Social Media for Government

How to blend traditional and non-traditional new media into your government communications plan
Social Media for Government Workshop
July 12, 2010
Washington, DC
Presented by: Amy Mengel

Hello!
Amy Mengel
readMedia
amymengel.com
readmedia.com
@amymengel
amy@readmedia.com

Workshop Schedule
Phase One:
Understanding the changing media landscape
1:00 p.m. Introduction
1:05 p.m. Small Group Activity
1:25 p.m. How Information Seeking is Changing
Traditional vs. new media channels
Adoption rates of social media
The shrinking newsroom
POST methodology
Social Technographics
1:50 p.m. Break

Workshop Schedule
Phase Two:
The importance of content
2:00 p.m.
Becoming your own journalist
Transmedia storytelling
Identifying stories within your organization
The new press release
Reaching audiences through social media
Search engine optimization
Online reputation management
Deploying content
Online newsrooms

Workshop Schedule
Phase Two:
The importance of content
2:45 p.m. Content creation exercise
3:10 p.m. Break

Workshop Schedule
Phase Three:
Putting it all together
3:30 p.m. Review of Exercise
3:45 p.m. Final Q&A Summary
4:00 p.m. Conclude

Small Team Activity
Introduce yourselves and try to discover what everyone in the group has in common.
Draft a collective “Twitter bio” for your group: Describe it in 160 characters or less!
Come up with three hashtags that fit everyone in the group:
e.g. #dawgs, #albany, #tdf

Understanding the changing media landscape

The old way:
Traditional media had a monopoly on news creation and distribution.

The new way:
Tools for content creation and dissemination are plentiful, portable, cheap, accessible and easy to use.

People are consuming information differently.
92 percent of Americans use multiple platforms each day to get news.
60 percent of Americans get news from a combination of online and offline sources each day.
33 percent of cell phone owners access news on mobile device
37 percent of internet users have contributed to creation of news, commented on it, or disseminated it via posting to social media sites
80 percent of online news consumers get or share links via emails
Source: Pew Research Center

The rate of social media adoption:

Social media is no longer a fad.

Traditional newsrooms are hurting

Newsroom pain:
Newspaper print circulation has dropped 25.6% percent since 2000.
All traditional media sectors saw decreases in ad revenue from 2008 to 2009.
Roughly 1/3 of newsroom jobs in 2001 are now gone.
Network news staffs at half of what they were at peak in 1980s.
“News hole” continues to grow, with content required for main publication plus online, blogs, social media
Source: Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism

Traditional media still drives online conversations!
Blogs rely heavily on traditional press for topics.
At local level, most news is repetitive. Traditional media still leads in breaking “new” information about a story.
Traditional media is now producing more than one third of stories via new platforms
Less local and hyperlocal news is available online, vs. regional or national
Stories with positive headlines shared 30 percent more than average on Facebook
Source: Pew Research Center: New Media, Old Media and How News Happens ; Wall Street Journal Digits blog

But now you can also engage with audiences directly

P
O
S
T
PeopleAssess your stakeholders’ social activities
ObjectivesDecide what you want to accomplish
StrategyPlan for how relationships will change
TechnologyDecide which social technologies to use
Copyright Forrester Research
Forrester’s POST Approach

Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder

Break – 10 minutes

The importance of content creation

Become your own journalist
Your organization is your beat
Find stories to fill the news hole
Repurpose content

Transmediastorytelling
Blogs
Videos
Podcasts
Photos
Tweets
Comments
Forums
Aggregation
Statusphere
eNewsletters
Press Releases

Identifying stories in your organization
Create an editorial calendar
Routine/mundane activities can be interesting to outsiders
Use employees to help generate ideas
Find ways to turn outputs of your organization into content: databases, lists, maps, visualizations, research
Look at the variety of ways to tell a story and repurpose
Create many stories out of one by personalizing and localizing them: promotions, new jobs, awards

Case Study: NY National Guard

Case Study: NY National Guard
Unique visits to content up 150%
Click-thru rates up 250%
Stories shared in Facebook see an average of 6.2 additional views
NYDMNA published 6,800+ personalized, localized stories about its soldiers in one year

Case Study: Staunton, Va.
Media coverage increased tenfold
Classes sold out
Info readily available via Google
Increased awareness of initiatives in the community

The “new” press release
Does double-duty – provides print-ready content for media and searchable news content for direct audience
Make it shareable – easy for people to post to social networks, embed on their sites, email to friends
Multimedia – enhance press releases with photo, video, slides, copies of speeches and reports
Headlines as email subjects – must be enticing!
Include relevant links
Make it easy to get to other news from your organization
Get it to the media, on the web, and on your site

Use content to build community

Community Building

Facilitating knowledge exchange

Department of State
Asked for reader input ahead of a a Clinton speech in Karkow promoting democracy
Library of Congress
Blog highlights library exhibitions,
Preservation efforts, interesting and odd pieces in the LOC collections

Harness existing content and community

The importance of search optimization

How Google Works
Google likes fresh, original content that gets linked to!
PageRank algorithm
Link structure
Authority
Keywords

SEO for online news content:
Each article/press release has a unique, permanent URL
Google can’t find articles that are in a drop-down box, embedded as Flash or graphics. Plain text HTML is best.
Google News doesn’t crawl articles in PDF! Don’t publish articles/press releases/other content as PDF links.
Think of keywords and use tags when developing content.

Online Reputation Management

Case Study: Iowa Treasurer

Where to put your content?

Seed content across channels:
Online newsroom
Social outposts
Website
Microsite
Intranet
Printed literature

Online Newsrooms
Features to Include:
Press releases, with RSS feeds
Multimedia: YouTube videos, FlickrPhotostream, Podcast
Facebook and Twitter widgets
RSS feed of industry news and organization’s news coverage
Media contact information
Related links

Make content easy to find

Repurpose content across channels

Deploying Content
Blogging:
Blogger
Wordpress
Posterous
Tumblr
TypePad
Moveable Type
CoverItLive
Video:
YouTube
Vimeo
Tube Mogul
Qik
Ustream
Livestream
Aggregation:
Delicious
Greader
Digg
Reddit
Stumble Upon
Collecta
Wordle
Networking:
Facebook
LinkedIn
MySpace
Ning
Photo:
Flickr
TwitPic
Yfrog
Picasa
Picnik
MIcroblogging:
Twitter
Yammer
TweetDeck
HootSuite
TweetChat
VisibleTweets
Audio:
BlogTalkRadio
iTunes
Location:
Foursquare
Gowalla
Loopt
Yelp
BrightKite
TripIt
Documents:
Slideshare
DocStoc
Scribd

Content Creation Exercise

Content Creation Exercise
Your team must produce a piece of content about this workshop using your assigned channel. Tell a story!

Putting it all together

What did we create?

http://smgov2010.posterous.com

Wrapping it up
Traditional media is still important: find ways to make their jobs easier and identify interesting stories
Be your own journalist
Determine POST and technographics for your audiences
Reach audiences directly via good content
Transmedia storytelling
Optimize content for search
Use social outposts todeploy content

Questions?

Photo Credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wcroff/2493207433/http://www.flickr.com/photos/re_teacher/4524447850/http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidchief/1306006614/http://www.flickr.com/photos/therichbrooks/4040184142/http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavanimages/3589957881/http://www.flickr.com/photos/pacman3000/4309759389/http://www.flickr.com/photos/lelonopo/2172736720/http://www.flickr.com/photos/ljesmith/292424850/http://www.flickr.com/photos/11271667@N08/2376539888/http://www.flickr.com/photos/cphpubliclibrary/3238562999/http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncleriotous/3517700953/http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisstreeter/3674586966/http://www.flickr.com/photos/40686087@N06/4022714137/http://www.flickr.com/photos/87719210@N00/3526434869/http://www.flickr.com/photos/danforth/3605692139/http://www.flickr.com/photos/bewelcomepix/2528101893/http://www.flickr.com/photos/therefore/18542525/http://www.flickr.com/photos/92305862@N00/2307362444/http://www.flickr.com/photos/voodooangelmg/380979873/http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbrucker/407842334/http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewburrows/2559394780/http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3370498053/http://www.flickr.com/photos/precious_shots/804609072/http://www.flickr.com/photos/23615551@N03/4249992361/http://www.flickr.com/photos/liznal/3923540093/http://www.flickr.com/photos/smil/3637651409/http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673802/

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Social Media for Government

by Amy Mengel on Jul 12, 2010

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Social Media for Government — Presentation Transcript