Building social media advocacy – what’s needed?

Many of the organisations we work with want to encourage their staff to use social media more.

This is a great move if you want to encourage more networking and ‘working in the open’. It’s also the best long term plan to bring more credibility and variety to an organisation’s social media activity.

Some of the teams we work with have been experimenting with ways to encourage their colleagues to use social media, to talk about their day-to-day work.

There’s lots of things you could do to generate interest in social media. Sometimes there’s a bit of trial and error.

I started compiling a list of the types of activity we’ve led or been involved with. For each we’ve identified some tips, and the type of things that work – and don’t work.

Offline events

Keep the emphasis on learning and doing, not just celebrating social media for the sake of it.
These sorts of events should be about building capability and confidence of your colleagues, not showing off your initiative to the rest of the world. Selfies with colleagues crowded into a cardboard Insta frame are usually a sign that this is less about skills building and more about curating evidence that an organisation ‘does’ social media.

Keep things focussed on practical skills by setting challenges that get people doing things:

Interviewing each other about their job and posting it online
Connecting with colleagues on different networks
Reviewing different types of social media activity and assessing what people would and wouldn’t click
Thinking about upcoming projects and how these might appear on the organisation’s feeds. I’ve had a lot of success using templates like this, to get people sketching ideas in teams https://www.teachingtechnix.com/2019/03/updated-instagram-template-for-google.html
Be prepared to tackle the tricky topics head-on (another reason why these need to be focussed on helping colleagues, not promoting the event itself). Tricky topics might include social media policy or personal privacy.

Also think about bringing in some senior support. If you have a social-savvy leader in the organisation they can really help assuage people’s fears and legitimise what you’re trying to achieve. Ask them to present something short and snappy on:

Why they use social media
How they got into it
The mistakes they’ve made
The opportunities they’ve had, as a result

I used to be sceptical about this approach but I’ve seen it work well, even in very cautious government departments.

Finally, talk to your local reps for the big social media platforms and see if they will support your event. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn all have in country reps who would like to do more business with your organisation. Their training resources are usually great, and in my experience they will send you stickers and stationery without necessarily expecting a sales pitch.

Social media surgeries

One-off events can be great, but keeping the momentum is what counts. However, you probably aren’t paid to do full time social media training. The challenge is finding ways to support people that are sustainable with your other commitments.

Social media surgeries should be open to any colleagues in the office building, or on Skype, to speak with you at a fixed time each week. So, rather than handle lots of enquiries on email randomly throughout the week, you can ask people to come and join you, and whomever else turns up, at a fixed time each week.

I ran these for several years in an organisation of 3500 people split across 3 sites. Sometimes no-one would turn up, sometimes a few people, but more often than not there’d be 10-12 different people each week, often with similar questions or ideas.

Pick a day, time and location and stick to it, however slow business might seem at first. Consistency of availability is key, and it builds trust and referrals.

Keep the sessions informal, only as long as you can afford and consistent: ‘I’ll be in the canteen between 10 and 11 every Wednesday. No question too big or small.’

This approach also really helps overcome any perception that no-one’s doing or supporting social. I also found lots of ready-made social media advocates this way, and caught a few odd or crazy ideas that were brewing elsewhere.

Training the trainers

Hopefully you start to build enough momentum that your events and surgeries are oversubscribed. Success looks like social activity being planned early on in projects, and your advice being sought at the beginning.

This means your next problem is capacity. Having others volunteer to run events and surgeries could be an answer.

Stick to these rules and you could build yourself a good support network. New trainers must:

Be regular social media users themselves
Be prepared to speak to the experiences they’ve had – good and bad
listen to the concerns and needs of individuals. They’re not there just to sell social
Not try to be an expert on everything. Vulnerability encourages confidence within others.
Be prepared to continually encourage and support the people they train, online
keep training practical: get people set up with accounts there and then, take photos, create graphics etc.

Books and reading

For all my obsession with helping people to just get on and press some buttons and share content, I accept that for many, having something to take away and read is really important.

For the purposes of the activity described above, I’ve assumed people need a bit of persuasion or inspiration.

Here are some suggestions, for starters:

Organisations don’t tweet people do: http://euansemple.com/book
Putting Social Media to Work: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Putting-Social-Media-Work-Practical-ebook/dp/B00WT1ZHWY
Battenhall updates and reports (for social media managers, comms planners or anyone you think might be a little geeky): https://battenhall.net/publications/

You

The single most important activity is your own, online. I’ve seen companies flounder with social media advocacy because they don’t have a central person or team who is really well connected with staff and demonstrably enthusiastic about social media.

Make sure your colleagues can find you online, and that you are ready and waiting to support them. Your colleagues need to see that you are accessible but also immersed in this world – a source of expertise but also practical help.

An advocate for social media in your workplace.

The first 4 months of 2019

January

Early night in Dubai.

Wake up this morning and open my UK news feed pic.twitter.com/FXy0o3nB3d

— Tim Lloyd (@timolloyd) January 16, 2019

Bin forra bit of a little mooch abart London tarn. Early start for a full day at an informed, interactive and inspiring @UKgovcomms Online Crisis and Media Response workshop delivered by @helpfuldigital @socialsimulator. Great to see you @timolloyd ? it’s deffo been a while! ? pic.twitter.com/YZIsVwSEuf

— Jess Barlow (@jessica_barlow) January 25, 2019

February

As a team I think we’re OK at ‘planned reflection’ on projects.

But…today’s been a reminder for me that the most inspiring and useful reflection is often found in side conversations with clients, quick checkins on Whatsapp and rooting around past slide decks in Dropbox pic.twitter.com/Zt7HUb9mKk

— Tim Lloyd (@timolloyd) February 13, 2019

“The best storytelling in communications becomes, in our opinion, quickly diluted if the telling isn’t done by real people.”
Our @timolloyd explains why well-told stories via social media are so important https://t.co/uSXjMdL9gK #socialmedia #comms pic.twitter.com/aJMMDMexeT

— Helpful Digital (@helpfuldigital) February 20, 2019

March

Head over to our Instagram account this evening for an Insta Story Q&A with @JoshJMcNally discussing his life in the RAF and playing for @LiRFC. Get your questions ready! pic.twitter.com/LDgJ4VDzga

— Royal Air Force (@RoyalAirForce) March 4, 2019

Smug work tweet #egypt pic.twitter.com/7vpfSAeAnq

— Tim Lloyd (@timolloyd) March 6, 2019

This has been a great project in the middle of a busy 5 weeks: I’d forgotten just how kind, engaged and fun NHS comms people are https://t.co/lnrDzKmr8I

— Tim Lloyd (@timolloyd) March 21, 2019

Another great day talking crisis comms with @helpfuldigital Thanks @timolloyd for sharing your insight and experience with the team ? pic.twitter.com/t3HFeVvGJ3

— Jo Westlake (@Jo_Westlake) April 2, 2019

Minus 4 outside the hotel. Might have to buy a coat and swap my loafers. pic.twitter.com/jx77a6Qjc2

— Tim Lloyd (@timolloyd) April 11, 2019

Brave clients

This post isn’t supposed to sound smug. It’s not about Helpful, but the good things that come from brave clients who approach their digital capability with intent.

What makes for a Brave Client?

They commission scoping projects rather than list requirements.
They have genuine problems to solve, but they’re willing to try different approaches to a solution.
They’re generous with their time and enthusiasm, as well as their budget.
Most importantly, they’re doing something sustainable. Helping their organisations build confidence, skills and opportunities to communicate online, for the long run.

It’s all too easy for companies to choose the do nothing option, or simply outsource and hope for the best. Because no one has time, “we tried it before” or “it’s too risky”.

Right now we are working with Brave Clients. They’re doing something sustainable around skills development and it feels to us like a genuine partnership. Their teams are learning new and sometimes tough skills. Building confidence, because they want to; they know they need to. Not because we sold them ego, fear or greed.

Among our Brave Clients are an energy company so vast and successful that they could happily outsource social media and not suffer the consequences. However they really care about their staff development, the quality of their communications and understanding the opportunities that simple, effective online campaigns can bring. Their willingness to pilot a different approach, blend a variety of learning techniques and focus on greater practical skills and less theory, is admirable.

Whomever we work for, I am always painfully aware that our approach can uncover internal politics, tricky relationships and surprising levels of inexperience. Not so this Brave Client. There’s trust and confidence, and that’s what helps us to really understand the needs of their team, and feel confident reporting on these in an honest and open way.

Brave Client number 2, a military organisation, has every right to be sensitive about their work. However, they have enough care for their 33,000 staff to recognise that these people must have their voice on social media. They recognise that it is this voice that resonates most loudly with potential recruits, supporters and other services.

More than that, the people we work with most closely at Brave Client number 2 are willing to take this message to Very Important People. They’re willing to re-shape job responsibilities, put digital communications front and centre and recognise that this is a long game.

Building confidence in a digital world

On a sunny day in Brighton 2 years ago Steph, Chris and I, with input from the rest of the team, made quite an important decision to put capability building at the core of all our client work.

Instead of building websites that sometimes go unloved or are born out of ‘launch and forget’ briefs, we’d challenge clients to do more continuous improvement of their sites, through testing, looking at data and careful crafting of content. Luke was already helping clients do this very successfully with their intranets.

Rather than tentatively help companies do paint-by-numbers social media, we’d push them to actively engage with customers: front up to the things they’d done wrong, listen and acknowledge complaints, and generally be more credible online.

And rather than deliver strategies that depending on a few good people in a digital corner to deliver, we’d focus clients’ attention on the skills and confidence of individuals in the business, from the CEO down. Or in many cases, from the customer service centre up.

Now our strapline says ‘building confidence in a digital world’.

We decided on capability building because:

a) it’s more rewarding to deliver the right thing once, than win repeat business year after year that ends up being the same set of unresolved challenges

b) we wanted to work as one team and have a shared appreciation of each other’s crafts and experience

A range of skills and experience

We were, and still are, a real mixed bag of skills and experience. From back-end web developers to front-end designers, user-obsessed project managers to former comms people delivering crisis response training.

I believe this gives us the right spread of skills, expertise and interests, to help a variety of clients build their confidence and experience, in-house. It also means that we can talk with authority about the link between, say, dark sites and crisis response, or social media engagement and how this fits with users’ wider online behaviours.

Clients haven’t baulked at this approach and we’ve delivered a few really interesting projects that combine a number of different skills from across the team. For example digital strategy reviews, which encompass owned web estate as well as other earned channels.

Building confidence internally

However, I’m not convinced we’ve actually sold the range of things we do to anyone, yet. People find us through one of a few ways, and usually because they already have a specific need, or are interested in one of our training platforms.

That makes it a tricky shift for everyone on the team. I’ve learned that colleagues like to work for a brand or product, with a specific deliverable. Trying to start each project with a cold, hard assessment of needs, rather than a menu of products or services, can be strangely overwhelming.

It takes a dose of brave pills to stand in front of a client and say:

‘you’ve asked for an intense, advanced crisis simulation, but actually we’ve looked at your current work and feel some more basic classroom training is required, first.’

Or,

‘we could close up that white space, but we think it might be more beneficial for you to join us for some user testing, so you can see where the design is performing well’

But if we’re to build a diverse business that is Helpful for clients, then we need to be flexible about the products and services that we deliver.

As a team of 11 it’d be easy at this stage to start falling into awkward silos, but this is exactly the right time to be avoiding all of those and continuing to shape a Helpful proposition for our clients.

On the receiving end of the Social Simulator

I’ve just finished helping to deliver social media simulation as part of a large incident response exercise.

We’re pretty focussed on finding things that the press, public affairs and incident management team did well online, and where they need to get better.

Handing out constructive criticism and recommendations in the aftermath of a 12, 24 or 36 hour exercise can feel awkward. No-one wants to be the critic when everyone’s sat back to catch their breath and wants to get to the bar or go home.

It’s easy to lose sight of what the participants have actually experienced.

For one thing, they’re not only dealing with what the Simulator team throw at them. Often press teams are navigating a call logging system, newspapers and TV channels that might be new to them.

If they’re operating in a different country to their day job, channels that are unfamiliar.

And what we throw at them is thousands of tweets, rumours on Whatsapp, angry customers destroying every single Facebook post they’ve ever published, journalists and customers on the phone, TV and radio interviews in front of colleagues.

Teams are sometimes at the mercy of the strategic decisions made by their superiors (or their procrastination). Simulations always have elements outside of everyone’s control: changing weather, security breaches, fake news or random tweets from the President.

And it doesn’t matter how many times we deploy the ‘we’re testing the processes not you’ slide. Ambitious people who are proud of their work want to do well. So they’re playing for professional satisfaction too.

I feel that most of the hard work for us is in planning and designing the work that goes in to a good Simulation: once it’s underway our work is almost done.

But for the teams we’re trying to develop, the work is significant and has only just begun.

How we label digital doesn’t matter – it’s the outcome that counts

I stood before a distinguished panel, in an imposing, wood-panelled room outside London that was briefly the epicentre of WW2, and delivered a pitch. It was about the benefits of having staff describe their work online, in their own words and using their own social media accounts.

I winced several times, because I had to use the word Storytelling. I have hated seeing that word, more so writing it into my work. I see it every day in huge letters just inside the News building and it did the rounds of various conferences a few years ago.

Storytelling ended up in the pitch as a suggestion from some colleagues I respect, and I was on holiday beforehand, so I left it in.

This got me thinking about the labels we attach to our work.

I’ve read a few articles saying the term Digital Transformation has become diluted.

Another colleague said that Digital Engagement is a term that’s been emptied of any meaning.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (but, I promise, not just because we won the Storytelling pitch!), I’ve changed my views on this. A bit, at least.

I think it’s OK to pick and choose from these labels, if the ends justify the means. I’m OK using Storytelling to brand a particular project, because I’m confident that we are delivering this properly: staff are building their digital capability, talking openly about their work over a number of years, and publicly responding to questions and comments.

Ghost-written corporate ‘blogs’, grip-and-grin photos at meetings and shamelessly positive stories won’t feature as Storytelling.

In the same way, I think it’s OK to continue using Digital Transformation in your organisation, provided the outcome is better online services for staff and customers, and processes redesigned for the web.

If a popular label gets people in to a room, inspires them, helps maintain momentum and deliver something meaningful to the organisation and its customers, then that’s OK.

Alex wrote of his experience in Digital Transformation:

I have not seen a digital transformation programme that got outreach right. I’ve seen push comms, push comms dressed up as engagement in the form of roadshows, social media and cake, but I haven’t seen a user needs led approach.

This sums up a lot of what is wrong about labels for me. Roadshows and cake are easy to deliver, and easy for participants to get excited about. But they don’t make change happen.

Labelling social media content as Storytelling doesn’t make it so.

Labelling a digital programme as Transformation doesn’t make it so.

In the same way that simply having sticky notes, Macbooks and hashtags doesn’t mean digital things are really happening. However, if the labels and baubles of work contribute to actual outcomes, than that is OK.

Worry less about how projects are described, and spend more time focussed on change.

Hypnobirthing for Dads

Prior to my daughter being born in February 2017, we signed up for a hypnobirthing course, as a couple, to prepare us for pregnancy, birth and the first few months.

Actually we signed up to quite a few things. As Dad, I was interested to read a few books and thought NCT was probably something to tolerate rather than look forward to. I’d had a chat with a few mates who are long-standing Dads and picked up some tips. I’m afraid to say hypnobirthing was definitely something I was tolerating for my partner’s sake.

But I couldn’t have been more wrong: it was the single best piece of preparation we took on. In fact, it was one of the best learning experiences I’ve had for a long time.

I’m not sure where the ‘hypno’ bit comes from. Don’t let that put you off. There are no swinging pocket watches.

Hypnobirthing is about understanding all the choices available to you, as a couple, during pregnancy and birth. It isn’t about forcing anyone to have waterbirths at home, or calling the child Sky or Spirit.

Winnie Westoby-Lloyd — Mouth-open air guitar pose

Hypnobirthing carves out quality time to prepare for birth, free of distractions and focussed on good practice and sensible, evidence-based advice.

I found NCT and NHS session a little chaotic as facilitators tried to keep up with ever-changing guidelines. Hypnobirthing simplified all that.

Most importantly:

it gave me a role as the partner, to provide really practical support. Things like massage for Mum, making sure the birth environment was quiet and calm.
some useful meditative practice, like better breathing (yes, for Dads too).
gave me an understanding of the NHS’s needs and how to meet these without compromising our plans
gave us options to consider. You can practice hypnobirthing, even with a C-section in hospital. Hypnobirthing is an approach, not a fixed process
this was a much more structured experience, than picking through a barrage of book and YouTube recommendations

If you’re a Dad-to-be, hypnobirthing is one of the single best investments of time and money you can both make during pregnancy. Take my word, as a cynic-turned-advocate.

Our hypnobirthing instructor was Bev Samways at Small Acorn. She was brilliant for us. I understand from other Dads that different instructors have different styles, so be sure to pick someone who’s right for you.

Getting better at training

From a recent proposal I wrote for some training projects:

We practice Collaborative Communication (based on Non-Violent Communication), to ensure that we make time to listen to the needs of participants, without making judgements, and are clear with our requests of them.

I think the client were mainly looking for information about our track record, handing out sweets to participants and what we’ll do if someone oversleeps. But I was keen, and proud, to include this too.

Training can be boutique, tailored, 121. Call it what you will. But it’s never personal unless we make the time to listen with intent, to what people need.