I’m a slightly ambivalent about Twitter takeovers these days.
I’m proud to have been involved in one of the first in the public sector nine years ago but where once they boldly charted new territory they now often feel like tired box-ticking.
I did quite like content posted from lead nurse for recruitment Vicky Jobson on the corporate account of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead.
Hi, I’m Vicky Jobson the lead nurse for recruitment at Gateshead. Today I’m taking over the organisations social media channels to talk all things nursing & help everyone understand what it’s like to work as a nurse in Gateshead. Feel free to comment, share or ask questions. pic.twitter.com/yyVhMlYGar
Some critics of Twitter takeovers complain that there isn’t a call to action to go with them so why bother doing them?
I both get that but disagree. Yes, comms will be judged on what people have done as a result of all that comms activity. How many sign-ups to that thing is critical, for example. But to judge social media activity solely on the bottom line fundamentally misjudges how best to use social media.
I’ve blogged many times before on the need for an 80-20 split between your content with the majority being human over corporate content. It’s the recipe that just seems to work.
So some of the content that shows real people at work really hits the mark.
Lovely Rebecca trained at our Hospital and is now a qualified nurse undertaking her preceptorship on ward 8. Welcome to our QE family. Sky’s the limit Rebecca 😘 pic.twitter.com/C0R8No8bjV
Consciously or not using a human tone for eight pieces of content will make it easier to land those prompts to become a nurse with the other two. Would 10 posts that start with ‘work for us’ land better? Not on social media, they wouldn’t.
Conversations should sound human
I’m reminded of lines from the Cluetrain Manifesto. This amazing document from 1999 was the result of crowd-sourced discussions between early internet pioneers which sets out what the internet could look like. It described social media before it properly happened.
Included in the manifesto are…
Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?
Essentially, takeovers are reminders that humans work here.
But I genuinely think that these human voices should be the default setting rather than a special occasion.
Sure, you have to break bad news from time-to-time and you need to handle that.
But wouldn’t that formal tone be better coming from an organisation that has already long won people over by being human?
With major changes in direction to Facebook its clear that the public sector needs to drastically re-think their approach to the world’s largest platform.
Ahead of them, here’s a steer on the questions you need to ask yourself to be an effective communicator.
‘Is it actually Facebook that I need?’
Facebook it is not a magic cure-all that reaches the parts other platforms cannot reach. So, the lazy email that asks you to post their clip-art poster onto the corporate page for an event for teenagers may well be pointless. Maybe there are other ways to reach teenagers.
Check your insights to see who your audience is and be ruthless about sticking to it.
‘Is my content the best it can possibly be?’
If you’re sure you’re audience is on Facebook, then knock yourself out and create something. But make it as good as you possibly can. Research show recorded video tops the chart for engagement, followed by a picture followed by a link followed by just plain text.
Check to see if you can make content that’s sharable, is engaging and tells a story.
‘Is this better as a Facebook Live?’
Facebook are pushing Facebook Live like crazy. It’s not hard to see why. The engagement rates are high and the audience who come-by to watch after the event are far greater than the original. It’s a chance to let your audience ask questions and see a behind-the-secenes glimpse.
Check to see if this would work as a live video.
‘Is my audience in a Facebook group?’
You’re promoting a new exhibition at your museum. Is there a heritage Facebook group where people like talking and sharing pictures and stories of days gone by? Or maybe, there’s a serious fire that you need to get a warning out to a village.
Run a search to see if there’s a Facebook group. See if you can join the group as a page. Alternatively, see if you can message the admin from your own account if you are happy to to see if they’d share your content.
‘Is my audience better off in a Facebook group?’
Dorset Council created a community for people looking to live healthier lives. They did this by creating a Facebook group. They set some ground rules and let them share recipes, diet tips and other useful things.
Think if the niche audience you are after world be better served in a Facebook group that you can create and manage.
‘Is there some budget for a boosted post?’
If you’re looking to find the brass band enthusiasts in your patch to market the brass band festival and there isn’t a group maybe a Facebook ad is the way forward.
Facebook is the biggest pile of marketeer-friendly data ever assembled. If you know that your audience likes brass bands and is likely to be aged between 30 and 60 you can tailor an ad just for them.
Look to use that small pot of money to boost your message to the right audience at the right time.
I’m delivering the Vital Facebook Skills workshop in London, Manchester, Belfast and Edinburgh. For more information and to book head here. I’d love to see you there. Any questions? Drop me a note: dan@danslee.co.uk.
It’s now a few days after the local government elections and the dust has started to settle.
Candidates have caught up with lost sleep and so hopefully have council comms people.
I blogged the day after the results at the patchy quality of how the election results were communicated. You can read that here. I love local government. I really do. But the struggle to find out basic information made me despair.
I wanted to know who has won my ward.
I wanted to know who is in control of the council.
Yet, as I glanced around 16 West Midland councils, almost half didn’t mention the election results on their home page, half had no party-by-party results breakdown and none told me which party was actually now in charge.
As an ex-local government person I feel the pain of those trying to get the numbers out. But the truth remains that if councils can’t get the basics like this right, what hope have they got in convincing sceptics they can nail the really difficult things?
I’m encouraged there’s now a debate on how to improve election comms.
One council caught me eye.
Step forward City of York Council.
They have three comms objectives and measured them
The comms team at City of York Council led by Claire Foale looked to encourage residents to engage in the process through easy-to-share content, they wanted to share up-to-date content in realtime that was also easy for journalists to share.
Evaluation shows they reached 157,000 accounts on Twitter, 2,900 on the live stream and their website had 105,000 views with a peak at 6pm the following day. Five people worked on the project. It’s important to say that this was a daytime count.
Hats off to Claire Foale and their team for drawing-up the plan, delivering it and then measuring it. It’s a really impressive performance.
This shows that yes, this can be measured and that yes, there is an appetite for the information if you create it in a sharable format. If you resource it, the numbers justify it.
I’m also glad they looked at creating content that media could share. The important thing is getting the information out rather than driving traffic.
Besides being useful, election night is the comms team’s first chance to impress the newly-elected or re-elected administration
Picture credit: City of York Council
They have a signpost to results on the homepage
Yes, I know a lot of people go via google direct to the Baswich library page to find out the opening hours but there’s something pretty basic about signposting from what is your flagship page the flagship numbers.
They list who voted for who ward-by-ward
So, if you’ve voted in the Acomb ward, you can see what difference your vote made.
They also give an overview of where the parties are
Like a swing-o-meter, this graphic gives a picture of who is on the brink of power. If there’s an observation to be made, I don’t know if this is updated in real time during the night. I hope so.
And for bonus points, I’d like to know what the current situation is. No overall control? Is that a change from 2018? And is there a Full Council meeting where this gets resolved?
They also give an overview ward-by-ward
Again, a visually attractive ward-by-ward breakdown. Bonus points if this was updated in realtime.
They ran a video livestream in realtime
They also ran a video link live from a fixed camera position to allow uber-geeks to follow things in realtime. They also managed that rare thing of getting the sound something like alright.
Extra marks for making a note of when each ward announced, so people didn’t have to sit back through nine hours of coverage to see that special moment when the Hull Road ward result was called.
They ran a Twitter that posted results and answered questions
Ten years on from the first time results were posted in social media, the council Twitter fulfilled this role and also responded to queries in realtime.
Hi Tania,
Thank you for your question. As the local election is a legal vote count and today has seen some close vote results, our counters take great care in ensuring accuracy and due diligence across all 47 seats being declared. ⁰Thank you ^SM
The list of what reporters are encouraged to write about is here
Is it fake? Surely? On balance, surprisingly not. It appears to be real. It even gets carried in The Guardian media pages with a picture credit to the Evening Standard.
The list of things I was encouraged to write about as a reporter
It got me thinking.
News desk requests are nothing new.
My career in journalism is behind me, so I’m not betraying any confidences when I say that the list of things I was encouraged to write about as a reporter probably didn’t bear close public scrutiny.
At various points in my career I was encouraged and discouraged to write about:
Yes, to stories about dead kids.
Yes, to stories about dog shit.
Yes, to stories about ‘happy ill people’.
No, to pictures of people in wheelchairs or with tattoos.
No, to damp flat stories.
No, to stories about three people from our patch held by the US military in Guantanamo Bay.
None of these edicts were ever written down. All were always passed on by word of mouth. If you think they’re bad, there’s a couple of other passed-down instructions which I’m not publishing because frankly, they’re actionable.
But what is new about the Evening Standard pic is that someone has codified them, printed them and an image has been shared on Twitter. Their grid is driven by web traffic rather than prejudice or that elusive experienced-based judgement call of ‘news sense’. That’s the journo’s sense that people on the patch will be more interested in a campaign to save a hospital than a story about, say, a damp flat.
Without looking at the numbers of what works, newspapers are dead. But what if the numbers don’t point to what could be called journalism?
But on the other hand, Reach’s Black Country Live‘s 26 Facebook posts over four days have just four updates that could be called local news. Most of what is posted are memes, Black Country dialect and culture jokes and re-nosed national stories. To a former journo who got a bollocking for covering a story 100-yards off the patch that’s a slightly a weird feeling.
Newspapers are on borrowed time. Some are making the shift to digital well. But they risk this shift by setting fire to 100 years of hard-won trust by pimping extreme weather stories in short-term dash for numbers. I’m seeing a backlash against this from newspaper readers on Facebook tired of being conned that three foot of snow is coming.
What this means for comms people
It means, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
The local newspaper that prints verbatim every cough and spit and is widely read is a thing of the past.
Some remaining print titles rely on a stressed junior reporter cutting and pasting your press releases. But here’s a warning. Impressive print cuttings from those hollowed-out shadow titles is not a long term strategy. It’s not even medium-term. If you’re spending five days on signing off a press release without thinking about it, I’d say you’re wasting your time.
It all points to the point that you need to educate the client. In this case, it’s the organisation and quite possibly yourself.
To paraphrase the Evening Standard grid, if your content doesn’t tick those boxes chances are you shouldn’t be targeting the newspaper.
Credit to David Grindlay for sharing the Evening Standard image.
It’s the morning after local government elections.
I’ve voted.
I want to know who has won my ward.
I want to know who is in control of the council.
So why is it so very hard to find out these two basic pieces of information?
I live in the West Midlands but I’m interested in the results in a number of places across the country. The trek to track down the information has proved to range from difficult to the almost impossible.
Councils with no mention of results on their homepage.
Or mention of the results on their elections page.
Or mention that the votes are actually getting counted later in the day.
Or sodding pdfs that won’t download.
Election night is graft, I know
All in all, I’ve covered election night counts for 20 years and I get the hard work that goes into them. They can see 20-hour days from people who try really hard to do the best they can with outdated websites and patchy wifi. This is absolutely not a dig at any one council in particular but rather a sector-wide complaint. Anyone who worked last night deserves a medal.
But I mean all this with love. If we struggle to get people out to vote we’re not helping ourselves if we make it really hard for people to follow the results or catch-up in the morning.
Social media is great in realtime, but…
I’ve been an advocate for posting results in realtime on social media. That’s great. But ward results very quickly get lost in the timeline. They’re part of the answer. Not all the answer.
But if we can’t tell people the results, no wonder turn-out ain’t great
So, I ran a quick survey of the 16 councils that are closest to me. I could have gone on but it was too depressing.
45 per cent had no mention of election results on their homepage
50 per cent had no overall party-by-party breakdown.
Not one told me which party was in charge. Not one.
If local government can’t master something so simple as telling people who is in charge then what confidence can when they tell people they’ll crack this smart speakers and 5G lark?
This announcement is about what’s next. Here’s some thoughts on how it impacts public sector comms.
Direction of travel: privacy and private messagers
It’s clear that Facebook have been stung by misuse and criticism. It’s also clear that the old Facebook of pages, news feed and the blue and white branding are on their way out.
The focus from Facebook will be privacy.
For the future, people want a privacy-focussed social platform.
Mark Zuckerburg, F8, 2019
Tools for business to buy and sell on WhatsApp will follow and there’s a lot of talk about Facebook Messenger being the safest, securest and quickest private messenger service.
Key message: Private messaging apps Facebook own like Messenger and WhatsApp will get more important as will messaging through Instagram.
Friends and family… and communities in groups
It would be wrong to translate the shift to privacy to more private messages.
It means a focus on smaller groups. Your friends and your family are that.
Two years ago, Mark Zuckerburg caused major upheaval by declaring an end to click-bait. How? He switched focus from naked clicks on pages to friend and family. The shift overnight undermined the business model of many media companies.
This year he reinforced the direction of travel to keep it towards friends and family.
So, your mates and you brother will be seen more as you scroll through your Facebook.
Our friends and family are always going to be the core of our social lives.
– Mark Zuckerburg, F8, 2019.
Key message: Not PMs but you’ll see more from your mates and your Mum and Dad.
Direction of travel: Groups, groups, groups
Facebook groups are going to be big, big, big.
I’ve been a keen observer of the role Facebook groups have played for a couple of years. They’re going to play an even bigger role. Why? They give a sense of community and there’s a bit of walled garden from the nasty wider internet.
I could not be happier about this.
In a world where people are joining fewer physical communities and there is less social cohesion its more important than ever to be part of comunities that are meaningful to us.
There are already more than 400 million members of Facebook groups that are meaningful to them.
We believe there is a community for everyone so we’re building on a major evolution to redesign the Facebook app to make communities as central as friends.
Overall, we’ve made it a lot easier to find and connect to groups with much better suggestions and search.
It all adds up to the feeling that groups are at the heart of the experience just as much as friends and family.
– Mark Zuckerburg, F8, 2019
This is huge, huge, huge.
If you’ve been a member of the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group you’ll have seen the benefits for some time. A walled garden of shared interest it has engagement rates that dwarf any pages I know. You can find it here.
But it does mean that public sector comms people need to massively switch-up their overall Facebook game. The idea of chucking something onto a page and forgetting about it has become as pointless as pinning an announcement to a lamp post.
Extra tools have been announced to clamp-down on misinformation or harmful content in Facebook groups.
Message: Communication on Facebook will increasingly be through groups.
Direction of travel: Seriously bad news for pages
Here’s the bad news for the public sector. Your page on its own is pointless. It’s something I’ve been saying for some time and has been hugely reinforced.
What’s interesting is not just what Zuckerburg said but what he didn’t.
The biggest loser in this announcement are pages. There was nothing of note said about them. When you bear in mind that the public sector pages real estate is huge and extensive this is really, really important.
The direction of travel for Facebook is clear: friends, family and communities through groups. Pages don’t feature in that at all.
Message: Stop putting all your eggs into the Facebook page basket.
Direction of travel: Facebook are keen on stories
Facebook are really keen on you making more stories with your content.
These are upright filmstrips that can be created with text, video, stickers and emojis.
I’m not a huge fan but if the direction of travel is towards rewarding them this is something that needs to be worked on if you want to reach people.
Message: Look afresh at stories.
Direction of travel: Instagram is not just for pictures it’s for buying and donating
Instagram has been a platform of growth for years.
The big changes announced here will delight charity comms people. A button to help people donate to a cause close to their heart has been announced. Aside from that, a shopping channel has been launched and Facebook are looking at ways to allow business to use the platform.
So, ‘merch link in bio’ will become a thing of the past. That means ticketing for events suddenly opens up as a viable strategy.
They’re also improving Instagram stories, improving private interactions and making the camera better.
Key message: Instagram has just got a lot more interesting to communicators and marketers looking to sell stuff.
Direction of travel: they’re having a re-brand and trying to win your trust back
The blue and white logo will go and will be ‘modernised.’ You won’t hardly see blue on the app and website from sneak peaks of the new platform.
So, white backgrounds. That’s the colour of purity, right?
They’re also stressing a new approach based on the principles of private interactions, encription and safety. They also talk of ‘interoperability’. That means how Facebook brands like WhatsApp, Messenger and the main platform can navigate to each other. On top of that, secure data storage is more important. So is ‘reducing permanence’ (translation: In other words, they don’t want you do be frightened that something you say as a kid will be dug-up to blight your future.)
Key message: Facebook are staging the largest re-brand in corporate history.
In summary: Big changes will require some big thinking from public sector people and a new use for some old furniture.
I’m running a new workshop to help public sector people understand how to better use Facebook.
I’ll be joined by Sarah Lay for VITAL FACEBOOK SKILLS at a city near you.
A few weeks back I was asked for a list of decent apps that I’d recommend for comms people and that always gets me thinking.
Rather than a list of things that look great but never use here’s a list of apps that I do use on a regular basis and that I’d hate to delete from my phone.
Some I use to create content while others are for keeping tabs on things.
I’ve taken as a given the main social channels of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. I’ve also taken it as read that if you are an android user you’re using things like Google sheets, docs and forms.
As I’m an android user, these apps are android. You may well find equivalents in the app store.
Capturing and storing
Screenshot Touch
Sometimes you find yourself scrolling through your timeline and see a tweet or a post that catches your eye.
If you do need and you need to capture it then this app is really handy.
Launch it and you’ll have a camera icon on the screen that you can use to take pictures that are saved to your gallery.
Seen something handy posted online that you’d like to save for later?
The Pocket app is a really useful way to save things. Rather like a pocket library Pocket acts to save your links.
Aside from saving your own links, you can also use key words to search for content on a particular content. So, need a look at everything on Facebook advertising that’s been saved by Pocket subscribers you can dive in.
This app captures records what is on your screen at a particular moment in time.
You launch the app and then you hit record.
The video is saved as an mp4 clip in your gallery that you can use as a separate video later. Useful for capturing a timeline or a Periscope live video.
Caution: it’s not great at recording sound and will record you coughing after you hit the red button.
You can edit with a comprehensive range of tools that a few years ago you’d have to pay serious money for.
There are 11 set template styles and 28 tools contained here.
About 10 years ago, the free Google product was still behind the paid-for platforms. That’s understandable. But this free Google product is an excellent way to edit images on the go.
I spent years working in offices and find that being around people meant I got more done. It also meant I got less done with daft interruptions.
So, the White Noise app is a happy medium between the idea of working in a work environment and not having to listen to people saying ‘if you’ve got a minute.’
Rain is the most productive part of this.
If only I could work in an open plan office on the top of Haystacks in the Lake District.
Busy time in Manchester tomorrow with the Reds facing an unfancied side from Spain. The @MENnewsdesk tells us where the travel deadlocks will be, and posted a very creative info sign from Transport for Greater Manchester https://t.co/6WPZD6Kahspic.twitter.com/kdDjlsUMZN
In my early days as a communicator, media relations was the stand-out skill I needed.
I worked for a newsy council that had not long come out of special measures and fell at the intersection between warring newspaper groups. Three daily papers and three weekly papers fought it out with two radio stations and two TV channels. It was a busy time.
Media relations is still important.
But as news has moved from print to digital the key to media coverage has evolved from the ability to create 300-words of press release with a photocall to what content you can supply for Facebook.
Facebook remains the behemoth as we head to towards the third decade of the 21st century.
As I’ve launched a new workshop Vital Facebook Skills with Sarah Lay here are some things for you to know.
10 reasons why every communicator needs to take Facebook seriously
It’s a platform that has the numbers
In the UK, there are 41.8 million people who have used Facebook in the past four weeks. If we take the current UK population as 64.1 million that means 65 per cent of the population is a regular Facebook user. (source: Ofcom)
It’s a platform that is growing
Facebook users are going up not down. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is something to be aware of and there has been a movement to quit Facebook. But this has had limited impact on the bigger numbers. In the UK, from 2017 to 2018 the number of UK Facebook users rose by 5.2 per cent from 39.7 million. (source: Ofcom here and here.)
It’s a place that’s local
Every man woman and child likes nine local groups and pages. That was the result on research I’d carried out. It has become the Parish pump. And the place new parents hang out for advice.
A Facebook group mobilises support for an issue locally. In the old days it was a pen, paper and a clipboard to collect names. Now? It’s a Facebook group to turn clicktivism to rapid activism.
That’s something you need to be aware of and listening to.
It’s an effective place to target adverts
You can reach people you want to reach if you have budget. When you use Facebook you give it a pile of data. That means if you are after a married brass band enthusiast who lives within 20 km of your town hall you can target them and only them. Facebook accounts for 20 per cent of the global ad market, the FT says.
It’s a place where people don’t like to like public sector pages, TBQFH
In research I’ve carried out, just three per cent of the population like a public sector page. You can have good content. But you need other ways to go and reach people where they chose to hang out on Facebook.
That’s in local groups more often than not. (source: original research).
It’s a place that reaches older people
Ipsos research shows that Facebook reaches 7.8 million people in the UK aged over 55.
Often older people are on the platform to keep in touch with family. (source: Statista).
It’s a place where the traditional media now is
As newspapers sell less print papers their digital reach has grown. Reach plcs’ Marc Reeves points to the Birmingham Mail’s 20,000 print copies and its online audience being 40 times larger through Birmingham Live’s 350,000 subscribers and its other Facebook footprint.
That huge.
It’s a place where video is watched without sound
Video is an important driver for traffic on your page or profile. But 85 per cebt of content is watched without sound. Why? Because people are out and about or at work or sharing a sofa with someone watching TV. (Source: digiday.)
It’s a channel that’s predicted to rise in the UK
Research suggests that Facebook is not going away any time soon. It predicts a rise in Facebook use in the UK to 42.27 million by 2022. (source: Statisa). That means its going to get more important and not less.
There’s a minority of people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
They’re the first to complain and often among the last to help.
They crop up in the comments section of the Daily Mail and you’ve seen them in the local paper and from time-to-time on your Facebook page, too.
Social media has given them a platform and their indignation helps keep media companies’ share price in the black.
Nobody minds challenge, but the self-righteous eye-rolled trolling isn’t that at all. It’s a drip-drip of corrosive bile that can sometimes inhibit some people from posting. It can only end in a world that is much poorer.
So, it was so refreshing to see a newspaper group shun the clickbait of faux outrage for something far better and by doing so ironically reach a wider audience.
The story is this. Police officers were photographed eating breakfast getting a briefing in a branch of McDonalds. A debate broke out on Facebook with some criticising the officers for their public break. So, credit EssexLive for shunning easy outrage with this headline:
We don’t care that Essex’s cops stopped for coffee and neither should you.
Their enlightened stance was welcomed by a senior officer responsible for them.
What builds on it is this piece of human comms for an Inspector who on his own Twitter gave public support and gave an explanation of what they were doing:
Really pleased for such a sensible response. Personally it was nice to see my incredibly hard working officers had a chance to get hot food (which is rare), and proud they chose to use their meal break to have a team meeting, remaining visible in the town. https://t.co/UxwfQbaPPa
