Chapter and Verse Blog

Another area that is being talked about more and more in the commercial world is the business of ‘Social CRM’ (Customer Relationship Management). In a recent AdAge article, Michael Scissons makes the point that many marketers now have more fans and followers across social networks thanthey do email or direct marketing subscribers. Whilst this may not be strictly true for UK public sector Communications & Marketing professionals, it is the case that those that have made the commitment to follow their NHS trust on twitter or engaged with their housing provider on facebook are far more engaged than the passive recipients of a print campaign through their letterbox.

This engagement is incredibly valuable because it is discretionary rather than happening by default. Thus, if the correct approach is taken, in this social following there is the great potential for you as public sector MarComms professionals to cultivate genuine ambassadors for your organisation and its services. To do this effectively it is important to become a source of relevant and valuable content to your online community by talking about the things that are important to them.

Scissons’ article goes on to emphasise the importance of data—and indeed, recommends a number of different technologies and tools to achieve this—but I think much should be borrowed from the thinking behind ‘Social CRM’ rather than the technological aspect, by public sector organisations who are active on social media channels.

The underpinning principle in this article is that ‘Social CRM’ will enable you to gain customer insight and then to act upon it. Whatever the scale of your organisation’s presence on social media, it is undeniable that these channels can provide a unique ‘lens’ into the opinions, expectations and preferences of your current service users.

In fact, during an age where many UK public sector organisations—the NHS and Housing Sectors in particular—will need to become more competitive online, reacting to these insights could also help with the acquiring of new service users.

This is because knowledge is power, and unlike email marketing campaigns, your connections on social media talk back and so the insights gained in this area will enable communications and marketing teams to better plan content and campaigns, and even to anticipate and make changes to service delivery where necessary.

In essence, in the public sector context a ‘Social CRM’ strategy should be less about replacing other technology and delivery channels, and more about trying to better understand and respond to the needs of your patients, tenants or stakeholders. Ultimately, this will allow public sector organisations to take a more agile approach to communications—and indeed service delivery.

An effective social media monitoring strategy is an essential part of doing this successfully, and this is one of the key areas of focus at our upcoming Housing and NHS Hot Topics events that will take place in London and Manchester in October and November.

To view the dates and agendas for these sessions and to reserve your organisation a free place click here.

Last week @VerseOneComms attended the Social Media World Forum (#SMWF) at London’s Olympia Conference Centre. The agenda was packed with superstar speakers such as Twitter’s UK Sales Director Bruce Daisley, LinkedIn’s Global Marketing Director EMEA Joshua Graff, and David Bailey Communications Manager at Staffordshire Police.

David’s session was particularly fascinating: he discussed how their use of social media had a positive impact in preventing last summer’s riots from proliferating in the area. Follow @Staffspolice if you are looking for a good example of a public sector organisation using Twitter as something more than a one-way broadcast channel for their website.

Of the many memorable soundbites from the day, there’s one that was referenced a few times that we particularly like—and we’ve managed to locate it via the wonders of Google:

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends” Jeff Bezos, CEO at Amazon.com.

This quote echoes the sentiments of public sector social media advocates such as Anna Lambert @HaltonHousing and Rachel Rutherford @NHSBradford, both of whom have featured as guest speakers at VerseOne’s Digital Strategy events.

They believe that conversations on social media will be taking place about your organisation already, whether you like it or not — and that being part of the conversation, gives your organisation the chance to do something about it.

If you are thinking of starting on social media but would like some help, or you'd like to make your existing social media presence more conversational and engaging, click here to find out more about our public sector social media workshops.

Humans are fallible creatures, especially when trying to predict the future. Nostradamus remains revered in certain circles because his prophecies are extremely vague and compass events in world history. Conversely, there's John Dvorak, the tech writer famous for his lack of the Inner Eye, who once wrote:

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don't want one of these new fangled devices.

(You can read a selection of his clangers here.)

Predictions about the success or future usefulness of technology tend to go more spectacularly wrong than most, as anyone who invested in a Betamax or a LaserDisc player can attest. And although many of these centre around hardware, there have been more than a few people to foresee the failure, pointlessness, and uselessness of the web, too.

One of the best wrong predictions I've read comes from an otherwise unknown Newsweek journalist called Clifford Stoll, writing in 1995. After two decades on the internet, he says, he's convinced the whole idea is "oversold":

It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community…Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Oops!

I'd like to be fair to Mr Stoll; he's writing 16 years ago, when a lot of us had never heard of email and still hadn't made the transition from tape cassette to CD.

But he really drops the ball on how people would end up using the web. For example:

Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

It's not just the Kindle and the iPad he's failing to imagine; the most well-read and trusted source of news in the world today is a website.

Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

If that sounds like an experience you had in the '90s, then you know how much Google has changed our lives. The date of the Battle of Trafalgar? Search returned in 0.59 seconds. First result: Wikipedia telling me the battle took place on 21 October 1805.

Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30.

And yet online behaviour has contributed to the success (or not!) of politicians and governments around the world. Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Ed Miliband's tweet-up yesterday…although I daresay voters still aren't clamouring to read local politicians' press releases.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

According to this article, e-commerce contributed approximately 7% of the UK's GDP in 2009. For reference, the NHS budget represents 9%.

Stoll's commentary isn't completely past its sell-by date, however. His views about the web being "an ocean of unedited data…lacking editors" can be found in the words of many a present-day journalist, though equally he's wrong about that data lacking reviewers or critics.

And his encomium to simple, human ("IRL") contact will strike a chord with many who believe, like Stoll, that the web can be as much an alienating force as a socialising one. It remains to be seen whether this is true, but the statistics are against him. Don't believe me? Which activity—long thought to require face-to-face contact—is generating almost $1 billion per year in the United States?

Increasingly, communications and marketing teams that we're speaking to in the public sector are being tasked with writing a digital communications strategy for their organisation.

At VerseOne's free Digital Strategy Seminars last week, Nora Harris provided some great insights and much useful information for delegates to take away to help them put together a strategy that is effective and, more importantly, aligned with their wider communications objectives. Nora began by emphasizing that VerseOne's Information Architecture Process can be applied to great effect when beginning this task.

Define your objectives

Before beginning your digital activity, you must have clearly defined objectives, so that you will have an idea of what constitutes success.

There are many benefits an integrated digital strategy can bring—driving more traffic to your website, raising brand awareness, improving SEO—and although priorities will vary for each organisation, they must be clearly laid out in order to measure the effectiveness of your activities.

Profile your audience

Decide who your target groups are, identify the digital channels where their conversations take place, listen first, make a list of what's being talked about, follow people. Then begin to share and comment. Become a source of information that is relevant to your audience, where your audience congregates.

Measure success

Having defined your aims clearly, you can estimate timescales and expected achievements to provide a benchmark for eventual realised benefits.

There is also a wealth of tools to help you analyse your metrics:

• Google Analytics will let you track your website performance and help you measure ROI
• HootSuite will help you to track results and measure success in real time
• BoardReader will let you find out what's being said about you on forums and message boards
• Alexa Rankings will allow you to measure the influence of any commentator or blogger that may have commented on your organisation

Then develop and adjust your strategy and tactics accordingly, and don't be afraid to experiment.

Integrate online and offline

Nora eloquently explained the importance of getting this right, given the way internet users' perspectives have changed over the years:

"The online landscape has changed. Web users want to be able to contribute, engage and share; they want to be part of a genuine conversation, not part of a 'receive-only' audience. They also expect to have access to interesting and useful information, rather than a wall of corporate marketing material."—Nora Harris, Information Architect

This is excellent advice; however, many of the public sector organisations we have spoken to—given the service-oriented nature of their websites—have also raised the question of how to generate interactive and engaging content online. This is where it is useful to realize that as well as activity online, a well-executed event or forum offline can not only generate some useful content for your online channels, but lead to further engagement in the digital space.

Of course, this demand for interaction and useful content is not just limited to the web! And so our roving Tweeter, @VerseOneComms, was keen to find out how well the content and format of the Digital Strategy Seminars would be received. We live-tweeted the seminars with the hashtag #v1tech; as well as receiving a lot of retweets and comments during the session, we found the number of our Twitter followers increased by 357% over the course of the week—simply due to the fact that we provided people with some useful and interesting content that captured the attention of our target audience.

We would like to thank everyone who contributed, engaged, and tweeted during the sessions.

Because we've integrated digital media with our general communications strategy, we also gathered traditional feedback from delegates:

"Very useful day, good info, interesting presentations."—Katherine Gray, Leeds City Council

"The event was fantastic, thank you very much."—Carly Farley, Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust

Thus, as well as providing our delegates with some strategic tips when it comes to online engagement, hopefully the impact that the offline events had in the digital space can inspire our public sector audience to embrace online channels to extend the reach of their other PR or marketing activites, as the two can most certainly be mutually beneficial.

Feedback for our guest speakers was also extremely positive and we'd like to thank:

Digital Strategy Seminars:

• Mark Parry, Porchlight
• Mike Teasdale, Harvest Digital
• Daniel Nolan, theEword
• Steve Downes, Juice Digital

Hot Topics in the NHS: Digital Communications Strategy for the NHS

• Rob McNair, mycleveragency
• Guy Levine, Return on Digital
• David Fatscher, British Standards Institution

...for their excellent contributions.

If you would like to find out the full details of all of the presentations, click here to register for a copy of the slides.

If you were at one of last week's digital strategy events, please feel free to leave a comment below—we'd love to hear from you.