Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

Whenever the subject of YouTube comes up in federal government 2.0 cirlces (and it comes up often) the Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) Waking Up Canadian video is cited as the poster child for Gov 2.0 YouTube success. The measure of this success is the over 180,000 views it had as of this writing.  It’s short,  funny and well produced- three key elements for YouTube success for sure. However, the  more important number that has never been mentioned, to me at least, is the number of comments the video got: 724. 724 comments good, bad and ugly for all the world to see. This is engagement and it’s what really matters on the web.

I would argue that the high number of comments is the key contributer to the high view rate. But to get comments  you have to allow comments and not disable them: something many departments are still reluctant to do.

No doubt many will have to go through the process of wasting taxpayer money and public servant time putting up closed off channels that die slow, lonely deaths before realizing that they either have to engage or become even more irrelevant.

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Sometimes I sound like a broken record when I talk about the need to measure government social media efforts. This isn’t social media’s fault. Long before there was social media, upper management – in government and the private sector -  was ignoring good advice from communications staff and blasting out messages with little justification beyond, well, blasting out messages.

In the old days communicators didn’t have much to combat this because it was hard to measure communications success. So, since it was hard to measure it was hard to argue that communications programs should be linked to business strategy and have measurable objectives flowing from that strategy. But social media changed that. They offer metrics that are easier to get and way more meaningful. For example, the number of blogs posts about your product, written by people who care about it enough to write, means a lot more than a TV commercial seen by lots of people that may or may not care.

But one of the main reasons why measurement is so important in government is that to measure something exactly you have to know exactly what your objective is. With business that’s easy: sell more stuff. But with government it’s not always so clear. Objectives like “raising awareness” with the “general public” get used a lot but some inquiry quickly reveals how little these really mean – and how difficult they are to measure.

The more specific your target audience and objective the easier it is to measure your success – or lack of it. You want move from vague objectives to specific ones like “increasing the number of tweets or re-tweets by Canadians 18-24, that mention our department’s program X, from the current one per year to five per month over the next year”.

So here are three key reasons why you should never stop pushing your government organisation to measure their social media communications efforts:

1) Because to measure exactly you must define your objective exactly.

2) Because it’s public money and communication spending, like all spending, must be justified even more than in the private sector.

3) Because social media efforts can be easily measured so there’s no excuse not to.

Have you got any other reasons?

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The two most important questions to ask clients who ask you to implement any communications tactic, social media or otherwise, are:

1) What’s their objective?

and

2) How will they measure that they’ve met their objective?

This is more crucial now because, as far as social media go, we’re still in the phase where people are trying to make the new dog do old tricks.

One of those old tricks is having vague goals they can’t, or won’t, measure. The classic vague objective is “raising awareness of what their organisation is doing”.

How do you measure this? Whose awareness do they want to raise? Do they mean awareness of everything the organisation does or a specific initiative with a specific timeframe in a specific place? How do you measure how aware your target audience is now so you can measure after the campaign to gauge if it had any effect? If your target audience is more aware after the campaign, how do you know the campaign had anything to do with it?

Vague objectives like this are the result of years of using communications tactics that were practically impossible to measure in any meaningful way; advertising being the main culprit, print press releases being a close second. Since communicators had few alternatives we learned not to challenge vague objectives and measurement.

However, times have changed.

A key part of the power of online communications is they offer better measurement; not perfect, but better. They help us help clients measure specific things.  So, when someone hits you with the “raising awareness” objective you can say, “Let’s make the objective more specific and measureable. Let’s measure the increase in mentions of our organisation in online discussions, among our target group, of issue X during a given timeframe.” Then you can use Google Alerts or some paid service or whatever tool you like to measure discussion before and after your campaign to get an idea of whether it had any impact. It’s still not a perfect science because, even if discussion has increased, knowing what part your campaign played takes some work. However, it’s a huge improvement on the past.

For more on measurement check out KD Payne’s PR Measurement Blog.

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