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5 Take-Aways on Social Media and Politics

10.11.02

Discussion around my recent post on some alleged unethical social media use during Toronto’s mayoral election got me thinking around some broader topics that have emerged recently.

Without further ado, here are five thoughts on themes I’ve seen recently.

1. People who try to tie social media success or failure alone to campaign results are nuts

I’ve said it many times, communications is evolving away from silos and towards integrated campaigns. As this continues, we’ll see fewer and fewer stand-alone “social media” successes and more and more multi-channel successes – for example, owned properties supported by earned media, paid ads and social channels.

People who continue to produce analyses of whether social media drove the success of a candidate, or whether better social media would have improved the odds of a candidate, are missing the bigger picture. We should be looking at the overall communications approaches of campaigns, and how they communicate the selling points of candidates and parties.

Take-away: Consider the bigger picture rather than analyzing artificial silos.

2. Buzz is very different to mobilization

The volume of online chatter about a candidate may say something about candidates, but is very, very different to activating those people to take action. The fact that people are discussing something doesn’t mean they are going to do anything about it. That’s especially the case when the online discussion is passive – that is, that it’s happening about offline activities but isn’t backed-up with online engagement or a call to action.

Take-away: Share of voice is only one metric. Look at other metrics alongside it, and analyse those metrics to provide useful insights and recommendations.

3. Social media doesn’t reach everyone

…and neither does the Globe and Mail. Neither does cable news. That’s why organizations – political and non-political – need to adopt communications approaches that integrate multiple media to reach people, multiple times, with consistent, simple and compelling content.

Take-away: Bring marketing, media and PR together to create integrated plans for optimum results.

4. Crises CAN emerge online

Crisis communications is a fascinating topic nowadays. There are plenty of scenarios where a situation can emerge online and translate into a critical election issue. For that reason it’s critical that organizations monitor online channels – and not just about themselves, but about their key issues – on an ongoing basis to identify issues early and provide additional time to mitigate them.

Take-away: Monitor before issues emerge, rather than after they hit, to create additional opportunities for issues management.

5. Communications can only solve so much

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Communications can’t solve everything. If your policies are poor, good communications won’t help. If your product or service is poor, or your customer service is awful, good communications is likely to draw more peoples’ attention to that.

Yes, poor communications can ruin even the best policies – the best policy in the world is no use in a campaign if no-one understands it or knows about it – but communications can only do so much.

Take-away: Make sure the underlying fundamentals are good before pointing the finger at communications.

Posted in: communications, government, politics, pr, public relations, social media, uncategorized

Tags: commmunications, government, politics, pr, public relations, social media

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Governments Experimenting With Twitter

09.03.24

As Twitter experiences almost exponential growth (Nielsen estimates 1,382 per cent year-on-year growth from in website users alone), I’m seeing a rapid growth in corporate use of this emerging communications tool. Companies like Zappos, Dell, JetBlue, Comcast and others have done a great job of providing customer service, establishing relationships with their customers and putting a human face on their brands.

Still, even though Twitter has been around for more than three years, I’ve seen few examples of governments using Twitter with the kind of success that some companies have seen.

Resources

Steve Lunceford at BearingPoint runs GovTwit, a directory of government and related accounts. It’s growing regularly, and has a large number of US and UK-based accounts; however it currently has few from Canada.

Alexandra Rampy published a great list of US government Twitter accounts late last year, but again few standout examples and no Canadian examples (which is fine; it was deliberately a US list).

Mike Kujawski runs the excellent Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki, which features a few Twitter-related examples from the provinces.

Potential uses in government

The lack of case studies doesn’t mean there’s nothing happening or no interest. I did a little digging and found a whole bunch of people and departments experimenting with Twitter. Being an Ontario government alumnus and having participated in efforts like an increasingly social news release, YouTube videos and even real-time social media monitoring during crises, I focused there.

My sources tell me there is still resistance to Twitter within the government, largely from people who haven’t really given it a cursory try, which is unfortunate. However, the variety of people experimenting is encouraging.

I can forsee a variety of uses for Twitter within government, including:

Early-warning issues management - identify emerging issues early before they bubble up to the media;
Monitoring reaction - through persistent Twitter searches, departments can track sentiment, content and other trends in reaction to announcements;
Direct-to-citizen communication – Twitter, and other social media tools, can help organizations communicate directly with their target audiences rather than going through the filter of the media;
Put a face on the organization – government often suffer from being faceless organizations, while politicians seem aloof. Social media tools in general can help to counteract this;
Emergency management - emergency coordinators need to get information out quickly to people in an emergency; Twitter could even work at a hyper-local level;
Raise awareness of resources – government websites can be impenetrable mazes, designed by committee to placate competing silos with information buried deep inside the site. Twitter can help to point people to the right place;
Identifying resources and information – a more individual use, which worked for me – Twitter can be invaluable for finding answers and identifying resources for those last-minute requests (contrary to popular opinion, government communications can move very quickly at times) - just throw the request or question out there for a rapid response;
…and many more.

Twitter isn’t going to be the right tool in every case. No social media tools are. Just as not every announcement necessitates a media event or news release, Twitter (like the social media release) is an extra tool to add to your toolkit. Different functions will find different uses for this tool, and like other tools, it won’t be right for every one.

It’s ridiculous to think that a blanket one-size-fits-all approach would work for organizations that function in such a broad array of areas. It would be equally stupid to outright dismiss it and assume that because it doesn’t fit in one situation that it won’t fit for any.

Still, I’m encouraged to see the government’s communicators giving it a try to see what works.

Ontario government trying Twitter

From a quick search I found:

11 organizational (non-personal) accounts
28 personal accounts covering eight ministries and one agency

Organizational

@FoodlandOnt – Foodland Ontario
@ontarioparks - Ontario Parks (also see the Ontario Parks blog) – despite following no-one and posting zero tweets, this account has 122 followers
@oac_cao - Ontario Arts Council ~~(surprisingly, despite the bilingual name, it features only English tweets)~~ Thanks to the Arts Council for clarifying – the account is indeed bilingual.
@onfieldcrops - Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs – Field Crop News
@onhortcrops - Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs – Horticultural Crop News
@MNRcentral – Ministry of Natural Resources
@OntarioREV – Ministry of Revenue
@OntMinFinance – Ministry of Finance
@Ont_Ombudsman – Ontario Ombudsman
@OntMinLabour – Ministry of Labour
@OntMinLabourFR – Ministry of Labour – French account

Individual accounts, by ministry

Note: After careful consideration I decided not to publish the names of these accounts, as they are personal accounts and not on behalf of the government.

Cabinet Office – 13
Ministry of Children and Youth Services – 1
Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration – 1
Ministry of Community and Social Services – 3
Ministry of Education – 1
Environmental Commissioner of Ontario – 1
Ministry of Finance – 2
Ministry of Government Services – 4
Ministry of Natural Resources – 2

Missed opportunities

With all of the interest and discussion about Twitter within the government, I’m surprised to see some clear opportunities missed.

Most notably, the Ontario government is currently at risk of brandjacking, as we’ve seen happen with entities like Exxon Mobil and the Dalai Lama.

While @daltonmcguinty is claimed (though it’s not clear if it is by his office), a bunch of obvious accounts aren’t claimed. Try @mcguinty, @OntMinHealth and @georgesmitherman for example. Their staff need to get on that. I’d like to see a little more clarity around who is behind the ‘official’ accounts, too.