Social Media Analytics – Makeover Time

Managing Social Media Analytics in Local Government

Part of the Critchsue blog series – Managing Social Media in Local Government

 

Within your organisation what is the value of your social media analytics on a scale of 1 (completely useless /non-existent) to 10 (totally useful/informative)?

To determine where your organisation currently sits on the useless/non-existent, useful/informative spectrum, it is suggested you run a simple survey within your organisation, asking recipients of your social media analytics reporting to rate this using the scale mentioned and also advise (Y/N) whether they think social media analytics would be valuable to the organisation at all.

In my opinion, within many local government organisations, the result of this survey would be:

Current Value Score:      3 or less (not very useful or relevant)

Is Valuable:                         N (No)

The reason for this result would be that, in many cases, social media has been implemented because the organisation thinks that is what the public expect, rather than as a valuable business tool. This perception needs to be changed.

Achieve this by starting your analytics makeover today

Social media analytics is more than just departmental number crunching. It is about gathering and analysing data from a variety of social media sources to enable business decisions. As such, social media analytics needs to start with a strategy that encompasses the whole business, not just an isolated social strategy.

Build a social media measurement strategy.

Implement an analytics process that will show off your strategy

 

Social Media Measurement Strategy

The Altimeter Social Media Measurement Framework (Etlinger & Li, 2011) provides a base on which a good social media analytics strategy can be built. The four critical steps of this framework are:

1. Strategy – Start with your business objectives and the strategies that support these objectives. The reality in the changing social media landscape is that planning is for the present (with the future in mind) and must be sufficiently adaptable to serve the future
2. Metrics – Define how you will measure success from a business perspective before approaching the social perspective
3. Organisation – Evaluate how ready the organisation is in term of resources (staff, systems, tools) and internal collaboration. Reporting on areas the organisation is not ready for will have an adverse effect
4. Technology – Using the other three steps as input, select the tool that is most appropriate for your organisation bearing in mind the how you intend to measure success and the resources you have available to you.

 Now you have completed the pre-requisites, let’s start measuring

Analytic Process

Implementing an enduring, repeatable process for social media analytics is very important. It needs to take into consideration the constantly evolving environment.  Using the capture, understand, present (CUP) process (Fan & Gordon, 2014) social analytics process will ensure flexibility while providing structure and best practice for this area.

Capture analytics from a wide variety of sources. Don’t limit yourself to your immediate environment. However, you do need to strike a balance between the need to find all potential information and the need to focus on the most relevant and authoritative sources (Fan & Gordon, 2014) so that you don’t drown in the quantity of information captured.

Understand the data you have captured. This stage is the core of the analytics process where the meaning of the information must be assessed and metrics for useful decision making generated (Fan & Gordon, 2014).

Present the information in a format that is easily understood by the recipients. Use some of the widely available visualisation techniques and tools (Fan & Gordon, 2014). Sophisticated visual analytics help make sense of large amounts of information (Fan & Gordon, 2014).

Congratulations!!

Your analytics value score should now be increasing rapidly and the benefits of this increase (better perception of social media, wider understanding of social media in business, etc) will be becoming evident.

Keep improving and the benefits will continue to reveal themselves.

 

Other blogs in Critchsue – “Managing Social Media in Local Government” series

Social Media Privacy and the Digital Native

Social Media Fire and Storm Prevention, Preparation and Response

Social Media Risk Management – Is it needed?

References

Etlinger, S., & Li, C. (2011, Aug). A Framework for Social Analytics. Retrieved Jan 2016, from http://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/GBUS8630/doc/altimetersocialanalytics081011final-110810105257-phpapp01.pdf

Fan, W., & Gordon, M. (2014). The Power of Social Media Analytics. Communications of the ACM, 57(6), 74-81.

 

 

Social Media Fire and Storm Prevention, Preparation and Response

Social Media Crisis Management advice for Local Government

Part of the Critchsue blog series – Managing Social Media in Local Government

In general, many Local Government organisations, especially those in New Zealand, are novices when it comes to Social Media management and participation. As such, dealing with a social media crisis is often a “seat of your pants” operation. We need to get better at this activity.

Social media crisis management is not very different from crisis management in any other area, except that the time for reacting to an event is much shorter. A huge storm can be created by social media users in a very short period of time (Pfeffer, Zorbach, & Carley, 2014). Organisations need to keep their eyes open, be realistic and anticipate the storms.

There are three components to managing a crisis:

• Prevent
• Prepare
• Respond

 Prevent the Situation

Prevention is better than a cure and often more cost effective. An orderly implementation that is gradually matured over time (Lee & Kwak, 2012) will go some way towards this prevention.

There are many tools available to assist with a successful social media implementation in an organisation. Some examples include:

An Implementation getting started guide (McGee, 2015)

Open Government Maturity Model (Lee & Kwak, 2012)

Book – Social Media Rules of Engagement

Social Media Profiling framework (Culnan, McHugh, & Zubillaga, 2010)

Google and social media searches using words such as social media implementation success will return many hits.

My favourite tools would be a combination of the Culnan, McHugh, & Zubillaga (2010) profiling framework to assess where the organisation currently sits combined with the Open Government Maturity Model (Lee & Kwak, 2012) to determine what the organisation needs to address next on their journey to a successful implementation, including maturing crisis event prevention.

Prepare for the Event

While we do our best to prevent a social media crisis, we still need to prepare to handle a crisis should our prevention techniques not be sufficient. This is a likely scenario with the proliferation of social media tools and sites and the ever increasing size and sophistication of the group using these tools.

The Social Media Rules of Engagement indicate this is the first line of defence when dealing with a social media crisis.

We also need to be mindful of the four lessons of social media crisis management:

1. It is a risky business that could make or break a business
2. You never know what is going to happen
3. Fire Drills – practice dealing with fires
4. Get ready to create – create content to stem the flow of negative activity

There are specialists around to assist with crisis mitigation and free downloadable crisis management plan templates.

Respond to the Situation

Inevitably there will be a crisis, or two, that needs to be handled. If we are prepared, these events should not be too onerous – the organisation will know what needs to be done. We will have participated in practice sessions so the actual event will be business as usual.

Digitlab  suggests that when addressing a social media crisis the organisation needs to be honest, respond in a relevant manner and switch the location of the crisis to somewhere more manageable (e.g. frequently asked questions on a website. It is important that the organisation listens, sets the right expectations and is transparent.

Other blogs in Critchsue – “Managing Social Media in Local Government” series

Social Media Privacy and the Digital Native

Social Media Risk Management – Is it needed?

Social Media Analytics – Makeover Time

References

Culnan, M. J., McHugh, P. J., & Zubillaga, J. I. (2010, Dec). How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value. MIS Quarterly Executive, 9(4), 243-259.

Lee, G., & Kwak, Y. H. (2012). An Open Government Maturity Model for social media-based public engagement. Government Information Quarterly, 29, 492-503.

McGee, T. (2015, Dec). A local government guide to getting started on social media. Retrieved Jan 2016, from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/local-government-guide-getting-started-social-media-todd-mcgee?platform=hootsuite

Pfeffer, J., Zorbach, T., & Carley, K. (2014). Understanding online firestorms: Negative word-of-mouth dynamics in social media networks. Journal of Marketing Communications, 20(1-2), 117-128. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527266.2013.797778

Social Media Risk Management – Is it needed?

Social Media Risk Management in Local Government

Part of the Critchsue blog series – Managing Social Media in Local Government

 

Are there any social media risks to manage in a local government setting? Everything done within that organisation is discoverable so data leakage and privacy aren’t a concern, or are they? Is brand damage a problem – we don’t have any competitors?

All organisations, even social media, have risk in relation to social media. It is just that some do not realise it. According to Altimeter, many are aware at some level but many just cross their fingers and hope.

Let’s get rid of that ‘head in the sand’ attitude and manage, rather than ignore, the risks associated in our organisations.

Getting Started

To start we need to implement a process whereby social media risks are continually identified, documented and mitigations developed. The ever changing social media environment means we can’t just do this once then put it in a draw – it will be constantly behind the times. The Accenture framework (Culp, Gomes, & Narveson, 2014) designed to generate a risk awareness culture within an organisation is a good resource if you are starting from scratch

Framework for Managing Social Media Risk (Culp, Gomes, & Narveson, 2014)

Best Practices

Some of the best practices to keep in mind when designing and implementing your risk management framework include:

• Risks are not isolated to internal staff – the public are able to produce negative content that could risk the organisation brand, quality of information and destroy trust (Schullich, 2012)
• Ensure all risks, not just those around reputation damage, are considered (Culp, Gomes, & Narveson, 2014)
• Rather than having a separate risk governance structure for social media, include the social media risk activities in the existing structures (Culp, Gomes, & Narveson, 2014). In the council there is already an audit function, recruit the manager of this area to assist with incorporating social media.
• Upon completion of the risk assessment, present it to the executive team for decisions on mitigation strategies (Schullich, 2012)

Resources

There are often resource constraints within organisations, particularly local government, in this area. Budgets are tight and the use of social media as a business tool is just emerging. Tapping into the knowledge of other councils within the region or local government specific resources such as the ALGIM resources on social media will extend the resources available to you. There are many resources available online that searches will reveal. Key words include social, media, risk, management, local, government. Some of these have been compiled for you in this storify.

Other blogs in Critchsue – “Managing Social Media in Local Government” series

Social Media Privacy and the Digital Native

Social Media Fire and Storm Prevention, Preparation and Response

Social Media Analytics – Makeover Time

References

Culp, S., Gomes, R., & Narveson, J. (2014). A Comprehensive Approach to Managing Social Media Risk and Compliance.

Schullich, R. (2012). Risk Assessment in Social Media. The SANS institute InfoSec Reading Room, SANS Institute.