At the beginning of December I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Social Media Roundtable at the Australian Centre of Excellence in Local Government, being held at the University of Canberra. For those of you who don’t know what the ACELG do, they’re doing some great work with social media governance and planning for local government throughout Australia. I previously worked with them on a case study about social media use during the Brisbane floods, which you can see over on IKEN, their Innovation and Knowledge Exchange Network.

Social Media Use in Local Government

There were a number of fantastic attendees at the social media roundtable, with a very diverse range of inputs and opinions on what would constitute a national framework for social media use in Local Government. The aim was to collate ideas and opinions on what would work at a national level for the many organisations who are hoping to or are currently using social media. For me, one of the biggest learnings of the day was that there is a wide disparity between local Council’s and their current use of social media. Some of the smaller Council’s expressed opinions about not having enough staff to resource social media as part of their communications plan, while others were concerned that higher management wouldn’t understand or support their use of social media. In comparison to larger Council’s, such as Brisbane City Council, many of the smaller Council’s are right at the beginning of their journey, and therefore a national framework would need to be very adaptable and generic in places to fully embrace every different Council in Australia.

Creating a National Framework for Social Media Use in Local Government

What would you consider integral for creating a national framework for social media use at the local government level in Australia? There were a number of interesting propositions, including one that stated the most important task should be to encourage Council’s to be innovative and develop new concepts and new approaches. While this of course is important, the overwhelming opinion was that for many, this is so far down the line, that the main thing initially should be to focus on building confidence and capability with social media use first. I have to agree with this approach. As someone who works for the largest local Council in Australia, I think that it’s important to be as strategic as possible, raise awareness, understanding and ability through education and training and then incorporate more ‘innovative’ approaches.

Presenting on Social Media Use by Brisbane City Council

While my role at the social media roundtable was to learn and share experiences of social media, I was also the presenter for the day. I spoke for around 3o minutes on my experience of social media use at Brisbane City Council during the January 2011 floods. As always, I loved having the chance to talk about the experience, even if it was a little rushed, but thankfully it was very well-received. It doesn’t matter how many times I speak publicly on social media use in a crisis, I still enjoy it and still get new questions. It was a great day and I was thrilled to be invited. What are your thoughts on creating a national framework for social media use in Australian local government? Do you think it would be worthwhile, or is it too late, with many Council’s already forming their own plans?

This post originally appeared on our CEO’s blog over at TracyWhitelaw.com

If you happen to be at Dreamforce, please head along to Tracy’s session which she’ll be sharing with the lovely Gloria Huang from the American Red Cross. They will be discussing crisis communications and how to be prepared for them using social media. As you know, this is a topic that is very close to our heart here at Social Ignition and Tracy will be discussing her experience of managing social media during the Brisbane floods of 2011 and also her PhD research into social media in a disaster.

We’ll no doubt write all about Tracy’s experiences at Dreamforce when she returns home, but for now, it’s off we go to LA then SF to talk social media!

There seems to be a new social media crisis every week and this week it is the turn of Gloria Jean’s Coffees. The Australian brand is under fire on social media sites due to their apparent support of not only Hillsong, but also because of their supposed donations to the extremely anti-gay Family First and Australian Christian Lobby (ACL).

When Social Media Goes Bad

Gloria Jean’s launched an online campaign to highlight their charitable work and they created the hashtag #WithHeartLocal on Twitter to support campaign. It didn’t take long for the campaign to backfire, with customers taking to Twitter and Facebook asking Gloria Jean’s about their charitable contributions to homophobic religious organisations. When the company went silent, the public became more irate that their questions weren’t being answered and of course, comments continued to spiral. This however wasn’t the most horrifying aspect of the train wreck of social media over at Gloria Jean’s. No, deleting Facebook posts was even worse. Yes, that’s right, they immediately started censoring their own customers by deleting their opinions on the Facebook page and at the time of writing this, they’re still deleting.

Social Media Management in a Crisis

So, how do you avoid becoming another social media crisis case study? What can we learn from Gloria Jean’s? Well, unsurprisingly it’s the exact same thing we can learn from all the previous failures like Qantas, Nestle, McDonalds and more:

Learning from your Social Media Crisis

The most important thing in a social media crisis is to ensure that once the dust has settled, and it will, you look back at where you went wrong and learn from it. You need to implement changes to ensure that the same mistakes don’t happen again. Spend time updating your crisis communication plan, ensure your staff are genuinely skilled in social media and analyse every piece of content to see how you can make it better the next time.

If you’re looking for a social media company or individual to help you with your social media ALWAYS check who you’re dealing with, check their credentials and background (and not just some spiel they’ve written on their own website or blog). This may seem kind of ironic given this is a blog post and we are a social media company, however I know we can back up the spiel and that’s what I’m urging you to check with other companies / individuals ….

As an example of good social media knowledge, our CEO Tracy Whitelaw studies social media (at PhD level), she works in social media for government, she has hands on experience in using social media not only for marketing purposes, but also in disaster management (actually DURING a disaster, not hypothetically) and she utilizes most social media channels for fun also.

Don’t hire someone who tells you they’re a social media expert, check their credentials first, if they have work experience, academic experience and an accessible record of excellence (Tracy has led a team and won awards for social media excellence in government), that’s a great start. It’s your money you will be spending, spend it wisely.

Post by Angela
Enterprise Officer for Social Ignition
Sick and tired of people claiming they’re “social media experts” when clearly they are NOT.

Here’s a couple we just generated for Social Ignition:

“Redhead, Stylist, Visual Facilitator, Connector of People, Small Solar System. I put fries into my straw.”

“Runner, Avatar, Saviour of Mankind, Systems Thinker, Attractive 20-something Yogurt Enthusiast. Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.”

“Volunteer, Producer, Happiness Seeker, Harry Potter Lover, Pantless Jogger. I speak lorem ipsum.”

You can get your own over at Silly Twitter Bios, where you can generate silly Twitter Bios to amuse yourself.

Social Media Tips – Utilizing YouTube
Production Value
As with most things in life if it’s shoddy people won’t be as interested as if it’s good quality and useful. Spend a little extra time in the production phase to ensure you’re putting out a good product, remember, what you put out reflects on you and your business.

Short is Sweet
Keep what you’re doing short and concise. In 2012 people have more time due to the gadgets we use, but time has also become more precious (go figure), people will sit through a short YouTube video, but unless they’re wholly engrossed in what you’re offering, they won’t waste time on something longer than a few minutes max (regular YouTube clips are capped at 15 mins, don’t feel you need to use every one of them).

Be Regular
Make sure you put something up on your channel regularly.

Schedule
Create a YouTube schedule, work out when to put up your content, tie it in with events, dates etc. Regular content will bring back viewers and cause subscriptions, a schedule will force you to make and put up the content regularly.

Interact with comments
If you’re brave and have your comments switched on, interact with commenters. YouTube is know to be home to commenters who are a hive of scum and villainy, but mixed in with all the chaff are some genuine users and ignoring them won’t ingratiate them to you in any way. Monitor what’s happening, moderate the inappropriate and respond to the good stuff. Oh and don’t delete negative comments if they’re written in polite manner, respond.

Featured Video and Playlists
Choose a good featured video! Don’t put up something because it’s newer, but do keep it relevant so it shows your channel off in the best possible light. Make your playlists neat and tidy so it helps users find what they’re looking for.

Make Your Channel Look Sweet
Spend a little time making your channel look nice, mess with the aesthetic options to customize your channel so it’s easy to read and matches your brand presence. If your Facebook and Twitter presence use imagery that is blue, make that your key color on YouTube. Keep your brand the same over all channels (backgrounds, icons etc).

Just a quick post, but some handy hints for bettering your Facebook engagement.

Watch this video and tell me you didn’t raise just a tiny laugh, despite the obvious social aspects of online bullying, which are ever so slightly touched upon beneath the humor within this clip.

Some of the big hitters would indeed appear to update their own pages / accounts, at least most of the time. Other celebrities take the tack of trying to pass off their PR as themselves, whilst others make it blatantly obvious one of their ‘people’ does the updates for them, merely using the channel as a conduit for information relay, rather than a connection.

Who is your favorite Facebook / Twitter celebrity and why?

If you’re not following George Takei on Facebook or Kate Walsh and Wil Wheaton on Twitter, look them up and it is allegedly really them.

Bing Translator will be the tool of choice, the translator already integrates with various Microsoft devices and websites so it will be interesting to see if these tests lead to full Twitter integration in the future.