Working on grenfell digital comms

I’ve been avoiding my blog for a while because I worked on the Grenfell Tower recovery team. Some of what I worked on isn’t appropriate to share on social media, and some of it’s too painful to talk about, but the experience was a massive learning curve. I love reading other people’s blogs and learning from them and so I thought it was time I shared some of what I learned. 

I used to think I was having a bad day at the office. Someone senior hadn’t signed something off so my project was delayed. Someone made a negative comment on social media about a project I’d put my heart and soul into and it hurt my feelings. I realise now those weren’t bad days. When you get death threats on social media, when someone throws a microphone and knocks your camera over while you’re filming, when you break down in the middle of the street and sit on the pavement bawling your eyes out – those are the bad days.

I’m not suggesting for a minute that I’m the one you should feel sorry for. I was working with families who’ve lost children and parents. People who’ve lost everything they own. People who’ve witnessed things you only expect to see in a horror film. But I like to think I can help other people who might have to deal with a crisis situation at work with some practical tips and things I learnt about coping with the emotional side.

I was born in North Kensington. I could see Grenfell Tower from my bedroom window. I was devastated when I heard about the fire and so I jumped at the chance to be part of the team that helped people affected. It’s safe to say I was naïve. I took the job because I thought I could help but I had no understanding of the anger and pain I would be dealing with.

I had to learn a few things very quickly about dealing with a crisis:

Throw corporate norms out of the window. In a crisis no one is interested in the type of language government uses. Jargon and acronyms that may have only irritated people in the past will quickly enrage them. Speak like a human being or don’t expect to be treated like one.

Grow a thick skin. You don’t know who you’re talking to when both of you are behind a keyboard and that makes some people more vicious. If I was talking to people face to face I doubt they would be half as abusive, but social media can bring out the worst in people. In other jobs I could ignore abusive comments, but in a crisis situation you don’t know what the person you’re talking to has been through, so no matter how abusive they are you need to stay calm, patient and friendly, and do whatever you can to help. 

You can only do what you can do. When I was faced with endless waves of criticism and anger on social media, the line between what I was personally responsible for and what was out of my control became blurred.  I started to feel guilt and shame about things that were nothing to do with me. It took a couple of counselling sessions and conversations with supportive friends and colleagues for me to realise all I can do is my best. Keep talking to people you trust so you don’t lose your sense of perspective. 

Don’t lose site of your brief. My role was to communicate with people affected by the tragedy and help them to find information and resources. When you’re under scrutiny from the general public, the press, other organisations and celebrities it’s easy to lose site of what you’re supposed to be doing and get distracted by other people’s agendas. It’s really important to keep third parties informed, but not at the expense of the people who matter the most in a crisis situation. 

I still get shaky when I hear people talking about Grenfell – the emotional impact has taken it’s toll on me – but I’m so glad I had the opportunity to help and meet some amazing people along the way. 

Image by Duncan C

Choosing a Facebook account, group or page

A client recently asked me about the difference between a Facebook account, page and group. If you’re familiar with Facebook it’s straightforward but for newbies it can be confusing.

An account is usually personal, for individuals. Set up an account to connect with your friends and family. Use it to share photos and updates about your life, and other things you and your friends are interested in. An account has two main sections: your news feed where you see your friends’ posts and posts from pages you follow; and your profile where your own posts appear in a timeline.

A group is for people with a shared interest to join. For example, you might have a group for people who live in your area so you can discuss local issues and share details of nearby events. Groups can be public or closed. If they’re public, anyone can join the group and see its members and posts. If it’s closed, an admin has to approve requests to join. People can see the group’s members but not the posts unless they become a member too. Before you set up a new group it’s a good idea to check that there isn’t a similar one that exists already to avoid duplication.

A page is the best option for a business or cause. Pages are public so everyone can see the content. Content is created by the page admin(s). Other people can post to the page (unless you turn this setting off) but you’re able to approve their posts before they show up in the visitor posts section. Visitor posts won’t appear on the main page unless you share them. Anyone can ‘like’ and ‘follow’ your page. People can also message you via the page.

Pages are also useful if you want to keep your business interaction away from your personal account. For example if I was a personal trainer, I would have an account where I add people I know to my friends list. Then I would have a page where I advertise my services and talk to clients.

 

 

#Hashtag or @mention?

Someone told me I should call my blog ‘The Alexis Bailey Daily’ but that would mean having to post every day and I don’t think I can manage that. But I do need to post more than once every four months, so I’ve decided if I’m busy I’ll just keep it simple.

I train people on using social media and this is a question I get asked repeatedly:

What’s the difference between a hashtag and an @mention?

Well they’re both tags but they serve different purposes.

A hashtag is a way of categorising your post. When you add the # symbol in front of a word it becomes a link that people can click on to find other posts with the same hashtag. You might hashtag one or two key words in your post. Those words can be part of a sentence, or just added to the end of the post. For example:

Looking forward to having #ItalianFood at my favourite restaurant in #Woolwich tonight #FoodGloriousFood

A hashtag can be more than one word, but it mustn’t include spaces or symbols (numbers are fine). Anyone who sees this tweet and wants to find more tweets about Woolwich or Italian food can click on the hashtags. If someone searches for either of those hashtags on Twitter, the tweet will come up in the results.

You might want a unique hashtag for a campaign or event. Something that no one else has used before so that tweets using that hashtag are only relevant to your campaign/event.

You can use hashtags on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as Twitter.

An @mention is a way of drawing someone’s attention to your tweet, or crediting someone. If you use an @mention you’re adding an account’s username to your tweet and the account you’ve mentioned will get a notification about your tweet. People will also be able to click on the @mention to see that account’s profile. For example, I could add an @mention to my tweet above:

Looking forward to having #ItalianFood at my favourite restaurant @ConGustoTweets in #Woolwich tonight #FoodGloriousFood

When you’re choosing a username, bear in mind how it will look as part of an @mention. For example, if I were to tweet:

Who’s up for coming to @ConGustoTweets in #Woolwich tonight?

Would people who hadn’t heard of Con Gusto restaurant know what I was talking about? I would need to add context with hashtags:

Who’s up for coming to @ConGustoTweets in #Woolwich tonight? #food #restaurant #hungry

You can tag accounts in a similar way on Facebook. You start by typing @ followed by the person’s name or the page username. You can then choose the account you want to tag from the drop-down list that appears.

A final note on hashtags: If you’re joining two words together it’s a good idea to use capital letters for each word. This not only makes it easier to read, it also means screen-reading software can read the hashtag.

5 things I learnt from the Great British High Street 2015 competition

Working on the Great British High Street competition was fun. Exhausting but exciting too. The competition grew last year, and while I’m delighted it was so successful, there was a point where I feared it was spiralling out of control!

The competition is about driving footfall to high streets; encouraging people to shop locally and use local services so the money you spend benefits your local economy.

In 2014 a panel of judges chose the winning high street. In 2015 a public vote helped decide and this was a game changer. We set ourselves targets, based on past experience, for the number of entries, number of website page views, number of votes and number of mentions of our hashtag #GBHighSt. We wanted 200 high streets to enter; we got 230. Not bad. We estimated 25,000 hashtag mentions; we got 29,000. Pretty good. We hoped to get 20,000 votes; we got nearly 200,000. We were very happy with that. We expected around 30,000 page views for our website; we got 800,000. We were stunned.

It wasn’t all plain sailing and I learnt a few things along the way which I want to share.

1. Public voting was open for six weeks. This was too long. It was exciting for us to watch the vote count going up but the entrants started to run out of steam and found it hard to motivate their local communities to keep voting.
2. Social media makes a difference. One poor high street didn’t send a single tweet or Facebook post, didn’t Instagram any images or put a video on YouTube. They got about 700 votes. Their competitors went all out on social media to rally local support. They got about 15,000 votes. The majority of traffic to the website came via social media.
3. Facebook advertising is complicated. I was excited to have a small budget to spend on Facebook ads. Little did I know how confusing the process would be. Facebook operates a bidding system for advertising space. If someone outbids you, your ad gets knocked off by theirs. You have no way of knowing if you’ve been outbid until after it happens. I thought our ads would keep going until the budget ran out, but they disappeared much more quickly than expected. Still, the ads increase web traffic by 285% and there were 60,000 clicks from Facebook to the website.
4. Trying to keep on top of Twitter is a full time job. With 29,000 mentions of our hashtag to track, a similar number of @mentions, and  queries coming in by direct message, there were times when I was checking Twitter from 7am when I woke up to midnight when I went to bed. Anticipate every question in advance and make sure the answer is online already to reduce the volume of Twitter queries you have to deal with.
5. Live tweeting doesn’t always go to plan. I love the idea of tweeting about events as they happen. It’s live, spontaneous, original content. Unfortunately, at the awards ceremony people were so excited about receiving their awards they didn’t notice that they were standing with their backs to me. They didn’t think to move away from the window so they weren’t just a dark shadow in my photo. They didn’t politely pause and turn and smile whilst shaking hands with the minister so I could get a good picture. They rushed off at the end to tell the world they’d won and didn’t hang about to give me a quote. Live tweeting works well in some situations, but semi-live tweeting, where you draft your tweets and get some nice pics in advance, is less stressful.

The 2014 winners told us that the competition had increased footfall, boosted tourism, helped the local economy and attracted investment. It’s good to know that the competition achieved what we set out to do.

I got a letter from High Streets Minister Marcus Jones praising my work. (Okay I’m just showing off now but if you knew how rare praise from above was in the Civil Service you wouldn’t blame me!)

 

 

Campaign advice from the digital experts

Yesterday I was invited to 10 Downing Street to present to a panel of digital experts from Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and LinkedIn. I was terrified, but this was too good an opportunity to miss so I put on my best underwear (it makes you feel more confident – try it), took some deep breaths and repressed my fear of public speaking.

I talked about the Great British High Street competition and our plans for the next stage – the public vote – and the panel gave me their feedback. I didn’t need to be scared, they were friendly, encouraging and helpful, and I left with some really good advice. Here are the top tips that might be useful to others running similar campaigns:

1. When communicating with stakeholders and partner organisations keep it as short as possible. A three-line email is all they’ll read, e.g. We’re having a competition to find Britain’s best high street. It will help the economy by increasing footfall to high streets. It would be great if you could send one of the three tweets below. Please get in touch if you want more information.
2. Instagram is the fastest growing social media channel and ‘quote porn’ is the hottest trend. People love inspirational quotes. I typed ‘inspirational quotes’ into Google Images afterwards and the inspiration was phenomenal. Whatever your campaign, you’re bound to find a quote you can use on social media to inspire people to get involved.
3. Brainstorm all the companies and individuals who may have an interest in your campaign and get them onboard. The panel helped me to think of possible partners I hadn’t considered before, e.g. the Yellow Pages have an interest in keeping small businesses going so they might help encourage people to vote for their favourite high street. Get other people to help you brainstorm – they might give you new ideas.
4. Network. Senior people in other organisations aren’t the ones who will help spread the word. I need to schmooze my counterparts – the social media community managers.
5. The panel advised me to spend all of my small budget of on boosting Facebook posts (it wasn’t the person from Facebook who suggested this!). There are more people on Facebook than other social media channels so they recommended boosting a post for each of the finalist high streets, specifically targeted at people living in those areas.
6. For a campaign like this everything needs to be mobile friendly. People are likely to get involved when they’re out and about so any digital channels and tools must work on a smart phone.
7. The competition will attract more votes if we show voting figures. The high streets with less votes will work harder to get more, the high streets with the most votes will want to keep their lead, and the high streets going head to head will become rivals, returning to the website every day to vote and check numbers. This idea may not be popular with the press office, who might want to save the results for an announcement, but if it’s digital engagement we’re after that’s the way to do it.

I”m excited about the next stage of the competition, and acting on the pointers the panel gave me. Keep an eye on thegreatbritishhighstreet.org.uk. Voting opens in the next couple of weeks.

The 7 Barcelona Principles for measuring communications

This morning I went to an event: the relaunch of the Barcelona Principles. I’m not sure where the name comes from but I just got back from a lovely holiday in Barcelona so I felt optimistic. But these principles aren’t about sightseeing and shopping, they’re about measuring communications activity.

If you work in digital comms you’re probably already using some of them, even if you didn’t realise they were named after the sunny city. Some of them might be common sense but I found it useful to have them set out in a way that I can use as a checklist when I’m evaluating my activities. This is version 2.0 and is a refresh of the seven 2010 principles. The 2015 language is plain English and the principles have been tweaked so they can be used by all organisations, not just those selling a product. There’s more focus on social media, not just traditional PR. A range of sectors had input into the new principles, including government, and it’s intended that government organisations will use them as a framework for evaluation.

The gist of the Barcelona Principles (or la esencia as they say in Spain)

1. Set your goals and objectives before you start. The key things to ask yourself are: Who is your audience? What are you trying to achieve? How much behaviour change are you aiming for and by when?
2. Measure outcomes not just outputs. Don’t just look at what you did but what has changed as a result. Using the Fire Kills campaign as an example, the comms message is that you’re four times more likely to die in a fire if you don’t have a working smoke alarm. The outputs are tweets, Facebook posts, radio ads, YouTube videos etc. The outcomes are an increase in the number of people testing their smoke alarms regularly and a decrease in fire-related accidents and deaths in the home. It sounds simple but it’s easy to look at success in terms of number of retweets or likes rather than what happened next. Pretty hard to measure sometimes.
3. What is the affect on your organisation? For example, has your comms activity improved your organisation’s reputation? Are you getting more endorsements?
4. Use qualitative metrics as well as quantitative. It’s not enough to say a post generated 50 comments. Were those comments positive or negative? Did people react the way you hoped they would?
5. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) are so last season. This is a method of calculating the effectiveness of PR by multiplying column inches by advertising rate to come up with a money figure. AVEs are as passé as inches. It’s centimetres and engagement rates now.
6. Measure social media engagement. It’s tempting to look at vanity figures such as the number of likes your Facebook page has, but what are people actually doing with the information you’re giving them? Are they responding to it and sharing it?
7. Measurement should be consistent, transparent and valid. To confirm the validity of your results look at them in the context of what else is going on in the world. For example, could your message have got lost under a big news story that week?

The new principles look at evaluation not just measurement – what have you learnt for next time? It’s hoped that they’ll be widely adopted and that the results will be used to shape business models.

I went to a second analytics and evaluation event this afternoon where Alex Aiken, Director of Government Comms, reminded us of the importance of not just listening to what people are saying on social media, but responding to it and using insights to shape our policies. This is something the digital team at DCLG have been working slowly towards for years and I hope these principals will help the process along.

What makes good social media content?

I was lucky enough to be invited to three great events recently where I picked up some useful tips on creating engaging content for social media channels. The first was a session with the Guardian Public Leaders Network. The second was a marketing and campaigning event hosted by Facebook. The third was a masterclass with LinkedIn. Here are some of the most useful things I heard:

Content

There are three key ingredients for the best content. It needs to be useful, relevant and inspiring. Interesting isn’t always enough. If you’re posting for a professional audience include information that will make people more knowledgable and help them make better decisions, for example latest trends.

Case studies work well on traditional media but on social media people don’t just want to hear what someone did, they want to hear how. Rather than just telling an interesting story, turn your content into a list of useful tips that people in the same situation can use.

People remember how things made them feel, they don’t remember details. If you want your message to stick, your content needs to evoke an emotional response. Emotional headlines also work well on social media.

Recycling content that’s been successful in the past can work better than creating new content, and saves you time.

For LinkedIn in particular, the most popular content is: original insights, thought leadership, sharing expertise, exclusive data and ‘The future of…’ posts.

Multi media

Use photos, video and graphics to get your content noticed. You’re competing for people’s attention with all the other content on their timelines so make yours stand out with something visual. People understand images much faster than they understand text so make sure your images are relevant to your posts.

Mix it up a bit – having recognisable branding can backfire. If it’s too familiar people will ignore it.

Audience

To help you understand your audience better, think of a particular person who’s representative of the people you’re trying to reach. Write you’re content as if you’re writing it for that person. Always put your audience first by taking about what they’re interested in, not just what you want to tell them.

92% of audiences trust earned media (content endorsed by a third party) over traditional media (Nielsen). This includes word of mouth from friends and family. Social media is idea for spreading word of mouth. An influencer is someone with an interest or passion, with a network of people who want to share it. Find your influencers and use them to spread your message.

The great thing about digital is you can see straight away who’s reading your content and what works. Take time to analyse the analytics.

Engagement

The best way to generate engagement is to find a topic people are really interested in. If you work in government, like me, you’re lucky because we have subjects lots of people are passionate about.

Make sure your ask is simple and not too personal. For example, if you want people to share successes they might not want to talk about themselves. Ask them about their team’s success and they may be more forthcoming.

50 first tweets

When I joined Twitter a few years ago it was because it was the latest trendy thing on social media so I thought I should give it a go, not because I had a clear idea of what I would use it for. At first I tweeted about any old thing just to get the hang of how it works. After a while I decided that, for me, Twitter’s most useful for sharing and reading social media tips and the highlights from events, and drawing attention to the things I work on, particularly high street regeneration and markets. It’s also great for hearing from other people who work on similar things.

If you’re new to Twitter you might still be figuring out how to make the best use of it. In the meantime, if you just want to get some tweeting practice and become more familiar with how Twitter works, here are 50 ideas for things you can tweet about:

1. Details of an event you’re going to
2. The highlights of an event you’ve been to
3. What’s happening live while you’re at an event
4. A link to an interesting article you’ve read
5. A comment about a blog you’ve read
6. A link to an interesting forum discussion
7. A quote that’s inspired you
8. Some useful advice you’ve heard
9. Your top tips
10. Interesting facts
11. Little-known stats
12. Facts or stats relevant to the area where you live
13. What you thought of a film or show
14. Details of an exhibition you’ve seen
15. A venue you liked (or didn’t like)
16. A great restaurant or café you’ve discovered
17. A special offer you’ve seen
18. A photo of something interesting you’ve seen
19. A Vine video
20. Ask a question
21. Answer a question
22. Comment on a sporting event
23. Ask for a recommendation
24. Say what you think of a place you’ve visited
25. Let people know about traffic problems
26. Warn people about public transport delays
27. Encourage people to support a cause
28. Highlight an important issue
29. Link to a petition
30. Give you’re opinion on a current issue
31. Introduce yourself to someone you’d like to meet
32. Congratulate someone
33. Wish someone luck/happy birthday/bon voyage etc
34. Thank someone
35. Follow up a meeting with a tweet
36. Thank a company for good customer service
37. Moan about bad customer service
38. Ask someone for a live update
39. Big up someone who deserves it
40. Share a useful tool
41. Talk about a project you’re working on
42. Get feedback on something you’re working on
43. Take part in a Q&A
44. Share a joke
45. Recommend a training course
46. Share the results of a poll
47. Share some trivia or quiz questions
48. Share your achievements
49. Tell people what music you’re listening to and why you like it
50. Retweet other people

The future of government digital

Last week I went to a masterclass on the digital landscape run by the Oxford Internet Institute. The focus was on how people will use digital to communicate with government in the future. They gave us some interesting stats and made some fascinating predictions:

• 78% of people used the internet in UK in 2013. 61% of those used social networks
• Digital exclusion is not as widespread as some people may think. Most people who don’t have internet access know someone who can go online for them. Less than 10% of people don’t have any way of accessing the internet
• There will never be a time when 100% of people use the internet. There will always be people who just aren’t interested even if they have access
• In the future government will be perceived as its online presence, a bit like Amazon is. In other words, people will see gov.uk as the government
• Government will abandon surveys in favour of social media monitoring and engagement
• Political movements won’t have leaders because they’ll be organised on social media and will take off without needing a person or group to lead them. This could be a good thing because more people can get involved in creating change, but a bad thing because once that change has happened there’s no one there to work out the details
• However, 99% of gov.uk petitions fail to get 100,000 signatures. This is the number needed for the petition to be eligible to be debated in the House of Commons. If a petition hasn’t made it in 10 hours it’ll probably fail. So although the internet gives us tools to help mobilise a community around an issue, it doesn’t necessarily make it easy

What do you think of the predictions? I like the idea of government making better use of social media for engagement rather than just broadcast. I’m not so sure about government being seen as a big website, like Amazon!

7 social media tips for beginners

I’ve been working with social media for seven years now so I thought I’d share my top seven tips. If you’re just starting out you might find these useful. I don’t consider myself to be an expert – there’s still so much to learn and there are always new channels and technologies popping up – but here are seven things I wish I’d known before I started:

1. Sometimes on social media grammar and punctuation go out of the window, but the full stop has an important role on Twitter. If you start a tweet with a username, Twitter thinks it’s a reply and it won’t go to your followers’ timelines. Stick a discreet full stop in front of the username, and all your followers can see the tweet.
2. Don’t let the trolls get you down. If you’re managing a corporate account (especially if it’s a government one) you’re bound to attract abuse. At first it upset me, then I became immune to it, now I sit down with a cup of tea and a biscuit and enjoy the entertainment. Don’t reply to abusive comments. People will soon see that if they phrase their question/comment politely they’ll get a response; if they’re rude and sweary they won’t.
3. Posts with images and video get a better response. You’re competing with a lot of other content so yours needs to stand out.
4. If you’re posting a link, for example on Facebook or LinkedIn, once the preview loads you can delete your link from the text – and the preview stays. This looks much tidier than including a long link in your text.
5. Start with your objective not your channel. For example, people come to me and say ‘I want to talk to people about X and I want to set up a Facebook page’. It turns out there are several high-profile blogs about X. That’s where their content should go. They might feel comfortable with Facebook because they use it outside work, but it may not be the best place for what they’re trying to do. Bloggers are always looking for good content and may be willing to let you write a guest post.
6. Experiment. When it comes to digital and social media no one has all the answers. You have to keep trying different things and be prepared to fail. You might post something you think is exciting and will get a great response, only to find no one cares. You might post something you think is a bit dry and suddenly everyone’s talking about it. It’s hard to predict what content will do well and what will flop. Keep evaluating everything you do until you understand what your audiences like.
7. Chose your username carefully – you can’t always change it. And when you’re coming up with a name for a campaign, keep it snappy, and make sure it can be easily turned into a hashtag.