Look, this is lovely. This is exactly what good social customer services is supposed to look like. Warm, engaging. And two way.
What would have happened in the olden days? A formal letter? A puzzled look?
This man is very cross about tea not growing in Yorkshire. Can someone please let him know that everything’s OK? He’s not listening to us. https://t.co/FR2ytWdM5V
For five years I worked in the public sector trying to embed digital communications across the organisation and in that time we found two secrets.
We won an award and we managed to get people on the frontline keen and engaged.
But what ingredients made this happen?
Two things. An open social media policy that allowed people from across the organisation to use it after some training. But a piece of paper only goes far. It opens the door but it won’t send everyone charging past and into the warm water. Here’s what really did. A regular meet-up where everyone who used social media was invited. We had three topics. No slides. We would try and meet off-site too to encourage creative thinking. A cafe was best.
The sessions were deliberately open and we encouraged people who were trying new things to talk about what they had learned.
Why involve people from across the organisation?
To share the sweets, of course. It’s something I’ve blogged about before. Social media shouldn’t be a communications thing. It should be an every service area thing. And sometimes we need our enthusiasm re-fired and a lesson shared to re-charge our batteries.
And one of the biggest challenges in all of this is for this not to be a comms’ own meeting. This shouldn’t be the head of comms lecturing everyone how it should be. It should be people from across the organisation working it out together. But more than that. Open it up to partners too. And anyone who is interested from the public. Widen the circle.
Here’s a secret. Two actually
Very often organisations can have more than 100 channels. Often they work seperately from each other and there can be painfully little collaboration.
That’s where the cake and coffee come in. Here’s the thing: if you talk to each other you’ll share ideas and very often work better. The customer services person, the librarian and the media officer. None of them have a monopoly on good ideas.
Try it. Let me know how it goes.
Shout if I can help. I’m dan@comms2point0.co.uk and @danslee.
When you’ve got a difficult message to deliver don’t just send out the next cab on the rank. Instead, use a bit of research to send out the best one.
Who is delivering the message is just as important as what they are actually saying.
But when time and effort gets spent on the the words very little gets spent on thinking through who will say them.
Who will say it? And what will they say? Here is a couple of pieces of research that should help guide who will say what for you.
A case study with trees and angry people
Back when I was in the public sector, an issue blew up with trees being cut down on common land. The simple equation was this:
Trees are good, so cutting them down is bad.
That’s a perfectly understandable response. The thing was, it was more complicated than that. IKt boiled down to:
Trees are good but they’re damaging rare heathland.
The offending trees themselves were self-set. In other words, birds had eaten berries and the seeds had ended up germinating where they fell. Trouble is the heath land they had germinated on needs protecting as there isn’t much of it. Sounds technical? It was. Luckily, we had a named countryside ranger who was using social media for the organisation. So, she was better able to communicate what was happening.
Why? Because she was a trusted individual and an expert in her field. She had also built a relationship with people. What was the alternative? A politician who wouldn’t have had the same clout.
Who will say it? Trust and shooting the messenger
Our reaction depends a great deal on who is sent out of the door to deliver the message. If we don’t really believe whoever has been sent out we won’t believe what they say. The 2016 Edelman Trust barometer sets out through extensive polling what people think of people with different job titles. See the board of directors on the right? They’re least trusted. Your employee? Markedly more trusted and the person like yourself even more so.
Who will say it? Trust in politicians is low
Data from Ipsos Mori was posted on Twitter earlier today by Ben Page. If you don’t already do follow him. He’s often insightful. The research shows that politicians are trusted by 15 per cent of the population and nurses and doctors at more than 90 per cent are the most trusted. The research is here:
The data is useful if you are in the public sector. While many of us would like politicians to be more trusted the hard reality is that they are not. Seeing as that’s the landscape we’re faced with, I’d argue that we need to be more thoughful in the way we deliver messages. The trusted member of staff is likely to be more effective. This also has the spin-off of making the approval process that bit quicker.
Of course, black is not white and there are occasions when a politician fronting up a message is the best route. This is where the small ‘p’ nouse of a comms officer is important.
Who will say it? Content is king
Of course, there’s a chance the message may be better delivered not by an individual but by a piece of content. The sharable infographic, the video or the image may be the best way to deliver the message. Especially if it is financial data that frankly, is a bit dull. Make the telephone directory come alive in other ways.
What will you say?: Honest communications, please
One last set of data to check before you respond also comes from the UK edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer. It’s about honesty. The research breaks down the population into the informed public and mass. In other words, college educated and high media cosumers and the rest. The stats here are so striking they can’t be avoided. We all want honest communications. My own take on this is that this is messages that are straight and don’t try and pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.
So, if that message is honest, straight and comes from people who are likely to be trusted, you’ve got a chance.
If you call cuts cuts and not efficiencies you are more likely to cut through. Especially if they are delivered from someone people can trust.
I’m dan@comms2point0.co.uk and @danslee. Shout if I can help. I’ll be co-delivering a workshop on How to Communicate in a Digital World in Edinburgh on December 9, Birmingham on January 24 and Manchester on February 16. More info here.
But it’s maybe important to reemember that emotion and story telling didn’t start this year. I was reminded of this when a TV ad from my childhood dropped into my timeline.
You may recall it. It’s a boy dreaming of a bike. His Dad keeps up the pretence that he thinks the bike is daft while secretly planning to buy it for his birthday. It’s a beautiful story told in 58 seconds.
You can see it here:
The TV advert was for yellow pages. It’s not a big thick directory of telephone numbers. It’s a place to make young people’s dreams come true.
As much as I can see the point of a direct call to action, a sign-up or a sale, I like this aproach too.
So, if we knew it in 1985 and we know it in 2016 why as comms people do we need to show people we work with to remind them that this is true?
Yesterday was a good day. It was the unawards in a cinema that saw prizes given in 18 categories to an audience of 140.
We gave out the prizes and then mopped up the disappointment of those who missed out with a film. ‘Groundhog Day’ was the main feature. This is a story of a man in the media forced to live his life over and over until he changes his ways.
Chatting to people over lunch afterwards it seemed the choice of film echoed a strand in people’s professional lives.
Every day people fight to get good things done.
Which is why getting out of the office, learning and above all talking to people are so important. Be reminded it’s them. Not you.
And every day while you’re in the office do one small thing better or differently. It doesn’t even have to be big.
In six months time you’ll look back where you came from and be amazed at how far you’ve come.
I’m dan@comms2point0.co.uk and @danslee. Shout if I can help.
Can you remember a single lesson from when to at school? Not the dates and fact you learned but the actual lesson that delivered them?
For me, one stands out above all others. The day of the Unexpected Door Opening. It features a threat, a German teacher and a comms message I’ve never forgotten.
The background
It was when I was aged 13 at Walton High School in Stafford. Picture the scene. A 60s teaching block.
Every German lesson would descend into chaos. The boys would fire paper missiles blown like darts through adapted biro blowpipes. The girls would talk to each other and at the front our teacher slowly having a nervous breakdown. Shouting was the only way she could make herself heard. She shouted a lot.
Until the week of the Unexpected Door Opening.
You see, our language classrooms had interconnecting doors. Right at the front of the classroom next to the blackboard. It led to a neighbouring clasroom.
It had never opened before but this week the door opened. Unexpectely. Into the din, noise and chaos walked Mr Sampson.
The threat
Mr Sampson was a grey haired teacher about 5’10” tall with blue eyes, glasses and a blue jumper. He’d been at the school for years and knew how children’s brains worked. He was dangerous. Why? Because you couldn’t con him. And his put downs could make the hardest kid look like an idiot and we all knew it.
I paused. We were for it now.
Gradually, the room fell silent. Like an orator waiting for a pin to drop the tension built and Mr Sampson waited to speak.
“Thank you, Mrs Kemp,” the newly arrived teacher said in a quiet voice. “I’ll take over from here.”
I felt the dread of the impending bollocking.
But it didn’t happen. Instead Mr Sampson for the final nine minutes of the lesson told us of the importance of making eye contact in an interview. Don’t look at the floor, he told us. Look them in the eye. But it’s hard to look people in the eye, he said. Because it can be off-putting and they can tell if you are not telling the truth. Some cultures think you can see into people’s soul. So look at the point between the eyes instead. He went into detail about interview posture and how to come over well. We all listened with complete attention. We were winning. He’d forgotten why he’d come in. Or so we thought.
The bell rang.
Thank God, we were off the hook. And we made to put our stuff away.
“Stop,” he said quietly.
We froze.
He paused.
He had us right where he wanted us.
“If I have to come through that door again, I will fucking kill each one of you,” and he looked each one of us in the eye. Right in the eye. Individually. One by one.
Next week we were good as gold. The week after that we were too. But on the third week, the noise levels rose. The interconnecting door handle started moving.
Shit.
We were fucking dead. But the door handle stopped. We froze. Ten seconds passed. The tick of the clock. The beat of the heart. And slowly the door handle returned to its original position.
A long sigh of relief. Like a timebomb that had stopped ticking with three seconds on the clock.
The lesson
It’s message? From Mr Sampson: “Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
We were as good as gold from then on.
But what’s the comms message? Be clear on your promise and follow through.
And look people in the eye when you’re delivering the message. Individually. One by one. It’s more effective that way.
The issue of social media bubbles has become a bubble of its own just lately.
Post-Trump, post-Brexit and post-truth the issue is this. People build their own bubble from people of a smilar view.
Driving home today listening to Radio 4 I came upon a rather excellent programme Bursting the Social Media Bubble. The iplayer link is here. It’s worth a listen.
Euan Semple has in the past written about there being volume control on the mob. I get that. Nobody wants to see some of the vile abuse you don’t have to go far to see. But what about reasonable people who have a contrary view? They’re not the mob. So, what about them?
Just recently the excellent Alan Oram from Alive With Ideas spoke about the need to have some naysayers in the mix. Why? Because if everything is excellent and amazing you are not getting the bit of challenge you sometimes need.
Besides, without a contrary voice we’re not exercising critical thinking and testing out what we think.
As BBC presenter Bobby Friction says:
“Social media is no longer a simple medium where we just chat and wish each other a happy birthday. It IS now the media. We need to start looking at our own social media bubble because we do have some control.”
Looking at Facebook side-byside
The Wall Street Journal’s Blue Feed Red Feed tackles the issue of rival bubbles by displaying the same subjects side-by-side. It shows Facebook posts about limited key words. Although US, as an exercise it’s fascinating. But does it tackle the issue? Not really.
A danger to you as a comms person as a filter bubble
Across the UK, the population feels as though it has never been more fractured or diverse. My Dad has a Facebook account and never uses it. He’ll watch the Six O’Clock news religiously. My niece gets her news from Facebook. My daughter watches BBC Newsround at school. How we consume the media is diverse.
A risk of a filter bubble is that you think the UK is made-up of likeminded people who all check their smartphones within five minutes of waking up. Newsflash: it isn’t.
But I also think that the forward thinking comms person needs to think about how to enter social media bubbles too. The Facebook group that carps about the council. The community page that is suspicious of the police. We need to be there too.
You can start with your Facebook algorithm
You can start with your own Facebook timeline.
You may have 300 friends. You are only seeing a skim of things from people you’ve regularly interacted with before. You don’t interact with those people? You won’t see them.
So, to widen out the views you are hearing from your friends there’s a tip.
Go to the Facebook home page.
Go to the News Feed in the top left hand corner and click. You’ll get a two-option text box.
Select: Most recent rather than top stories.
Give me a shout if I can help. I’m dan@comms2point0.co.uk and @danslee.
It really was a very simple idea… let residents photograph items at their museum and everyone wins.
Six years ago I was involved in a project that did exactly that and its simplicity deserves a re-telling. Not just because it was a darn good idea. But also because the person who made it work died unexpectedly last week.
I’ve blogged my sadness about Steph Clarke’s death here. In looking back, a project I worked with her that saw residents and council work together stands out. So, I’m updating it and re-blogging the idea to see who else will take this up. Looking at what others have done Walsall Museum was leading the way ahead of the world-famous Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam who started a similar project a short while after. So did Brooklyn Museum in the American city of New York.
What was the idea?
Simple. Let residents photograph items held by a museum in the area where they live. Like here, here or here. They can post them and if they are posted with a creative commons licence they can be re-used by the museum itself.
How could it work?
Easy. Work with a photography club or a more informal group who may meet via the social web. Six years ago when we ran the project the town had a thriving Flickr group. The group enjoyed taking pictures but often struggled with places to take pictures. In 2016, this may well be an instagram meet-up. Or even for a group or page that may not be primarily photographic.
Who has done this?
In 2010, we did this at Walsall Museum and by 2014, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam had rolled out a more comprehensive programme. Hi and low resolution images are made available for out-of-copyright work. A study found that the benefits included a bigger digital footprint ans extra interest. You can read more here.
What’s in it for the organisation?
Lots. The chance to create a buzz and online noise about the museum and tell the stories of items they hold. In Walsall, this was things like items from the Leather industry or a football from an FA Cup match. Most museums can only display 10 per cent at most of what they have. So, doesn’t it make sense? And you are letting residents to help communicate for you.
With the permission to re-use images through a creative commons licence the museum has access to photography without spending money but also can ensure some audience for updated webpages or social channels.
What’s in it for residents?
People get special access to items they effectively have a stake in. They can test their creativity and maybe feel a bit more proud of the area they live in.
So, why don’t people do this more often?
Basically, in the UK there is a very defensive attitude towards photography of items and images owned by an authority. In the US, all photography commissioned by the public purse is released without copyright. Anyone is free to use the images for whatever reason. Why not? It belongs to the people.
This idea is fine maybe if you own a particularly famous painting where you can generate income from the postcards, posters and t-shirts this can generate. But the 99.99 per cent of items wouldn’t command much of a market price. The photo consent form that Steph drew-up is here. It’s a half way house to allowing full copyright. But it’s a pragmatic starting point.
All people called Steph are amazing. This is the law. But Steph Clarke was particularly amazing.
Nobody I know quite had the same wit, charm, determination, digital skills, willingness to share and sheer JFDI. What is JFDI? Just flipping do it.
Normally, I will blog about comms, pr or digital things here but excuse me for this post if I take a moment.
Stunning news
Steph died unexpectedly this week. The news shared on Facebook by her husband James who had shared so much of her work. They worked on the wv11 blog in Wednesfield. But offline was where they thrived too. They volunteering and helped build the community hub in Wednesfield.
There must be hundreds of people who knew Steph better than me. My heart goes out to them and to her family, husband James, son Jordan and to Nick Booth who worked with her at Podnosh.
Always able to help
In reflecting at the news and Steph’s life, I looked back at things I’ve done and I realised that Steph had played a small encouraging part in all of them. She was generous with her time and sharing her knowledge.
All this started six or seven years ago when I was at Walsall Council and trying to make sense of the social web. Steph who was @essitam on Twitter was one of the first hyperlocal bloggers I came across. She encouraged my hesitant steps to talk as @walsallcouncil to people in a human voice about council matters.
When the Black Country social media cafe started I went along and Steph was there.
When we started brewcamp Steph came along. She gave a great talk about how social media was a lifeline in Christchurch, New Zealand after the earthquake. She has relatives there.
When we ran the first hyperwm unconference she came. I’m smiling as I think of the Press officer v hyperlocal blogger punch-up session that did so much to map out our thinking. Steph contributed.
When we started building bridges with the online she came up with a work around that persuaded the museum to open up its stores and Leather Museum to a Flickr meet.
In the last year or so it was good to bump into her every week or so at Impact Hub Birmingham. She hadn’t changed.
Life lessons
What does Steph’s life teach? So many things. For me, who knew her a bit, it taught that the web is just a way of finding people to meet in real life. The picture for this blog has Steph pictured in the centre. By the looks of it she is training the two other people in the shot. Chances are she may have never met them before that day but their smiles and her are real. That would be typical.
It is also showed that it’s not about the me. It’s about the we.
You may have noticed a slightly sneering story in the Daily Mail about the naming of a gritter.
Oldham Council launched the competition for schoolchildren to come up with a name for the vehicle.
Like many other councils the authority treats roads to help ease conditions. As someone who operated @walsallcouncil for five years I’m no stranger to grit and the public.
Indeed, while I was, I’d whoop and cheer when temperatures fell as it led to a pile of new followers to our corporate Twitter.
People wanted real-time updates on how the roads are and if they are treated.
The Daily Mail coverage was unsurprising. You can see it here.
But the response online was heartening. Not just from the public but from fellow local government people.
