Why governments should not bet against Social Media?

Recently in my twitter bio (@socialmedimouth) I underlined something clearly about engagement. Social media is not should not be used to broadcast data, it is mainly to encourage participation, feedback or recommendations for instance. Social Media has to be a conversation, if you start a monologue you don't give any chance to your audience to converse with you. If you are still broadcasting info make sure that your monologue becomes an engaging dialogue.

In the Social world of Media, governments are encouraging participation and allowing their citizens or residents to connect with them. Below I'm going to answer some questions I was asked to tackle:

Why governments should be using social media?

- Promote transparency

- Encourage openness

- Inform people and form communities around common interests

- Encourage participation

- Strive to "humanize" the government by building an emotional connection with the "streetosphere"

- Keep a pulse on citizens and residents' needs

Why governments should use more than one social media channel?

It is critical to understand which target group uses which platform but it's also difficult. Indeed, if you use the 2 main attractions of social media city, namely Facebook and Twitter, you will end up missing the voice of part of your audience. By interacting on several social media outlets you allow information to move like a virus, through networks, walls, tweeps. The principle is simple, the more platforms you are on, the more visibility you get and that is what we call connectedness; governments connect to people, content and machines (that can relay the content to more people).

What governments should do with the data and how can they spur their audience to keep interacting with them?

 Let's start with a basic postulate, governments face political, security and infrastructure challenges, right? So data could be used for crisis management and fix issues (potholes, broken street lights...) using technology (apps) to develop better service delivery. The city of New York is a case in point and they succeeded by maximizing awareness of their mission to the public. The role of the government is to serve and protect the community so if you look closely it is the ultimate customer service department. It has to be a back and forth communication between the government and citizens to ensure consistent engagement and enable collaboration. Across the globe governments have different ways to operate so it is paramount to balance security and open communication carefully.

To answer the question, governments could:

- reward citizens for solving government issues, for instance ideas leading to  a reduction in waste, energy consumption, better community interactions.

- create better decisions by capturing the knowledge of the crowd, namely take advantage of the world's largest focus group.

- Increase capacity of the society to understand complex problems.

- Listen to the voice of their audience to detect early warnings and provide a real-time response.

 Social media has changed the way people socialize, communicate and even work. Governments have to adapt and use social media avenues to take citizens' feedback and ideas and putting them into action plans.

Policies & Guidelines:

 It is difficult to frame things when engaging in social media but like in every game we have to set the rules at the outset.

When using social media it is important to have the right mindset and understand that it is an iterative experimentation. We keep learning and after several successful forays into social media it will appear natural to the government that it is a credible channel and the fears will fade away.

Posting information on  weather or road work announcements will not engage your audience. Several government bodies are making remarkable strides in developing approaches and systems that work for them in their engagement efforts.

Social media is a tremendous vehicle so make sure you book your seat...