How can we promote the use of Social Media in all levels of Government?
2. Key Points
What are some of the issues we face when trying to get senior management on board?
- Large organisations are change and risk-averse.
- In most levels of Government there is a set of specific tools for handling media (Question Period Cards/Notes, Media Lines, Press Releases).
- Policy barriers
- Stringent IT policies
- Official Languages Act
- Access to Information and Privacy Act
- Culture of keeping information private
- One solution that was proposed was http://laconi.ca which is an open-source micro-blogging platform which would allow the content to be managed (archived, searched, etc) from within Government IT departments removing issues from dealing with a privately owned identity. It can be federated with other laconica servers so different government departments could set up their own but still communicate with each other and the public. It also allows posting to Twitter. And it is Canadian. One public laconica server is http://identi.ca.
Who is doing this already?
- Public Health Agecy of Canada (PHAC) began using Twitter as a tool to broadcast information about the Influenza A H1N1 virus (Swineflu) to Canadians.
- How are they handling Offical Language issues? Two twitter accounts @PHAC_GC and @ASPC_GC
- How did they get buy-in? Pandemics require information dissemination and the Swineflu provided an opportunity to show the value of Twitter at reaching large audiences.
- Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is working on a project to use Social Media tools like Twitter to provide information to citizens, and to combat mis-information.
- How are they handling Official Language issues? Both English and French posts posted to the same stream. Identical content in both languages.
How can we approach this problem?
Phased approach:
- Phase I: Implement a communications strategy using Social Media as a broadcast medium (e.g. linking to press releases, or newly released reports) (one-way communication)
- Phase II: Engage users who ask questions: answer or direct them (two-way communication)
- Phase III: Proactively monitor using various trending tools. Tackle problems by contacting users experiencing issues or having complaints and provide them answers or point them in the right direction.
3. Takeaways
- Business cases need to be built that show that using social media is:
- cost-effective
- conforms to existing policies
- helps the organisation achieve its mandate
- Organisations need to present a personal face to the world and not a corporate/government feel.
- How can we accomplish this: different users announce who they are when using the tools
- Assigning roles of social media advocate within communications departments to be the "face of social media"
- Policies need to be developed around the use of media to mitigate "blowback". ie comment policy, etc.
- For most corporations and all government agencies, there has to be a way to quantify the success of using Social Media. What are the performance metrics that we can use?
- Followers (not great, but easy to monitor)
- Web Mentions
- Responses
- User feedback
ChangeCamp
You are not logged in. Log in 