Selling the idea of a Social Media Strategy

I agree with Jeremiah Owyang when he wrote How to Overcome Social Media Scare Tactics. You can not scare conservative organisation like government agencies into adopting social media and radical change by using fear of missing out next big thing. It must be more subtle and less dramatic than that. Though that does not mean you can not use fear as tool to get an agency moving along the path to social media.

The one question I would ask what happens when you find:

  • a blog post critical about the agency or one of its’ policies,
  • a series of critical blog posts, with a number of comments supporting the authors view,
  • a facebook group, critical about the agency or one of it&#s policies, or
  • a social networking site which is solely about your agency, and most of the content critical?

And would your action be different if was brought to your attention by:

  • a junior staff member,
  • senior management,
  • the minister, or
  • traditional media like the doyen of current affairs shows Today, Tonight?

These scenarios are what all could happen to your agency in the near future. If you need some examples do a Google Blog Search on your agency and have a look at the results. The results for TransPerth Complaint returns a dozen results. 12 hours in a WA Emergency Department is the fourth great article by the same author on the inner workings of a Perth hospital over at Perth Norg. Over 7000 Western Australians have joined the Facebook group Perth people who love Day Light Saving. And to pick on TransPerth again there is Dumb Rider.

How should your agency react in these situations and what can be done to reduce the risk, should be enough to get any Government Department thinking about a Social Media Strategy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Social Media Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “Selling the idea of a Social Media Strategy”

  1. Mission Creep | Neil Williams » Blog Archive » Embedding digital media: lessons from my father-in-law August 23rd, 2008 at 4:44 pm

    [...] all felt rather familiar. Colleagues and I have to do the same thing all the time when selling-in social media to policy officials, training people on CMSs or explaining how to use any other web [...]

  2. Justin Kerr-Stevens August 29th, 2008 at 8:43 pm

    Nick,

    Great series of posts. The approach I’ve taken with the UK government replicates a lot of what you’ve written here. Particularly around conversational awareness. I find it’s a lot easier to be part of a conversation from the outset than try and join in later - and when that happens in the government context the wording and basis on how you engage are normally cleared to within an inch of their life, making conversation sound stilted and artificial - which should remain the basis of a press notice, not a conversation.

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