Public Relations Strategery

Do you make time in your day to just sit and think?

I know we’re all busy.  We have deadlines to meet, emails to write/respond to, projects to work on, management issues to take care of, errands to run, families to care for, and many many other things that we do on a daily basis.  To make sense of it all, we create daily routines and schedules – wake up, take the dogs out, go for a run, get the kids off to school, respond to urgent emails, get a first draft of that paper done, attend the status meeting, etc.  Lord knows I wouldn’t get half of my work done with my Outlook calendar to remind me when I have to go to a meeting or make a phone call.  Oftentimes, breaking our day up into more manageable tasks is the only way to maintain some level of sanity in our lives.  But what do we lose when we get into routine like this?  Can you make “innovation” part of a routine?

When was the last time you created an Outlook appointment to catch up on your RSS feeds?  When a project deadline gets moved up, what’s the first thing that gets bumped?  How many times have you said, “ya know, I really should write a blog post or comment on some other people’s material tonight, but I’m exhausted and that can wait?”  How often do get outside your individual project “bubble” and make a concerted effort to just go out and learn something new?

When was the last time you just sat down and thought about your project/organization/contract/initiative and wondered?  About the long-term strategy?  About how to improve your team’s morale? About how to become more efficient?  About how to make things better?  About external issues that could positively or negatively impact your work?  When was the last time you came up with a new idea that wasn’t in your job description or SOW?

I had a great conversation recently with one the senior leaders at my company and he told me that’s the one thing that separates the good from the great.  The good worker will meet all their deadlines, crank out high quality products, not ruffle any feathers, show up on time, and do everything that’s asked of them.  The great worker on the other hand, may miss some deadlines and may make some people mad, but they’ll also be the ones coming up with the next great idea.  What was the last actual idea you had at work that wasn’t tasked to you by someone else? Did you tell anyone about it?  Did you act on it?

So, take my advice and carve out 30 minutes of your day to do some thinking.  This could involve:

• Catch up on your RSS feeds
• Read the paper
• Have a team meeting where the only agenda item is “what can we be doing better?”
• Go out to lunch with someone from a totally different part of the business and learning about what they do
• Be like Dr. House, find a ball to toss around and think about how to solve a problem
• Set up Google alerts for issues related to your organization and commit to staying on top of them
• Create an “If I were King/Queen for a day” list of ideas for your organization
• Do a Twitter search for your organization/brand and see what others are saying

Can you find time in your schedule to be great?

*Image courtesy of Flickr user Brian Hillegas

I’ve been in many meetings with senior executives where the topic has turned to social media, and sooner or later, THE question comes up –

“So, explain to me again why we should be playing around with [insert your social media tool of choice here]?  What’s the ROI of doing this?  I just don’t see how talking about what you ate for dinner on your ‘blog’ is going to help us accomplish the mission.”

Now, at this point, I’m usually fighting an internal battle between jamming a pencil in my eye or resisting the urge to shake the executives and yell, “why don’t you understand the benefits of open collaboration and communication??!!!”

Granted, the discussion doesn’t usually devolve to that level (but imagine how much more fun meetings would be if they did), but I’ve spoken to a number of people in the Gov 2.0 community who have experienced similar frustrations.  While there’s no shortage of resources for how to measure the ROI of social media, but unlike commercial companies, our government doesn’t use social media to make money or to sell products.  One can’t measure the value of using social media in a government agency in sales or revenue.  How do you measure the value of transparency?  How do you measure the value of open collaboration?  And even if you could, how do you make the case that transparency is worth the investment?

As Katie Paine says in Jason Falls’ excellent post on this topic, “Ultimately, the key question to ask when measuring engagement is, ‘Are we getting what we want out of the conversation?'”

So, are government agencies getting what they want out of the conversations?

That’s why Booz Allen Hamilton has teamed up with GovLoop to conduct an investigation into the usage of social media by our government at the federal, state, and local levels. We want to identify and assess the impact that the use of social media has had on efficiency, morale, budgets, outreach, internal communications, leadership effectiveness and other results.

To that end, we are conducting a survey of GovLoop members (survey is only open to members of GovLoop, so if you haven’t joined yet, this is a good reason to do so!) to get their input on what’s worked, what hasn’t, and why. The results of this survey will be published in a report and (hopefully) shared later this month at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, DC.

For each survey respondent, GovLoop will also make a donation to the Social Media Club – Education Connection to further the development of social media education at our country’s colleges and universities.

If you’re a member of GovLoop, please take the survey and help us identify what types of benefits (if any) you and your organization are seeing from social media.

Download the full report

Pew Internet released their “Government Online” report today, and it’s chock FULL of great statistics.  If you get an opportunity, I highly recommend reading through the whole thing and bookmarking it for good slide fodder for future presentations.  I won’t/can’t possibly do justice to the entire report here in one post, but there was one particular piece that struck me in my initial read-through:

“As we found in our last survey of e-government in August 2003, telephone contact is the overall most preferred contact method when people have a problem, question, or task involving the government.  35% of of Americans say they prefer using the telephone in these circumstances, a figure that is relatively unchanged from the 38% who said so in 2003.” [page 20]

And,

“The telephone remains relatively popular even among the technologically proficient, as 1/3 of home broadband (32%) and wireless Internet users (32%) say that the telephone is their favorite means of contact when they need to get in touch with government.” [page 20]

Surprising?  It shouldn’t be.  Despite the Government 2.0 community’s zeal for all things social media and online, 1/3 of Americans still don’t have access to broadband Internet, and even among those who do, less than 50% prefer to contact their government via online means, instead preferring the telephone, in-person contact, or writing a letter (!!).  While the issue of a digital divide when it comes to government-public communication is well-documented, it’s about more than just identifying non-digital means to reach out those without broadband access – it’s about providing a variety of means, both online and off, for everyone.  Among those who did contact their government at some point, almost half used a combination of both online and offline vehicles to do so.

“44% of all Americans contacted their local, state, or federal government via offline means. Roughly one in three called a government office or agency on the phone, one-quarter visited an office or agency in person, and 17% wrote a letter to a government office, agency, or official.”

Americans are using a combination of online and offline means to communicate with government

While plenty of Americans are are going online to contact their government – 82% of internet users (representing 61% of all American adults) looked for information or completed a transaction on a government website in the twelve months preceding the survey -the total proportion of Americans who prefer online communications has actually remained the same since this survey was last conducted back in 2003.  For these internet users, government websites/Twitter accounts/Facebook fan pages/blogs/podcasts have become critical supplements – not replacements – for more traditional forms of communication. The majority of online government users interact with government agencies using multiple channels, both online and off.

What does this mean to the Gov 2.0 community?  A few things –

• Online government communication is incredibly valuable and useful
• Information and transactions are viewed as more important government offerings than social media outreach
• Government use of social media should be focused on supplementing and improving the day-to-day informational and transactional needs of the public
• We should be focusing a LOT less on getting more Facebook fans and Twitter followers and more on figuring out how Facebook and Twitter can improve our customer service
• Government use of social media should be integrated with the communications and public affairs departments.  Very few internet users rely solely on government social media sites – in fact, those who use government social media sites are more likely to also use other means, both online and off, to communicate with their government as well
• Balance the promotions of your social media channels with other means of communications.  Two in five Americans believe that the use of social media is a waste of government resources, although 3/4 believe this type of engagement makes government accessible.

Social media helps supplement and improve everything else the government is doing to communicate – it’s not some communications panacea.  But you already knew that, right?? 🙂

Image courtesy of Flickr user Percita

Over the last three years, I’ve met a lot of people who are their organization’s social media evangelist, lead, POC, pioneer, ninja, guru, etc., and I’ve met many others who are aspiring to take on that role.  Hell, I even wrote my last post to help those people get started.  While it’s easy to get caught up in all the hype that often follows the people in these roles – the promotions, the raises, the invitations to participate in selective working groups, the personal branding, the ability to make your living using Facebook and Twitter – I’d like to take this opportunity to help balance out the expectations.  The following statements aren’t necessarily good or bad, but they do paint a more realistic picture.

So, if you’re itching to become “the guy” at your organization when it comes to social media, be prepared:

• To be expected to know EVERYTHING about social media, not only about Twitter, Facebook, and wikis, but also all of the policies, trends, statistics, and laws too
• To know who else in your organization is also involved with social media and if you don’t, why not
• To encounter people who assume that because you’re on Facebook or Twitter while at work, that you’re never actually busy with anything
• To justify the return on investment (ROI) of  all the time you spend using social media
• To get dozens of emails from people every time a there’s a negative, controversial media article discussing the risks of social media (you should have seen how many people pointed to the Wired article came out showing how terrorists could use Twitter and told me, “see, that’s why we shouldn’t use social media)
• To be always on, all the time. No matter what meeting you go into, there’s always a chance that you may have to give an impromptu presentation
• To have people constantly asking you for your thoughts on the latest social media-related email/blog/memo/article/news/interview that came out
• To justify your existence to your managers when there are organizations who outsource their social media for a few cents per tweet
• To get inundated with requests like this – “I just read [insert social media link here]. Do you have like 30 minutes to meet with me so that I can ask you some basic questions?”
• To see your work (even within your own organization) turn up in other people’s work without any attribution
• To be told that “all this collaboration is great, but what real work have you accomplished?”
• To change teams and/or organizational alignment at least once

I’ve encountered all of these situations to varying degrees over the last three years, and at times, I’ve felt frustrated, excited, nervous, entrepreneurial, scared, sometimes all simultaneously, but through it all, I’ve always felt proud to be on the cutting edge of changes that need to be made. I’ve never wondered if it was worth it, and I can definitely say that I’ve always felt challenged and stimulated through it all.

If you’re considering being at the tip of the social media spear within your organization, make sure that you’re prepared…for everything.