Just this week I was reminded that those who run social media accounts for an organisation need extra sets of skills.
To make something work well you need to put body and soul into it. You expose yourself online much more than you do offline. It can be 10 o’clock at night and you are dipping in to respond to a query.
There’s an excellent post on comms2point0 by Emily Taylor on how to deal with criticism on behalf of an organisation. That’s when people get angry about a project that isn’t going down well or some other aspect of what your employer is doing. It’s a great post. You can read it here.
There are anecdotes of unpleasant trolling of staff. Thankfully, that’s rare.
But I’m struck by a dedicated local government officer who looks after a corporate account who told me: “I don’t look at Twitter in the evening now. I have enough of people telling me I’m an idiot between 9 and 5.”
There’s some excellent advice on staying positive online if you are getting cheesed off with your friends’ perfect baby pictures when you are, say, a new parent. Use the off switch. Unfriend. But when you are running a corporate account it’s not so easy.
For five years I ran a corporate Twitter account and was responsible for the training of more than 60 others.
Advice for people who speak online for an organisation
What advice did I give above and beyond the points made in Lucy’s post?
Don’t take it personally.
Count to 10 before replying.
Never argue with an idiot. They bring you down to their level and to a passer-by it’s just two idiots arguing.
Talk to a colleague or a friend if you feel things are getting on top of you. Blow off steam.
Ask – or maybe even let – a colleague to step in and take over for a while.
If you feel it becoming an issue talk to someone and make your line manager aware. Stress is a workplace issue and your employer has a duty to you. Asking for help isn’t being weak it’s being strong.
Have set hours when you will deal with stuff and time when you won’t. You are not on 24/7.
You. If you are willing to learn new things there’s a chance you’ll still have a job in 2020.
This is not a bold statement. It’s surprising how many people quietly have contacted me to say that line resonates.
A few weeks ago with the old year fading and the New Year upon us I wrote that. It means just as much now you are into the swing of things as it did on New Year’s Day.
Around 12-months ago I wrote about the 40 skills a comms team would need. There’s probably something like 42 or 43 now. Relax, I don’t think everyone can know them all. But I do think that you should be a specialist generalist able to do a range of things but be really good at a handful.
I was reminded of all of this need for learning twice in the last week. Firstly, gazing over London on top of the BT Tower for a Government Communications Service event to celebrate good communications in the past year. Secondly, watching the response to three free comms2point0 masterclasses to help share the learning from unawards.
The London event saw examples of world class communications in a range of fields by central government. The Britain is Great campaign, for example. And the Blood Donation Service.
The unawards masterclasses sees examples of world class communications from the public sector in events in Leeds, Birmingham and London. Props to the Local Government Association for getting behind them together with sponsors Alive With Ideas and Govdelivery. Shout too to Darren Caveney my comms2point0 oppo whose baby this is.
There are four ways you can learn things today to still be in a job in 2020.
Do
By far the best. Just do it. Try things out. Experiment. Fail. I get the need for data-driven comms. But I also see the need to try things out to see if they work without those rockets being powered by data.
Listen
Hear what people have to say. It may be at an event or reading a blog post. But take time every day to read and reflect.
Collaborate
Try out new ideas with others. It’s more fun that way. If it succeeds there are more happy people. If it fails you can spread the learning. At its heart this is what still excites me about an unconference where the agenda is decided on the day.
Share
Once you do something worth shouting about share it. Tell others. Write. Blog. Talk. Tell people. It’s the only way people will share the learning.
Back when I was a journalist I used to cover Magistrates’ court a couple of times a week.
It was a mundane list of people charged with minor driving offences with the odd murder thrown in.
There were two characters to look out for. One was ‘Tipton.’ Most of the time he wore a woolly hat because he’d got drunk once and self-tattooed his forehead. Only he used the mirror so the word was written backwards.
Another character was ‘Love and Hat.’ He’d had ‘Love and Hate’ tattoed on his knuckles but an industrial accident robbed him of a vowel from ‘Hate.’
“Don’t laugh when you see him,” I was told. “He hates it when people spot it and laugh.”
In 2016, there is a question to be answered by everyone who uses social media around love and hate I’m not sure what the answer is. And no, not laughing, either.
Undercurrent of hate
There feels like an undercurrent of hate on the social web. You’ll have spotted it in 2015 Asylum seekers, Paris attacks, Charlie Hebdo. Labour leadership election, votes for bombing Syria, Britain First, Katie Hopkins and Donald Trump.
Hate rises to the surface in sometimes unexpected ways. Maybe it’s a colleague or a shared tweet.
In 2016, there’ll be more. Trump (again), the EU referendum. More terror attacks. You know it.
A tipping point
For me, a tipping point came in a former colleague’s Facebook post. Anti-Muslim sentiment reached fever pitch. It was the call to machine gun refugees that did it. This bothered me. A day later as no-one else was I chipped in to counter. No, it’s not alright to randomly shoot people. Not everyone agreed. But I felt better for drawing a line in the sand.
And what to do..?
Of course, one of the good things of holding a politically restricted job was a bar on making political comments. It makes life easy. Broadly, I follow that now even though I’m no longer politically restricted. It’s just easier. I get the advice of not feeding the troll. I also get what Euan Semple was getting at when he said that there is a volume control on the mob. But I’m, not sure that’s enough when it is so close to home. I also get the meme of folk singer Pete Seeger and the words: ‘It’s very important you learn to talk to people you don’t agree with.’
The mass unfollow-a-tron
There’s an application you can use to auto unfollow everyone who likes the Donald Trump Facebook page. Ha! Great stuff, right? Thing is, I’m not so sure. I’ve signed-up for his campaign emails just as I have Hilary Clinton to see what they are saying and how they are saying it.
It’s made me think about what I do. As a conscious attempt, I follow people from all the mainstream political parties. I want to find out what they are saying. I rarely engage on controversial stuff. If you come out with stuff my Grandpa spent four years in a tank fighting you are gone. But I’m wondering if that’s the right path. Or if that’s enough.
This is significant: printed newspapers have become the least popular way that people use to keep up to date with what is going on in the world.
According to a report in the Guardian the annual Ofcom news consumption study will say that 31 per cent of the population read a printed newspaper to keep informed. This is a fall from 41 per cent the previous year.
On the other hand, TV news on 67 per cent, the internet with 41 per cent and radio 32 per cent are all comfortably ahead of breaking news on the news stand.
To anyone interested in the media landscape this feels like hugely landmark news in itself. To communications teams geared-up to service the needs of newspapers first and foremost this feels especially important.
It’s also further evidence that while newspapers used to be practically the only show in town they are not any longer.
The full report doesn’t appear to have been published on the Ofcom site. Their reports always bear reading and the Ofcom Communications Market 2015 report should be required reading for all comms and PR people. I’ve blogged the findings here.
To look at this from a newspaper perspective, they would argue their websites and social media are included in the internet column. So, ‘it’s complicated’ maybe one summary.
The Guardian report also had a few more significant bulletpoints:
25 per cent of people use their mobile phones to keep up to date – up four per cent.
14 per cent of people use word of mouth to get their news – up three per cent.
Young people are more likely to go online (59 per cent) than watch the TV (‘around half.’)
BBC1 was the top news source on 48 per cent, ITV second with 23 per cent, the BBC app or website 23 per cent, BBC News channel 14 per cent and Facebook 12 per cent along with Sky News.
Just because you used to be a journalist doesn’t mean you can write for the web.
There. I’ve said it.
Several times of late I’ve had the same conversation.
Firstly, a confession. I was a journalist for 12-years and a public sector comms person for eight. Much of my work was crafted to be cut and pasted into newspapers either through a news story or a press release.
But those skills that work to create a punchy frontpage lead or impress a news editor doesn’t always work on the web. They are two different things.
And by the way, writing for the web isn’t the same as writing for social media. Writing for the web is writing for a webpage. Social media very often should be informal and conversational. But that’s for another blog post.
What does transfer
Brevity. Getting to the point. Paper shortages during World War Two meant that British journalists had to be concise. Waffle was cut. ‘Keep it short and simple’ ruled. Handy. But…
But a lot doesn’t transfer
On the web, words no longer rule. They are one of many tools available. Your aim is not to scream from the news stand to persuade a passer-by to stop and buy one. It’s to flag down a passing search engine.
Google is the biggest search engine in the world. It has an algorithm that rates each page. The exact recipe is a closely guarded secret and changes often. But some things do work. There are more than three billion searches a day on Google alone, so it’s something to take account of as they have almost 75 per cent of the market globally.
Less than 30 per cent of the words you write will be read on average so you have to be canny.
Metadata is your friend
Metadata is the information that a webpage carries to flag-up to search engines what’s on the page. Tags do this job. They can be key words or the author of the page. For this post the tags will include ‘writing for the web’, ‘tips’, ‘metadata’ and ‘comms.’ Use them. They score you Brownie Points with search engines.
For a simple picture alone, there’s more than half a dozen places where metadata can crop up. From title to description what camera took it, when and where. It all counts. Use it.
Rich content; yes, please!
If words no longer have supremacy, what does? Simple. Pictures, slides and video work well with people so search engines like them. So, when you are creating something use a variety of content. This also works if you are sending something out to try and entice a journalist to carry your story. Send them words, sure. But send them rich content like a picture or video they can use on their site.
On the web, the cunning headline to amuse and entice the reader in doesn’t work. Algorithms don’t really do irony or word play so be very literal. As the BBC Journalism website says, an ambiguous headline of ‘Queen sells pirate music to fans’ doesn’t work. What about clickbait? That’s all over the web, isn’t it? Yes. But that’s writing for social media and a very particular take on it.
And add links, for heaven’s sake
Back when I was a journalist I wrote thousands of news stories. I never added one link. Tom Foremski’s landmark ‘Die Press Release! Die! Die! Die’ from 2006 was written out of frustration. You should read it. It rails against the habit of text only communications. It begs for the kind of rich content this blog points to. Add links. They give the option of more. Like this econsultancy list of 23 tips for writing on the web.
So, you’ve set-up your email list and you’ve got some people to sign-up… so what now?
There’s a range of things that you can do to increase the chances of engaging with the most amount of people.
So, here’s a run through of things.
This list is for the helpful email newsletter or regular email that people have opted in for. It’s not for unhelpful spam, okay?
Consider your variables.
These are the things you can change around and adjust to see what works best. Adjusting one can have a big impact.
Subject line: That’s the line that accompanies your email. You’ll need to think of something interesting and eye catching that entices an open. Avoid ‘Weekly email vol 1.’ It has all the allure of a soggy novel. Vary it.
Timing: Think about what time you’ll send it. When would it get most attention? Would people be busy with their own jobs mid-morning and straight after lunch to spare time? Often, using an email provider you can pre-schedule a time to send your email out. Fridays and Monday are often bad days to send out an email. You get lots more out-of-offices on those days.
Pictures: Think about whether an image would work. But remember, that these can’t always be opened and big email lists rarely use them.
Merge tags: This is a way you can open up your email with a personal address to your audience. So, it’s ‘Dear Dan’ if it’s to Dan and ‘Dear Vera’ if it’s to Vera. You’ll need to have uploaded your list as a spreadsheet or similar format so the database knows to pull out the right first name.
Start the email: Tell them the reason you are emailing. They may have signed-up to the museum events list, for example, and you are letting them know of the summer events.
Links: Chances are you’ll want people to click through to a webpage. Pay close attention to the number of links you have and see how they perform. The first link tends to be the one with most click throughs. Don’t over stuff it. You can see what content works best by checking to see who opens what.
A call to action: Round-off with a call to action. This is the thing you’d like people to do. For instance, ‘click the link’, ‘donate’ or ‘buy one for your holidays’.
Sign off as a real person: People prefer talking to people. So sign off as one. When Barack Obama first won the election he didn’t sign all his campaign emails. Why? Because people cottoned onto the fact that he would be too busy. So, the regional organiser John Smith or someone else was fine.
Make sure you experiment endlessly. Your audience is pretty unique to you and the only way you’ll find out what works is by experimenting with your variables. You’ll see what works through studying your analytics.
Other top tips
Use a mobile-compatible template: Most email providers will shape your email and give you a template. There’s often a range. Try and start with the simplest one and one that will open on a mobile phone.
Add an address and an unsubscribe button: By law, you need to do this, so add one.
Sign-up: Follow political parties from the UK and the USA and online retailers. You’ll get a free education in how to write engaging emails. Pick the ideas that feel right from the look and feel.
Relevant content: It goes without saying that the content you provide will make or break your email list. Sending beef recipes to a vegetarian cookery list won’t work.
Style: Be light and engaging if you can. You’re asking people to sign-up and be signposted. Don’t make it a chore.
Test it: Before you send your email, test it. Most email providers allow you to send a test email first. This will allow you to check the links you’ve embedded as well as allow you to review your content. Don’t ever send it blind. Send it to a colleague to get their feedback. When you do send it, try and look at it on a mobile phone. Ofcom in 2015 says that 66 per cent of people have a smartphone and it’s where they check their emails.
Evaluate, evaluate and evaluate: When you’ve sent an email wait a few days and go back and see what worked and what didn’t. Don’t be afraid to send out test emails to small groups to see what the stats say works before you send the bulk list.
This post is part of the LGA’s email best practice guidance that you can read here.
It’s an instant London response that ordinary people can lend their voice to.
Second, in Cumbria flooding.
My 76-year-old Dad is from Keswick and is adamant he’s driving his Volvo up there because he’s got it in his diary. As a kid his home in High Hill flooded more than once when the Greta burst its banks.
We used Environment Agency flood warnings on their website and footage and pictures posted to Twitter to talk him out of it.
Elsewhere on Facebook, a friend spoke proudly of his sister who works in the public sector in Cumbria.
My sister was called out to man a reception centre. She was picked up at 11pm by mountain rescue. She had to walk through sewerage to get there. They got stranded in the cold and wet. She had to get showered when she got there. She doesn’t know when she’s there until nor what she will be doing. But she’s done it, without moaning. And is a bloody star.
A stabbing in London and burst rivers in the Lake District. What was the common link between the two?
In both, the public sector raced to the danger.
Police, local government, fire and ambulance headed to the trouble and communicated in realtime.
I tried and tried but I couldn’t see one single one of those who snipe at the public sector wrestle the knifeman to the ground or fill a sandbag.
If you are public sector, be very proud.
If you are not, just know that they are not as bad as the Daily Mail would like you to think and one day you’ll need their help.
It’s difficult to talk about virtual reality without sounding like I did when I was a kid the first time I watched a colour telly during the Moscow Olympics in 1980.
It was round at a friend’s house during a birthday party and athletes from Europe and Africa in multi-coloured vests were sprinting around a burnt red track.
“It looked so colourful,” I remember telling my Mum later. “Can we have one?”
We had been without a telly for two years and the images soaked into my television-starved mind. It would be another two before we did.
So, to virtual reality – or VR. The technology isn’t new. It’s been around for several years but it’s starting to cut through to the mainstream. Steven Davies, who I’ve worked with in delivering video workshops gave me a spare pair of Google cardboard in the summer. This is a cardboard self-assembly kit that you fit your smartphone into before watching specially-shot 360 degree footage you can download from Google Play. He’s been experimenting with immersive video for years. I’m starting to think he’s onto something.
There are VR downloads out there on Google Play. There are some amazing downloads to watch. But the download this week that really stopped me in my tracks has been the New York Times footage of three different children caught up in three different wars with the same unsettling outcome. I recommend you download it. The are talking of it as a new form of storytelling. I think they are right. You can pick-up Google cardboard online to watch the film in its full glory. But you can also watch it in smartphone setting.
Sending people to a warzone
Foreign news used to be a journalist being sent off to war zones to file a story through a distant telex machine. Photographers would try to capture an iconic image. Several days later you’d glance at it while eating your cornflakes. You may even read it. Then rolling news CNN-style pushed the boundary again bringing war zones into your living room. The New York Times VR download has changed that. It has taken you into the warzone itself.
Sending you to the warzone
The New York Times download is an ambitious 10-minute film that cuts between three stories of two boys and a girl. There is no commentary. There is no editorial. There is just you. There is the child, their words and there is a bed of music.
With VR you can look up, look down and look all around you. The film starts with you standing in a shattered room. You look down. You see shattered furniture, mess and torn books. Your eyes and your mind compute to tell you that you are in the room. You hear the scratching of chalk on a blackboard behind you. You turn around look up and you see a small boy with his back to you reaching up to write on the blackboard. You can’t believe a boy is standing in such a damaged room. It is eerily wrong.
This is Oleg from the Ukraine.
His words as a voiceover tell you his story. You read isolated sentences of his story that float in the air. He tells you he used to dream with his friends of planting a bomb in his school but he doesn’t now. When the war started he fled with his family, says. He tells you he returned to find his grandfather dead in the garden. He had died several months before and had lain unburied.
Then you are in a canoe with a boy on his own. This is Chuol. You are in South Sudan. He had fled for the swamps with his grandmother but had lost his mother. He stands in front of you his eyes burning with pain and you look away. You look back and he is still there before you. You see a boy who life is kicking whose joy has gone.
You hear the story of Syrian girl Hana too. She gets up with her family at 4am to pick cucumbers.
VR: the verdict from my family
You’ve heard stories like these before many times. But it’s unsettling to see them through VR with them standing in front of you.
I showed the film to my own seven-year-old daughter and watched carefully. She looked filled with concern for the children she saw in front of her and she watched quietly. Afterwards, we talked about how lucky we are to live in a country where we didn’t have war.
I showed the film to my wife. It didn’t have the immediacy of livestreaming, she said. It felt like a film too. She didn’t move around to explore the 360-degree nature. She just focussed on the child. But it reached out in a way that other journalism doesn’t, she said.
VR as mainstream?
“We hope people see this as the moment when VR went mainstream,” New York Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein told Neiman Lab. “Not when the early adopters, gamers and people who already know got it but when those without exposure to it realised what this new medium can do.”
Well, I wasn’t going to. And I didn’t seek it out but the new John Lewis TV ad gives a perfect lesson for where comms is right now.
You may know it. It’s a two minute film of a little girl spotting the man on the moon looking sad and sending him a present to cheer him up at Christmas time. An old Oasis b-side has been re-recorded for the music.
Not watching much television I wasn’t aware of it. But of course, I remember the penguin TV ad from last year. But I didn’t have to watch TV to find out about the new TV ad. It was being discussed on BBC Radio 5 on the way home and all over Twitter.
But the thing is you don’t have to wait until the ad break of Coronation Street to see it. It’s on John Lewis’ Facebook (4.3 million views in 24-hours), John Lewis’ YouTube (6.1 million views in 24-hours) as well as the 743 entries on Google News . Twitter, as this Topsy 30-day search shows went wild.
Video has never been more powerful. The two minute TV-ad moves the toughest cynic to tears. A little girl has reached out and melted the heart of a lonely old man. If you don’t cry tears watching it there’s genuinely something wrong with you.
But that power doesn’t have to be on TV anymore. It’s notable that the TV-ad was launched on YouTube first rather than on the television. That’s quite post-modern.
Social media fanning the flames is the vehicle for getting it seen. All the buzz, all the sharing and all the think pieces is driving the traffic relentlessly. Why pay for expensive TV slots when people can watch it in their Facebook stream? There were 81,000 shares in 24-hours.
It was uploaded to Facebook direct AND YouTube. There’s an epic battle going on for the future of the web between Google and Mark Zuckerberg. As tech improves and allows people to have phones that can stream video content like John Lewis’ ad can reach people.
Traditional media still plays a role. It may be online as well as in print but the news media retain a footprint in where and how we are consuming content.
Dan Slee is director and co-creator of comms2point0. He co-delivers an Essential Video Skills for Comms workshop in London on November 26. More here.
I’ve been thinking for a while that 24-hour Twitter events have driven up a bit of a cul-de-sac.
You know the sort of thing. An organisation tweets what it is doing for 24-hours and shines a light on unsung heroes. You learn things you didn’t know and then the timeline moves on.
Back in 2011, I was part of an award-winning team at Walsall Council that ran this first one in local government called #walsall24. We encouraged teams from across the council from 6am to join in. There was a countryside ranger talking about what she was doing, scheduled road repairs and events at libraries.
We created a wall of noise and we didn’t even bother to tell the local papers. We just did it. It was the first time it felt like we siezed the channels off production and just did ikt ourselves. I’m still hugely proud of that.
We wanted #walsall24 to be like an Atari ZX81 game. Amazing at the time but quickly outdated. A social Pong, in other words. Pong being the basic computer tennis game with two lines anfd a ball. I’d been thinking just lately that this model hadn’t moved on all that much.
Answering the ‘So what?’ question
The big question that any such event should face is ‘So what?’
In other words, you did all this, but what has changed?
Ideally, what did people do that made a difference? Maybe even how this saved money.
Two impressive grassroots campaigns
Two things just recently have impressed me. Firstly, the #Iminworkjeremy hashtag. Something which evolved ad hoc without organising. This was prompted by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s comments that consultants don’t work at weekends. So, working consultants tweeted pictures of themselves working. It was Twitter at its best.
The obvious ‘so what?’ of that is to challenge a statement and to reach out to others who are in the same boat.
The second thing that impressed was the Remember Srebrenica campaign in the UK which has strives to ask people to remember the genocide of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys murdered by Serbs in the bloody Balkans civil war. It was a simple ask. Pledge that you’ll remember them and an online and offline campaign co-incided beautifully.
NHS and commscamp
Several weeks back Amanda Nash pitched a great session at commscamp where she crowdsourced ideas for an NHS-wide event. She and others will make a success of it whatever they do. They’ll find solutions and make it fly.
The session spoke of the need to let people inside and outside the NHS join in. It also mentioned that sometimes they may need to shadow staff to give a flavour of what they are doing.
But I wonder, is there an NHS thing that can galvanise people, bring people together and make an appreciable difference?
Is there a pledge? A call to action? A promise? Something that answers the ‘so what?’ question?
But at the same time, keep it simple.
That’s for those doing it to work out and for the people behind houjsing day and any social event.
Answer the ‘so what’ question and you can move mountains.
