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Implementing social media monitoring

Purpose

Social media: Tools for sharing and discussing information among people. These include wikis, blogs, micro-blogging, video sharing, photo sharing, podcasts, social networking tools, and other "user-generated content".

The purpose of this guidance is to help government agencies and State servants monitor existing social media. The primary audiences of this guidance are communications managers and advisors, project managers, and State servants interacting on social media.

This guidance is designed to complement the State Service Commission's Principles for interaction with social media.

Scope

This guidance covers the monitoring of and interacting with social media.
It does not cover the setting up, hosting, and managing of your own social media sites.

Background

Government is in the information business – that business is changing dramatically. All social interactions include some exchange of information. The World Internet Project New Zealand (PDF, 1.2mb) found that 78% of New Zealanders use the Internet. Of these users, 27% have posted messages online, 34% have posted images online, and 10% keep a blog. Twenty eight percent participate in social networking sites at least on a weekly basis.

Social media is a new medium that New Zealanders are using to communicate with each other, sometimes regarding government policies and services. The use of social media is part of the transformation of bureaucracy from one built for the industrial age to one meeting the needs of the information age.

Social media 101: Listening

"Atom" or "RSS" web feeds

Web feed readers/aggregators: A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Among other things, this allows a user to keep track of changes to website content, automatically, without visiting the websites themselves. Each feed has its own URL. "RSS" (most commonly said to stand for Really Simple Syndication) and "Atom" are competing file formats of web feeds.A feed reader/aggregator is a software or a Web application which aggregates web feeds.

Create an RSS (web) feed reader/aggregator account

To efficiently monitor several feeds, you will need a feed reader/aggregator. In most situations, an online feed aggregator will likely be a sensible choice. You can use desktop aggregators, but their disadvantage is that they are tied to a single machine and thus not accessible from any computer with an internet connection.

Some free services include

Populate your aggregator with feeds

Once you have set-up your aggregator, you will need to populate it will relevant feeds.

Create feeds for searches on technorati.com

Technorati is a search engine for most blogs on the internet. Use it to search for your organisation in quotation marks. After doing this, right click on the “Subscribe” button (see above).

Then click “Copy shortcut” (which is the URL of the web feed for the search) and add this to your aggregator. Repeat this for as many searches that you can think of.

For example:

“ssc”, “state services commission”, “state services comision” [sic], “state services commissioner”, “Iain Rennie”, “Ian Rennie” [sic], “State Services Development Goals”, “www.ssc.govt.nz”, “John Ombler”, “People Capabilities Branch”, “Kiwis Count”, “igovt”, “DevCon”, “jobs.govt.nz”, etc.

After you do this, you will have your ear firmly to the ground.

Identify peers blogging

Chances are some other similar/related organisation or interested individual here in New Zealand or overseas are already blogging about topics directly or indirectly relevant to your organisation. Try to identify leading peers (perhaps from your Technorati searches), keep up with what they’re doing (set up feeds), and consider interacting with them. Learn from their experiences.

Create feeds for searches on Twitter

Twitter: Twitter is a free micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Twitter's search service can be used in the same way as the Technorati search:

search for your organisation (and other key terms),
right click on the "Subscribe" button,
paste url into your aggregator.

Create a feed for your organisation’s Wikipedia page

After locating your organisation’s page on Wikipedia, click the “history” tab. You will see the button for “RSS” and “Atom” in the sidebar. Once again, right click, “Copy shortcut”, and paste into your aggregator.

Create a feed for any other social media, or non-social media, you can think of Blogs, Twitter, and Wikipedia are not the totality of what can be monitored through feed aggregators. Try to identify others, and create web feeds for them also.

Some suggestions are:

Collectively, these feeds may replace media monitoring services that your organisation may already be paying for.

Social media 201: Interacting

Before interacting on social media, ensure that you have read, and fully understood, the Principles for interaction with social media.

Check the content and ensure the accuracy on Wikipedia

(... or anywhere else where your target audience may be gathering information about your organisation)

When Google became the most popular search engine on the web, it made business sense to focus effort into affecting your Google-search results. Nowadays, Wikipedia has become a common result for many searches on Google. People will often gather information about your organisation from third parties, and currently Wikipedia is a popular place to do this. Also, Wikipedia will be one of the largest referrers of traffic to your websites, and Wikipedia is increasingly being used to update other third party sites. This means you have a vested interest in ensuring the information is up to date and accurate.

There have been many stories in the mainstream media about individuals or sometimes government organisations from around the world embarrassing themselves or their organisation by editing their own pages. It is important to note that while editing your own Wikipedia page is not always forbidden, deleting accurate criticism always is. The safest way to avoid trouble on Wikipedia is to propose changes versus actually making them.

Almost all Wikipedians do not want to harm or help your brand, nor do they want to provide a platform for you to shamelessly promote yourself or for your critics to shamelessly attack you. They just want a complete, accurate and neutral encyclopaedia.

Check who has been editing your organisation’s page

Before you make any edits, check through the “history” tab to check that you don’t recognise any names that are already editing your article. There may already be employees from your organisation or in fact the IP address of your organisation (see next paragraph).

Create an account and be transparent

Every edit on Wikipedia is attributed to an author. If an edit is “anonymous”, it is attributed to the IP address of the author (the irony being that this is often much less anonymous than creating an account).

Before you create an account, read Wikipedia's policy on usernames and accounts.

On the profile page for your account clearly explain yourself (not necessarily identifying your name, as this could put you at unnecessary risk of harassment) and your motivations. Be as open, cooperative and transparent as possible. Recognise that the Wikipedia article on your organisation belongs to the Wikipedia, not to your organisation.

Propose changes on article's "Talk:" (discussion) pages versus editing the articles themselves

As opposed to editing the article itself, you should propose changes on the articles "Talk:" (discussion) page, or on the New Zealand Wikipedians' notice board. This way, you are collaborating with Wikipedians, rather than storming their territory primarily for your purposes. This also avoids being seen to breach Wikipedia's policies on conflicts of interest, single purpose accounts, or external link spamming.

Commenting on blogs

Following the instructions in the Social media 101 section, you should now be informed when your organisation is mentioned on a blog. A new question is: when is it appropriate for someone in your organisation to respond?

Gauge the environment

When interacting on other people’s blogs, it is essential to gauge the environment you are entering. Reacting to criticism, on a blog that does not take kindly to outsiders nor engage in reasonable discussion, is likely to be a fruitless endeavour. Using a corporate tone on an informal discussion is also likely to be less successful. Read some posts, comments and responses on a blog before determining that commenting will be the most constructive course of action.

If possible, have your subject area expert react to their subject area

As more and more conversations are happening online, it is less and less feasible that an organisational communications manager will be in the best position to react to all conversations. Identify subject area experts and encourage them to interact. Recognisethat some staff will not be comfortable with this.

Consider creating organisational policy for social media

All organisations should already have a "media relations" policy. Your organisational policy on social media should be an extension/evolution/complimentary to this. A useful starting point may be the SSC’s Staff Contribution Guidelines v1.0 for In Development, especially paragraphs 14-27.