How social media can bring strategic marketing thinking into government

It’s been almost 4 years since we started the Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing (CEPSM) . We set forth a very clear mission: To advance the marketing discipline in the public sector. How have we gone about doing this? Through our core functions of speaking, training and consulting.

The definition

Here’s how I like to simplify the marketing definition, whenever anyone asks: “A strategic process and set of tools wrapped in a philosophy for helping an organization do what it wants to do.”

People forget that marketing is first and foremost a process that helps organizations attain their objectives as effectively and efficiently as possible. It follows  a specific process and various frameworks (such as the 4P’s) that have been developed over many decades.

Why did we start CEPSM ?

• Marketing is one of  the most misunderstood functions in the public sector, often confused with “promotion” and “marketing communications”.
• A major primary research study on The State of Marketing in the Public and Non-Profit Sectors reinforced our beliefs early on.
• There is confusion between the “marketing” function and the “communications” function. In some cases the two are falsely seen as the same thing.
• There is a very evident lack of marketing expertise within the government environment. People are being put into senior “marketing” positions having never taken a single marketing course in their lives, let alone attained a business degree.
• Marketing is perceived as an “art” with no attention being paid to the “science” side. Big mistake.

What has changed?

Very little so far. Having worked with over 50 government clients I can say there is still a tremendous issue with people working in silos and not sharing experiences with each other, thus repeating the same mistakes. Tactics are still being developed without any strategies to guide them. Something needs to be done at a more holistic level.

Every year about 15-20 people go through our Professional Certificate in Public Sector and Non-Profit Marketing (through Carleton University). This course (or something equivalent) should be a mandatory prerequisite for anyone taking on a “marketing” position in government, or a “communications” position that has marketing elements to it. The problem is that people think marketing is some “fluffy” position that is responsible for glossy brochures and tv ads. As a result, any kind of formal training is often ignored. This is especially frustrating for people that actually have marketing/business degrees and are put into these positions surrounded by people (often their bosses) who don’t (I have met plenty).

What keeps me believing?

I have recently noticed an interesting rise in thirst for strategic marketing thinking in government. The neat thing is that most people don’t know that they’re asking for it , albeit indirectly. I’m referring to the thirst for my niche, i.e. anything to do with web 2.0, gov 2.0, social media, etc…

When it comes to social media marketing, there is a lot more interest than pure old “marketing”. Thanks to this, I have been invited to numerous senior management speaking engagements , conference presentations, and workshop courses. The  interesting part is that what I teach in my social media marketing workshops, is essentially  “marketing 101″ with a modern twist that takes into account the necessary organizational culture change that is needed to integrate social media  into an organizational strategy. Therefore I am able to put forth basic marketing principles and get people thinking using the strategic mindset that is “marketing”.

My conclusion from all of this….

…the “sexiness” of social media is a great opportunity to push forward “strategic thinking” and the “marketing process” in government! Especially since social media is something that very few people understand, but almost all want to participate in. Of course there are elements of the marketing process that social media has re-defined (e.g. marketing research can be crowd-sourced, niche audiences can be easily found, feedback can be collaborative, etc…) but the importance of  having a “strategy before tactics” will stand the test of time.

Long overdue Podcamp Toronto 2009 debrief

Just so you know, it bugs me like crazy not be able to dump my thoughts on various time-sensitive issues that occur on a daily basis. It’s unfortunately that time of year again when my post frequency is hindered as a result of “March Madness” (year-end for government clients). I am working with about six clients at the moment in addition to regular speaking engagement travel gigs. This is more than enough to eat up all of my time.  My “blog about this” list has accumulated over 60 items since my last post, however the #1 item I want to write about first is my great experience at Podcamp Toronto 2009.

As I usually do with my conference “debrief” posts, the following are essentially key items derived from my handwritten notes for each session I attended. The quantity of bullets under each post is not a reflection of the session quality but rather “new” things that I learned and/or people that I met. Sometimes a single item and/or contact can be extremely valuable to me. There is little grammatical structure to these bullets since they are meant to be a brain dump. So without further ado here are the sessions I attended…

Building Relationships with Word of Mouth and PR Practitioners While Maintaining Credibility with Your Audience – Anita Clarke, David Jones, Eden Spodek and Matthew Stradiotto, moderated by Keith McArthur.

My Two Cents: Walked in late, however it is always refreshing to hear what “hobby” bloggers have to say. I often find myself forgetting that most bloggers have personal blogs unrelated to their day jobs.

• Sysomos is apparently emerging as a competitor to Radian6 (which I use religiously)
• Blog pitching firms expect bloggers to show them their private metrics in order to gauge performance
• Quantcast Analytics is a very useful, publicly accessible analytics site
• Many “hobbyist” bloggers don’t care about analytics, trends, marketing space, etc…

Stalking Your Audience for Fun & Profit – Monitoring Your Community & Competitors – Sean Power on the O’Reilly book \”Complete Web Monitoring\”

My Two Cents: I was absolutely amazed as to how many great free monitoring tools I had not previously heard of. Sean did an amazing job presenting a massive amount of content in a short amount of time.

• I was told to watch the video “Website is Down” to get an idea of what IT guys do during their work day
• There is absolutely no privacy online…NONE, ZIP, NADA!
• Most visitor behaviour assumptions can actually be measured
• Monitoring 101: What did they do? Could they do it?  How did they do it?
• Minefield of buzzwords out there
• Key items to ask:
  • How did users get there?
  • Places and tasks: What are they doing? Where are they going?
  • Where did they leave? Why?
• Install Clicky –>Spy software analytics
• People do this: Consume, Click, Give Data, Navigate
• Neat metric: Percent of people that scrolled to the bottom of the page (Visitor attention vs. absolute scrolling reach)
• Install Clicktale & Crazyegg–>Real-time monitoring software examples, both track scrolling & fold.
• Neat metric: Blank fields left by user (if you have forms)
• Install Bitcurrent –>Replays user paths
• Need to start using the amazing exit survey tool called 4Q
• Install Monitorus
• Start using Google Sets
• Use SpyFu to find out what competitors are paying for various keywords
• Start tracking my TinyURL’s in Google (great performance metric)
• Use MyBlogLog to establish your identity
• Various additional Social Media Monitoring Tools worth using:
  • Google Alerts
  • Whatchthatpage
  • Roll Yo (your own search engine)
  • Bigboards (checks forums)
  • Search IRC
  • Twemes
  • Facebook Lexicon
  • TweetDeck
  • SiteVolume (site seems to be down right now – March 1st, 09)
  • Buzzfeed
• Download the Facebook Socialistics app to analyze your social network
• Use BackType to track comments
• Those interested in being part of the analytics community should look at becoming moderators on the web analytics list
• Platforms worth looking into: StatZen and WikiMonitor (?) to measure wiki metrics (Sean or anybody, I need a link here! Can’t find it using Google…may have written it down wrong).
• Look into Trendrr
• Use Compete to look at competitor traffic

How social media can be used to demystify public service institutions to encourage civic engagement - Jairus Pryor (Bank of Canada) and Audra Williams (Parliament of Canada).

My Two Cents: Walked in late to this one as well so I didn’t catch everything. However, I was very happy to see someone else speaking on public sector social media usage, albeit more so the political side. I tend to have an issue with political examples here in Canada since I find that simply using the “tools” doesn’t mean squat if your belief system and political culture are not in tune with the basic principles of “web 2.0″ (collaboration, transparency, 2-way engagement, etc…). Those of you wondering what I’m talking about haven’t worked with the Prime Minister’s Office.

• Conservatives tend to use more social media “tools” than the Liberals
• The Bank of Canada has a wiki, a fake blog, a Flickr account (for press to get pics from) and a Twitter account.
• Advice: “Once you have managed to start using a tool and bypassed the red-tape successfully, figure out ways to use the tool in new ways”
• Great quote: “What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent”.

Government 2.0 – A discussion on the expanding role of social media and government/citizen interaction, right here in Canada - Mike Kujawski (That would be me!).”

My Two Cents: Great crowd, although I wish I had more time allotted than 30 minutes. I was just getting started! Here is the link to the video of the presentation. I have no notes for this one for obvious reasons.

Making Traditional Media a Little More Social - Using Twitter, wikis and live-blogging at the Globe and Mail - Mathew Ingram.

My Two Cents: Great to see the person behind the Globe & Mail’s social media initiatives.

• Globe & Mail has created a real-time live-blogging widget (based on Cover it Live) that also captures Twitter & blogosphere discussion that is tagged appropriately.
• Good quote in the newspaper world: ” The people formerly known as the audience”.

A Social Media State of the Union Discussion - Collin Douma.

My Two Cents: Always a great open great discussion when Collin is moderating.

• There is still widespread debate as to the meaning of the word “podcasts” now that mainstream media is using it quite loosely.
• It is important for us social media folk to look outside the fishbowl of our own community.

My Two Cents: Solid presentation on overcoming barriers.

• Important to not use buzzwords among clients…focus on the purpose/benefits of the tool instead (e.g. instead of wiki say “editable, shareable document”)
• Look into the Society for New Communications Research.
• Good books: “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, “Made to Stick” and anything by Maslow.

Taking Control of Success - John Meadows, Steve Saylor, Keith Burtis and Katherine Matthews.

My two cents: Good open discussion on the various perspectives on “success” in the social media community. I mentioned the importance of setting objectives, which many “hobbyist” community members tend to forget…hence why they have a difficulty in measuring performance and defining “success” , which in my opinion is completely relative and dependant on your own personal objectives.

• Great quote “If you’re interested, you’ll be interesting”
• I should try out Batchbook

Lunch & Learn on the latest in mobile social media marketing - Robin Browne.

Putting things in perspective…

Those of you that regularly ready my blog are most likely aware of my deep fascination with not only social media, but the cultural, anthropological and psychological aspects behind it’s use. I’m always interested in “what’s next” and the “why” behind it. The future us “social media junkies” talk about is the semantic web (aka. web 3.0)…a fascinating, widely philosophized topic that you can easily get lost in.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, expressed his vision of the Internet as follows:

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

Sounds like a scary thought, but we’re all contributing to it whether we like it or not. Professor Michael Wesch explains it best in his video “Web 2.0 – The Machine is Using Us“. Today I stumbled upon a visual representation of the blogosphere that really got me thinking. I have pasted it below.

This is an actual diagram depicting the blogosphere. The core represents mainstream discussion (politics, entertainment, headline news, etc…), whereas the branches represent increasingly obscure topics the further out they stretch. The lines represent connections between bloggers (e.g. inbound links and comments). The details are explained here. You can take this a step further and argue that this is a visual representation of human thought…begging the question, what happens when “this thing” thinks on it’s own?

This is not the reason for this random post however. Rather, it is something that got me thinking about much bigger things. I’ll give you a hint: Think of what  that illustration above really looks like (and no, it’s not from “The Mothman Prophecies“).

…did someone say space? the universe? stars? galaxies?

I want you all to watch this humbling video that caught my attention today. It’s not anything new, but it is presented in a powerful way and puts our “micro” level problems in perspective relative to the “macro” universe we live in.

Thoughts?