Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Guest speaker: Jed Sundwall - Social Media Strategy that supports the mission

On Wednesday, February 6, Jed Sundwall, CEO of MeasuredVoice, will join our class to talk about the need for a social media strategy in government organizations.

In preparation, please follow Mr. Sundwall on Twitter: @jedsundwall and read the following articles:


  1. How to Manage Your Social Media Voice with Guidelines
  2. USA.gov & GobiernoUSA.gov: Social Media Guidelines - Making Content Sociable


Please leave your questions for Mr. Sundwall in the comments to this blog post!

22 comments:

  1. For a government agency, is it better to have one unified account and share password with the employees, or is it better for each employee to use their own account when tweeting about the agency? What are the pros and cons?

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    1. Vasileva, I hope I answered this sufficiently in class, but here's another take.

      I think employees should be able to use their own accounts, but the costs of managing / policing many employee accounts being used for official work are likely too high. Generally, the only individuals who should be officially representing a government organization on social media are heads of agencies, elected officials or other executives like ambassadors.

      In general, I strongly favor that most "official" social media outlets be those of the agency. To manage that, however, you should use some kind of social media management tool that can give multiple employees access to the outlet without sharing the password among many people.

      Consolidating communications from one outlet provides a better experience for citizens too, who shouldn't have to follow many individual government employees to keep up to date on their government.

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  2. It's not appropriate to put multiple exclamation marks.. what about smileys and other combinations of punctuation marks?

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    1. My caveat when it comes to grammar and styling rules is that "being understood is paramount". As long as people can understand you, you're in good shape.

      It's important to be expressive when communicating, but government agencies should be careful about sounding silly or flippant. Furthermore, non-standard writing can be confusing to people who might not be native speakers of a language, have cognitive disabilities, or are simply not fully literate. In general, I err toward more standard language.

      We wrote a blog post that talks about this as well: http://blog.measuredvoice.com/post/27841725572/hard-writing-makes-easy-reading

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  3. If the agency wants to develop a solid social media strategy, what should it start with? How to engage employees who are not familiar with/do not want to familiarize themselves and use with social media tools?

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    1. I didn't answer this in class. Sorry!

      I think the place to start is by doing internal and external outreach. Interview people that work within the agency to learn about their expertise, why they get out of bed in the morning, what drives them, how they measure their own success. Then interview citizens to get an understanding of what kind of information they want and expect to get from the agency. Based on this research, you can answer the questions I mentioned in class: "who's going to write what, when, and why?"

      As far as engaging employees with tools they might not be familiar with, it's a really hard problem to solve. I swear I'm not trying to push Measured Voice on you guys, but we designed it to be a very simple tool that anyone could use to contribute to an organization's social media content – even if they're not a social media expert.

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  4. A follow-up from Vasileva's question above), because social media networks continue to change and add newer features to their respective websites, how does one strategize what to include in their strategy and WHEN to add them? (If it matters?)

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    1. This is precisely why we encourage agencies to focus on developing a solid and consistent voice. If the agency has operations to regularly create content that people can understand, they will be well equipped to adapt their strategy to whatever platform comes next.

      For the most part, this will involve simply knowing how to write good messages. For some agencies, however, this will require operations to create photographs, video, infographics, or other media.

      So, the strategy should be focused on content rather than any particular network.

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  5. When developing a voice (a vocal and conceptual representation), say for instance for NASA, would it be appropriate to think of the Agency as having a mascot (a visual representation)?

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    1. This can be really useful, but it probably won't work for everyone. NASA has been really smart to personify some of its satellites and rovers. Not only does this help people get more excited about NASA's missions, but it also saves characters! It's much more character-efficient to say "I'm landing on Mars" than to say "The NASA Mars Curiosity Rover is approaching Mars."

      It also allows people to empathize with the rovers, e.g.: http://blog.measuredvoice.com/post/29443559920/the-team-behind-nasas-marscuriosity-does-a

      Geico is really smart about this too. Everyone loves the Geico gecko, but would anyone ever love an insurance company?

      Smokey the Bear, Uncle Sam and Rosie the Riveter are the only ideas of successful governmen-esque mascots that come to my mind right now. The National Forest Service has one called Cheecker right now, but I don't think it's very popular https://twitter.com/cheecker

      But all of these mascots are used to promote certain causes. I'm having a hard time imagining a mascot that could represent an entire agency effectively. I'd love to see someone pull it off though.

      If the IRS created a mascot, people would burn it in effigy every April!

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  6. Can it be beneficial to have sub-divisions responding to each other over social media platforms that are open to the public or do you think that that would be confusing for the public? I ask the question in all seriousness because I can see instance where it could be beneficial and instances where it would be detrimental.

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    1. I think it's good for agencies to share one another's content as it makes sense based on their mission and their audience's needs.

      Lots of back and forth conversation among agencies might seem strange though. I don't think it'd be reasonable to expect citizens to keep up on conversations between multiple agencies. If an agency has important information to get out to the public, it should be directed at the public rather than at another agency.

      I hope this answers your question.

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  7. I do not know whether "Government is Made is Easy" or not but the guidelines for making the content sociable are simple,easy to follow and clearly convey the message.Social media in the context of Government is two-way process and Government can reach people through any medium but for ordinary people some times social media is the only means of making their voice heard.I think Measured Voice should contain some information/guidelines for ordinary citizens for effective use of Social Media.
    Venkat Ratnam Rentala,Graduate Student,Maxwell School,Syracuse University.

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    1. Venkat, as we discussed in class, this leads to a much broader discussion about the merits and pitfalls of democracy itself. Yes, social media allows people to organize to advocate for more issues, but it's not always easy to turn that organization and energy into policy.

      I wrote a piece about this for Slate last year that you might find interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/09/kony_2012_bitcoin_wikileaks_and_the_future_of_voting_online_.html

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    2. Dear Mr.Jed,
      Thank you very much for your reply.I would certainly read your article given in the link.

      with warm regards,
      Venkat

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  8. Social media is a efficient tool for government to communicate with the public. But how can the government reach the targeted audience effectively as in many cases that even if the information delivered is clear, honest,, direct, friendly, etc, it can not get the attention of the public.

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    1. It's hard! One of the best things I learned in Catholic high school was "repetitio est mater studiorum" or "repetition is the mother of learning".

      I mentioned the CDC Zombie Apocalypse guide as a way that government has been able to get people's attention, but agencies can only play a stunt like that once every few years without compromising their authority. In lieu of that, it's important for agencies to understand that it's ok to repeat themselves. They might sound like a broken record to people who have already heard their message, but there will always be other people who still need to hear the same old message.

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    2. Thanks a lot for your reply. I think repeating the same information may bring other side effects. But you are right. As long as we want the info delivered thoroughly, it may be a "have to" decision.

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  9. And as we know, the citizens may be interested in one topic/ a new piece of information, but few would develop a deep understanding of it. How can the government help them to do so by social media in order to get throughly understanding and support from the public?

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  10. Social media play a vital role now and highly qualified by this modern society, but the cotent in this platform is hard to control. How the government could make their work more effective through this tool and at the same time, make the contents benefit for the whole citizens,ecological politics?

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    1. Let me answer both of your questions here:

      1. I don't think governments should try to do too much to control what other people say on social media. Perhaps my American biases are showing here, but I think that history indicates that such controlling impulses are very hard to maintain over the long term. Instead, governments should focus on providing their own valuable information through social media and occasionally correcting misinformation that arises on the Internet. Two examples are the FBI tweet that I shared in class and this post from the USA.gov blog refuting rumors about the world ending in 2012: http://blog.usa.gov/post/37121041300/scary-rumors-about-the-world-ending-in-2012-are-just

      2. The thing that social media can do for people who do not have access to the internet is still make information more ubiquitous. While most people might not have access to the Internet now, they likely know someone who does, who can relay information to them. And, demand for the Internet seems to be limitless. People might not have it now, but they'll get it eventually. It's important to plan for the future.

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  11. China has more than 1.3 billions people and almost 0.9 billions people are farmers. Most of the poor area in China now can not connect with internet. How chinese government could use social media to achieve their goals in this case?

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