Like it or not the public sector can’t say it’s truly got social media until it’s got Facebook right.
Right now it hasn’t. All too often it’s a tumbleweed corporate page shovelling out press releases and a handful of brave people following. Often it’s nothing at all.
That’s as social as standing outside the Town Hall waiting for someone to emerge from a window with a megaphone and then disappear. Now hear this? I’d rather not, if it’s all the same.
Since Facebook is the largest social media platform and, as the presentation cliche goes, if it were a country it would be the fourth largest in the world.
But the fact is most people just don’t want to ‘like’ the institution. It can be seen as social suicide. But if you provide interesting, targeted, social timely content they may. A page for a specific library may work. And yes, you can follow the excellent Coventry City Council route an de-brand your page so the barrier is as low as possible as a session at Hyper WM in Warwick heard directly from Ali Hook.
For instant followers, a crisis really works. The Queensland Police Facebook page saw numbers rocket when flooding struck the state.
But as Ben Proctor in the same session said:
“For me the reluctance of people to “Like” your Council’s web page is a signal that they don’t have a real relationship with your Council. Broadly Facebook is what people use to manage their real life relationships. I don’t think the solution to this is to be found within the Facebook environment.”
It’s an interesting point worth reflecting on. You can read his full round-up of Hyper WM here.
Should we pack up and go home?
Absolutely not.
I’ve written about things local government can do elsewhere. But what you do on your page is actually a really small part of the Facebook landscape. You’ve got 500 residents signed up to your corporate page? Fantastic. Think of it in terms of people coming to your meetings it’s huge. But in a borough of 300,000 they not even one per cent of it’s population.
If you believe that your reputation is what people are saying about you in the local paper, on the radio or online then this is a question you’re going to have to face.
The conclusion is actually simple. You need to go out to the big wide world and start to talking to people on Facebook itself. Not on your corporate page but actually on Facebook itself. On the Facebook group that has been set up as a protest but is actually shouting into a void.
You need to get out of the comparable safety of the corporate Facebook page.
That’s a deeply profound step to take.
So, how do we go out onto the wilds of Facebook?
1. You can don a tin hat and go on with your own profile. But that opens the whole grey area of personal and work profile and whether or not last summer’s holiday snaps from Magaluf really create that professional air.
2. You can create a work profile. Or rather you can’t. Facebook’s terms and conditions don’t allow you to and you run the risk of having the profile and maybe any page it may administer taking down.
3. You can use Facebook as your page. If you’re an admin you have the option to use Facebook as your page to comment on other pages. That’s a brilliant piece of functionality that I just never knew existed until the excellent Ben Proctor pointed it out to me.
4. And be sensible. You’re really unlikely to have a cogent debate on cultural diversity on a far right website populated by trolls. But the single issue pressure group that’s shouting about an issue the council may not be aware of is crying out to be listened to. The Citizenship Foundation’s Michael Grimes’ one page blogger engagement guide for organisations is just as important here as it is for bloggers themselves.
But has anyone actually done this?
Case studies are thin on the ground. Al Smith’s blog on how he engaged with the regulars of the Cooperage pub on Facebook using his own profile is a good starting point. You can read it here.
Far less well known is an example of Sussex Police venturing onto Facebook to talk to worried residents who joined the ‘Make Our Streets Safer Again in Bognor Regis’ Facebook group. Julia Burns, a Sussex Police communications officer, presented what she learned at a Local Government Improvement and Delivery event in Coventry a while back.
You can find the slides at the Communities of Practice site here (log in required).
In a nutshell, a Facebook group was launched by disaffected residents worried about their streets with more than 2,000 joining in three days. Advice from Julia was to engage on Facebook using a frontline officer’s profile. After overcoming some trepidation, fear and nervousness an officer did just that and got a positive response. The site’s admin became engaged offline with the police and her voice, and those of her group, started to get an audience.
This very necessary step all points yet again for the need for this to be properly resourced. Maybe, that means re-calibrating what you are doing as a comms team or as an organisation.
Which is another mountain to climb altogether.
Creative commons credits
Facebook logo http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/986548379/sizes/o/in/photostream/
excellent stuff dan.
At Talk About Local we train people to find a voice online. Increasingly Facebook is the place regular folk in communities want to start. Up in Stockport, with encouragement from Stockport Council and a community budget we have been gently helping the magnificent Hayley manage a sometimes tough Facebook group on her estate.
http://www.facebook.com/groups/178753568830557/
Often this comes down to moral support and some basic advice. One thing we advised was a simple set of rules for her to moderate against to deal with the inevitable difficult comments, often arising just after the pubs shut. They are inserted as a text block in the top right of the page. Moderation tools in Facebook are crude to say the least – we can’t work out for instance why it is hard to turn off comments overnight say (revert them to admin pre-approved), some Facebook people recently recommended Conversocial too us for discussion management – we are testing that.
Moderation has other problems for public authorities (censorship etc) but i think they should be firm – you wouldn’t allow swearing or wildly off topic issues at a community meeting run by the council why should you allow it on your wall.
If you want any help drop us a line william@talkaboutlocal.org
Dan,
This is really good. Thanks. Unfortunately, I think the public perception is that they just don’t have “a relationship” with their council. Most following, say, music acts on FB don’t have a “relationship” with the musicians, of course, but a key issue is that FB gives them a way of saying that, in effect, they’d like to. And FB then goes on to provide a fake version of a relationship – or a glimpse of what all relationships will now actually become, over time.
The attitude to the Council is still largely stuck at the (Life of Brian) “What have the Romans ever done for us?” level. No amount of posting photos of civic figures “in action” will change that, and the true penetration of news and press releases is, IMO, miniscule compared to the impression comms offices give that the world is waiting for their every syllable.
It’s people who make the difference. I remember my dealings with a head teacher of a primary school, who had said she never had visitors from “the council” come to her school. When given a list that included social workers, psychologists, welfare officers, etc, she replied “Yes, but they’re different, They’re real people.”
Nothing more one can say to that, is there?
It’s worth adding that Facebook (most likely*) rewards this kind of outreach behaviour by promoting your content more highly. Your content’s visibility is determined by an algorithm called EdgeRank that includes “affinity” as a factor. Going out and having conversations with people on their pages should increase affinity, so making it more likely they will see your content in future.
* The caveat here is that the exact recipe of the EdgeRank algorithm is, of course, highly secret.
Good post (again) – thanks Dan!
I’m glad you raised the Facebook person / professional profile quandary issue. Although I was always under the impression that while Facebook pages can interact with other pages, they can’t interact with groups. They change the rules all the time though, so I don’t know if anyone knows any different?
Cheers,
Kate
BWD Winter seemed to do ok. I know I keep banging on and on about it but no one seems terribly interested that it resulted in a quantifiable call drop to our call centre and saved us money. Must have done something right.
On the contrary, Lou I heard it cited the other day as one of the rare examples where activity was evaluated with a cost benefit calculated. That’s valuable work. Have you a link to it at all? As Queensland Police found, in a crisis people will come to your Facebook page. A crisis – in this case snow – is the reason for their Facebook page numbers sky rocketing. For the rest of the year all too often people won’t trouble official Facebook presences.
“you can use facebook as your page” I took me three reads to get this but now I have! Have now changed our settings and may be sallying forth from out moribund page shortly. Top tip! Thanks.
OK – I read the ‘you can use facebook as you page’ bit more than three times, and still don’t get it! Any clues?
Cheers, Ian. It basically means that if you click the ‘Use Facebook as your page’ button you can post messages to Facebook as your page and not as yourself. Cunning, eh?