure it doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
There are some things I’ve noticed while talking to people on social media in Monmouthshire Council. Here are just some examples of of our ‘immeasurables’ – our ‘known unknowns’ if you like.
- Expats: some people who no longer live in the county occasionally chat to us. Nice but in some cases they are not our target audience if we’re talking about things relevant only to residents. However, one of our Twitter followers (a clever, active social media user who lives abroad) happened to mention that he chats to his mum on the phone and passes information to her. She lives in Monmouth.
- Lurkers: those people who just like to watch from afar and say nothing are still engaging on one level if they take that information into their lives and face-to-face conversations. Often I can’t remember where I heard something, it could have been a paper, a tweet, a chat. But it’s in there somewhere and it informs my choices.
- Widgets: so much content from social media gets aggregated or pulled into apps and widgets. If you don’t use social media but you check the front page of our website you can pick up bits of information by looking at the twitter widget embedded there.
If we commissioned extensive research or just did a survey about people’s engagement with council communication channels it might not account for the way that chats and details pass around off and on the Internet.
October: awards season!
It’s awards season and I’m chuffed that my work is in the running in a few categories this year. My work at Monmouthshire County Council is shortlisted for five awards at the second Somecomms social media awards on 19th October 2011:
- Best use of YouTube – ‘Social care recruiting using YouTube’
- Best Social Media Campaign – ‘Residents ask the questions that matter: Live Q&A Twitter sessions with cabinet members’
- Innovation – ‘Social media for social care: how Monmouthshire foster carers support each other with Yammer’
- Best Community Engagement – ‘Social media for social care: how Monmouthshire foster carers support each other with Yammer’
- Best In House Team – for consistently great understanding and use of social media
A project I worked on at the council for a foster carers’ forum is also shortlisted for a CIPR Local Public Services (LPS) Digital Excellence Award 2011 on 14th October.
I work in a small communications team at the council and we are shortlisted for five other awards in the CIPR LPS 2011 awards including Small Team of the Year.
Also I’ve been longlisted in the Wales Blog Awards in the category ‘Best community blog’ for my blog and that ceremony takes place 27th October.
October – what an exciting month! It’s lovely to have recognition and even if I come away empty-handed it’ll be fun to meet other people working on cool projects that improve communication.