This document provides an overview of how municipalities can implement effective social media strategies. It discusses the benefits of social media for customer service and public relations. Case studies of City Power and Johannesburg Water show how integrating social media with operations and communications departments improved engagement, transparency and issue resolution. The document concludes that making information available across all platforms, with real engagement, allows municipalities to take advantage of social media as an important communications channel.

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© Matsika 2016 All Rights Reserved
Social Media: A Necessity
for the Modern
Municipality
A proposal on how to implement a social media
strategy
Prepared by Thoko Matsika,
Senior Technician, Eskom Distribution
For the Southern Africa Revenue Protection Association (SARPA) 20th
Annual
Convention: Smarter Revenue Protection
August 2016
Thoko.Matsika@gmail.com

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INTRODUCTION
Organizations have deferred on adopting social media as part of their business offering;
understandably so, as this introduces a whole plethora of unchartered territory to be explored,
and thereby a great risk of getting it wrong.
There have also been great strides in industry to take advantage of the opportunities which
social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook (and potentially WhatsApp) offer. These
have granted customers direct contact with an organization, and thus humanized interactions
between an organization and its customers.
A CLOSER LOOK AT SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is defined as: ‘the collective of online communications channels dedicated to
community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration (Personal computing
Glossary, 2015). The most popular social media platforms used by organizations in South Africa
are Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Hilgard Matthews, Executive Manager: Marketing and Stakeholder Relations; Johannesburg
Water states that social media forms part of a bouquet of communication solutions that
complement each other, it cannot stand alone. It is all about directly communicating and
engaging with stakeholders. Social media, when implemented correctly, will result in good
public relations.
• Twitter: The most commonly used to disperse information; it is fast paced, and allows
only 140 characters to send a message. It also grants the ability to attach photographs
and videos. Twitter is more popular among young adults. Internet users living in urban
areas are more likely to use twitter than their rural counterparts (Investopaedia, 2015).
• Facebook: More popular in social circles, has no limit to characters. Facebook is popular
among those in rural, suburban and urban areas, and those at every income level and
education background (Investopaedia, 2015).
• Whatsapp: WhatsApp is a messaging app used to send messages without incurring
SMS costs. It has become the most common mode of communication for sending
messages, pictures and videos, replacing the need for SMS messages.
Using social media can result in increased traffic to the municipality’s website. It is an
inexpensive channel for public relations, and will show how innovative and modern the
municipality is. The platform can be better utilized to not only report problems and provide
feedback, but also to educate the public on work being done by the municipalities, projects that
are currently underway and provide warnings (potential power outages, water outages, refuse
collection delays etc.).
SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLEMENTATION: INTERNAL SUPPORT
To date, social media has often been managed separately from Customer Service, by
Marketing or Communications teams, but there is growing need for contact centers to integrate
social (media) into their systems and workflows (Our social times, 2014). Municipalities can take
better advantage of these platforms to supplement their call center operations. The current
trend is that few queries are logged through social media, however, the public relations benefit

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in responding to these queries, far outweigh those responded to via the traditional methods of
communication.
The key, according to Matthews, is integrating Operations with Communications; that is,
managing internal relationships. Social media is instantaneous. Customers focus on their
inconvenience and therefore want it addressed immediately. This requires the social media
team to constantly get updates from the operations teams, who might regard this as a
distraction and nuisance.
As with any communication campaign, stakeholders should be segmented and their needs
addressed accordingly. Therefore structuring social media campaigns cannot be one-size-fits-
all approach. Stakeholders such as businesses and households have different needs and they
might access information technology differently. For example, compare households with
different levels of income.
Stakeholder engagement
Municipalities should not rely on only one form of engagement with the public. They should use
an integrated approach. For instance daily media releases on service interruptions (e.g.
electricity supply problems, burst water pipe, blocked sewage systems) must be complemented
by relevant information on the website, an email to councilors, an SMS/ Whatsapp alert to the
affected areas and updates on the various social media platforms.
Integrated engagement with stakeholders
The availability of this homogenous information on all these platforms lets the customer know
that their inconvenience is being taken seriously by the municipality.
A recent survey by Deloitte (2015) found that most contact centers still don’t use social media
monitoring as a tool for capturing customer feedback. Beyond the risks for brand reputation,
failing to properly integrate social media with customer service also brings direct risks to
customer satisfaction and issue resolution (Our social times, 2014).

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Review workflows
Having identified the stakeholders, the next step is to review workflows and value chains. This
is because a call Centre agent may need contact the depot manager for feedback on a fault, or
a social media agent may need to ensure that the contact centre has certain information to
provide the customer with.
Different departments, that normally don’t interact, will start to work closely as service moves
towards being more customer centric. In the future, marketing, sales and service skills will
continue to blur and could eventually be brought together into a single operation (Our social
times, 2014). These are the customer service, call centers, depots (technical operations) and
communication departments.
• Customer service: Note specific areas where complaints are coming from, send SMS,
email and call customers to inform them of outages, Share meter reading schedules,
assist in addressing billing issues
• Call Centre: Receive service interruption calls, Inform communication teams on outages
to report to stakeholders, Dispatch depot technician to resolve fault, Supply reference
number to customer, Follow up on faults
• Depot: Attend to faults, communicate findings on faults, determine estimated time of
restoring services
• Communications: Run social media account, manage stakeholder liaison, Receive
information from depot and call centre and share with the public
What to consider for implementation
Important things to have in place when implementing a social media strategy are:
• Define the administrator’s role
- Is it to address service delivery queries and/or public relations for the municipality?
- Is it to make announcements and/or to engage with customers?
• An understanding of the business and where to get information from
- How is the depot service structured? Who are the managers for the different regions
- Who do you contact for which types of problems? When do you escalate?
• Define the protocol to be used to vet for information
- Written confirmation of service disruption (includes SMS and WhatsApp)
- A phone call to the depot manager or area manager
- System alert
MONITORING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR SOCIAL
MEDIA STRATEGY
Having implemented a social media strategy, it is important for organization to review its impact
on the intended market. This can be achieved through the use of monitoring tools. The
monitoring tools allow users to plot trends over a stipulated time period. These trends include:

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the number of outages in the month, what are the sentiments from customers and in the media
space about the organisation for the period (positive, neutral or negative), what is being said
about your organisation (by industry and by individuals).
A demonstration by Johannesburg Water showed that a user can determine various criteria to
monitor specific scenarios, such as the impact of certain campaigns e.g. #savewater, or monitor
what is being said about the organization’s key representatives (e.g. the spokesperson).
Matthews stressed that good PR can always be measured in financial terms. The monitoring
tool that they use indicates the financial implications of tweets being retweeted and
Johannesburg water articles being shared. The tool gives the average savings, in Rands, of
pushing an article onto the website and Twitter/Facebook.
The tool also identifies the users/customers that engage the most with their online media. This
helps gain the confidence of the user/customer by sending them direct tweets and/phone calls
to explain their position better, thus gaining another ambassador for the brand.
THE BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Some of the benefits of social media use include: the removal of waiting time in a call centre;
immediate feedback from customers and updates on fault resolution; it increases accountability
(on teams tasked to resolved faults, and the organisation) and promotes transparency (showing
customers what the organisation is busy with). Social media platforms provide the ability to dis-
seminate information very quickly (Redbrick, 2012), and require little or no setup costs.
Armano (2009) lists the challenges that social media will present to organizations as follows:
• Integration- organizations have to figure out how to integrate social media into their
ecosystem, whether to adopt a centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches
• Governance- Organisations need to be aware of what is being said about them. In
addition, they need rules on how to engage with different scenarios such as a
compliments, complaints, and employees that post inappropriate or sensitive information
• Culture- Social media presents challenges to organisational cultures. They now have to
consider the potential benefit of embracing customers and employees in new ways, but
will have to manage this intelligently and with purpose.
• Human Resources- organizations will have to update their HR and Legal protocols,
update guidelines and train people who will be using social media for work. This is due
to the risk of having to fire individuals for a Tweet or Facebook status.
• Measurement & ROI- Measuring ROI continues to be a challenge. Some options to
consider are measuring the size or number of participants who are actively engaged, or
the influence of particular participants in the ecosystem. It becomes challenging to
measure revenue or savings when undertaking such endeavors.

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CASE STUDIES
City Power
The social media campaign was started since the call centre was inundated with high call
volumes, and a decision was made to segment the customer base. Since social media was
growing more popular, a twitter account was created. ‘The intention was to interact with the
customers in the best way for them to experience City Power’, said Sandiso Simelane,
Communications Manager at City Power Johannesburg.
Buy-in was received from the relevant internal stakeholders: Operations Director, Engineering
Services, and Customer Services. Contact details of Operations and Customer Services
managers in all the regions of the city were received, and approval was granted for the
communications team to contact them directly for information.
The response: Councilors and communities started engaging more on their social media time
lines, influential individuals started retweeting and sharing information from City Power’s social
media platforms, and people started reporting water related faults to City Power as well. Twitter
fast became a popular medium as customers communicated more on this platform, and got
immediate responses, as opposed to waiting in line for a call centre operator.
Twitter is used as an escalation tool. New individual faults are relayed to the call centre/ website
for a reference number, then followed up/ escalated by the social media (communications)
team.
Their twitter followers increased from 109 000 to 265 000 from July 2015- July 2016.
Johannesburg Water
Johannesburg Water was under reputational siege due to service disruptions and limited
proactive communication with its stakeholders. Most of the tools of communication existed but
were not used effectively. A new website was developed, and it focused on the needs of the
customer and not on showcasing the amount of information available on the site.
The homepage was designed to be user friendly and customer cantered.
The change in approach brought about integration and focused information on the various
channels. The same information is shared across all platforms.
The social media administrators were encouraged to engage with the public and not just dump
information in the social media sphere. Customers who logged queries were not referred to the
call centre but were provided with reference numbers via their communication medium of
choice.
Their Twitter followers increased from 46 600 followers to 143 000, the Facebook account
increased from 3449 likes to 8879 from June 2015 to June 2016
The success of the website is evident in the average hits of 2.5 million per month since
November 2015.

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CONCLUSION
The key is to make information available. This information needs to be disseminated on all
possible platforms; however, it must be accompanied with engagement.
The instant nature of the world we live in today has created an entire case in favor of shifting
towards more innovative social media use. Social media has disrupted the way markets,
companies and governments operate. The sooner local governments increase their social
media footprint, the more effective stakeholder engagement, public relations and service
delivery will be.
Cranswik (2016) describes a smart organisation as one which puts a customer at the heart of its
business process. Saying that a good customer experience drives revenue and can be
achieved as follows:
- The highest level of the organisation must recognize the importance of putting the
customer first
- The organisation must have the right strategy to execute on
- The organisation must put the right resources in support of the strategy
- The organisation must be consistent in the business processes that support the
strategy
Online media, with an emphasis on social media, is slowly becoming the virtual call centre and
a default public relations tool of choice to the public. We have a choice to take better advantage
of this communications medium, or be left behind.

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REFERENCE LIST:
• Forbes, Jason DeMers, the 7 worst (and most amusing) mistakes brands have ever
made on social media, viewed 19 July 2016
http://www.forbes.com/video/4913920933001/
• Jannette Amini, Engaging our diverse community: communications in transition, Paper
presented at the Association of Municipal Managers, May 2011
• Personal computing glossary, May 2016, viewed 24 March 2016,
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-media
• Business2community, June 8, 2015 What is the impact of social media on PR?, Ronn
Torossian , viewed 6 July 2016, http://www.business2community.com/public-
relations/impact-social-media-pr-01245327#2wym8smR3XweKvtV.97
• Our Social Times, 2014, How should contact centres integrate social customer service?,
viewed September 2015, http://oursocialtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/How-
should-contact-centres-integrate-social-customer-service.pdf
• Investopaedia, 2 October 2015. An article by Justin Walton: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs.
Instagram: Who Is the Target Audience? Viewed online February 2016,
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/100215/twitter-vs-facebook-vs-instagram-
who-target-audience.asp
• Cranswik, D 2016, The rapid revolution of Customer Experience Management, Radio
broadcast, Power FM, 21 July.
• Deloitte, Andy Haas,2015, 2015 Global Contact Centre Survey, Viewed online May
2016, file:///C:/Users/matsikta/Downloads/us-sdt-2015-executive-summary-for-gcc-
survey.pdf
• Lambie, B, 2012, Social Media and Municipalities: Risks and Rewards,viewed
online October 2014, http://www.redbrick.ca/assets/file/resource/Social-Media-Risks-
Rewards.pdf
• Armano, D, 2009, Five challenges social media will bring to your business, Viewed May
2015, https://hbr.org/2009/08/a-recent-survey-conducted-by
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