Why government agencies need a social media strategy

This is the first in a series of posts about government agencies and social media strategies.

Recently, I had a bad experience with Transperth, so I blogged about my experience. I was wondering how Transperth should respond, when I found I was invited to contribute to the Office of eGovernments’s updating of the Guidelines for State Government Websites and the second item on the agenda was Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.. I realised guidelines are not the complete solutions, There needs to be a encompassing strategy in any agency before guidelines are employed.

The internet is now a major communication channel. In the last two government departments I worked, more people where getting information from their websites than all other communications channels combined.

While the web has given government agencies a inexpensive channel to communicate their message. The internet and particularly social media have also given others an equal inexpensive and effective channel to communicate their alternative message. It is far easier to communicate online, for example, with my bad experience with Transperth, I told 5 people offline and over 100 people online about my experience. Significantly the research (Corporate Social Responsibility Survey 07) shows that people are more than twice as likely to trust a friend than a corporate website.

If you look at results of the Demographic Profiling of Victorian Government Website Visitors 2007 it shows close to 30% of all internet visitors to Victorian Government websites read blogs and 10% contribute to blogs. That is a large number of customers who are capable of providing or listening to alternative views about you. That does not include the over 2.2 million FaceBook members or users of other social networking sites or services.

If the 30% of your website visitors that are blog readers is not enough, social media has an impact well beyond that. Do a Google search on Transperth the results are interesting, the Transperth site is the first result the second is Transperth Dumb Rider System which is critical of Transperth, as are two more of the top ten results. This is because Google appears to be biased towards social media sites, in ranking the results it returns. As a large number of visitors arrive at your site through Google, the appearance of critical web pages highly in search results has damaged your reputation in the eyes of clients even before they arrive at your site.

The issues as I see them with the rise of social media and it’s impact on government agencies to communicate their message are:

  • The number of alternative voices and a good proportion of your clients are willing to listen.
  • People are more likely to trust other people, particularly ones they have pre-exisiting relationships with than your website or other communication channel.
  • Even if you web based clients do not use social media, they results of others using social media can have an effect on your relationship with them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Social Media Strategy, editoral. 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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6 Responses to “Why government agencies need a social media strategy”

  1. Donna Spencer August 6th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

    Just musing out loud, but I feel like there is a bigger piece missing.

    Most govt I work with (and I work with a lot of govt) don’t even have a decent communications strategy. Most really need to start thinking about what their real communications goals are, how they use the web, how they use people etc etc. A part of a broader comms strategy may include social media if social media is likely to help them achieve their broader comms goals…

  2. nick August 6th, 2008 at 2:30 pm

    I agree with you, most govt agencies have poor communications strategy. Often that is exasperated by the communication section handling the old school media, the IT section handling the corporate website and social media if used by the customer service section.

    Govt departments needs to develop a solid all encompassing communications strategy that includes online and a social media strategy. This is where I disagree with you, even if a govt agency is not using social media, it needs to have a social media policy to deal with others using social media to communicate about it.

  3. Jason Ryan August 6th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

    Good post Nick.

    It is also worth mentioning that an agency’s communications strategy should include, as part of a social media section, guidance for staff wishing to –or already– using these tools. It is not just corporate comms or, God forbid, IT that use social media in or outside the firewall…

  4. Donna Spencer August 6th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    Good point Nick. Most of the time when I hear people talking about needing a social media policy, they are talking about a solution, but not describing the problem it solves (which is where the broader comms strategy fits - this could be the hook that describes the problem).

    But your point about needing a policy simply to deal with what is already out there is a good one. In that case the social media policy (inc guidance for staff as jason commented) does address a clear problem.

  5. Nick Cowie » Government agencies and social media strategies August 11th, 2008 at 6:01 pm

    [...] series of posts on Government agencies and social media strategies over on my other blog. The first Why government agencies need a social media strategy has been up for a few days, the second and third are half written and should turn up [...]

  6. harriet August 15th, 2008 at 1:55 pm

    Thanks Nick, a great post - and one which re-iterates the power of ‘word of mouth’ - aka ‘word of blog’ as opposed to more traditional media formats. I’m passing it on :)

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