The ELGL resident social media guru, Patrick Rollens, is back with his take on services that claim they can better engage or track engagement than Facebook and Twitter. Read his take below and feel free to respond with your own experiences.
Engagement
Here’s a fun game: next time you’re at a local government seminar or mixer, gently steer the conversation over to social media and then see how long it takes for someone to bemoan the challenges of “engagement.” I’m guessing the topic will come up before you’re through with your first Diet Coke.
Defined broadly, engagement measures the interaction between your organization’s social media presence and the residents (or customers) you serve. If someone asks a question about the swimming pool hours, and your social media team is able to respond with an answer in just a few minutes, that’s positive engagement. The resident will be satisfied, and (since social media takes place in public) other residents who might have similar questions will see the response and be empowered to make decisions accordingly.
A good track record on engagement can bring in new followers, Facebook likes, retweets and boost your overall reach. Simply put, if you’re being a good citizen on social media, that’ll be reflected in the metrics, which are becoming increasingly important as local government organizations are beginning to track the success of social media efforts. Services like Mindmixer and Measured Voice have capitalized on this voracious appetite for quantifiable metrics, and the result is a veritable slew of well-intentioned charts, graphs and figures that purport to “drill down” into your organization’s presence on social media.
All these numbers are a dream come true for the Excel wizard in the manager’s office, but don’t get too wrapped up in the various services services that are available to parse the numbers. The basic dashboard tools offered by Facebook and Twitter give a good top-line look at your social media engagement efforts, and these companies are rolling out new analysis features each quarter. And best of all, they’re free!
All Mixed Up
I’ve heard a lot lately from companies like Mindmixer and Measured Voice, both of which would just love to sell you a product to help increase citizen engagement. I missed the ELGL webinar from Mindmixer a few weeks back, but they’ve reached out to us in the past to promote their products.
When reading about the services Mindmixer offers, I was reminded of a point I tried to make on my very first ELGL webinar back in December 2013: Go where your audience is.Unfortunately, Mindmixer turns this idea on its head by asking your audience to come to its custom-made forum to participate in the discussion. Frankly I’m skeptical that the benefit is worth it for all but the very largest government organizations.
Let’s take a look at EngageEvanston.org, a Mindmixer site from the City of Evanston in the Chicago suburbs. They’ve been using Mindmixer for a few years now, but I took a look at the seven topics that were put up for discussion in 2013 – roughly one every two months, on average, on topics ranging from snow removal to tourist attractions. Based on metrics available on EngageEvanston.org, these seven topics yielded 447 total interactions on Mindmixer in 2013. Evanston has a population of about 75,000, so, by my back-of-the-napkin math, Mindmixer was able to engage about half a percent of the population. Yep, that’s right – half a percent.
Now let’s look at Wooster, Ohio, which used Mindmixer for two topics in 2013. Total interaction that year was 143 – out of a population of just over 26,000. Once again, my quick-and-dirty math showed that Mindmixer reached roughly half a percent of Wooster’s population.
No, Really: Go Where Your Audience Is
Now, I’m betting that in both cases, the respective Facebook pages of Evanston and Wooster could have generated far more discussion and engagement. Evanston’s Facebook page has 5,297 likes and Wooster’s has 3,143 and using back-of-the-napkin math again that represents 7% of Evanston’s population and about 12% of Wooster’s. This on a platform citizens are already using!
So why not present your “community topics” using a service that is already a part of your residents’ everyday lives? Why pay Mindmixer and ask your residents to register for a new forum that, on an aggregate level, replicates the basic functions of Facebook? This approach might make sense for San Francisco or Austin, but I’m not convinced it’s the right choice for small and mid-sized municipalities.
Measuring Voices
Measured Voice is a tech company that offers custom social media admin tools for municipalities. It’s useful if you have a very large organization with lots of people on your social media team – after all, Measured Voice began as a way to consolidate the social media efforts of USA.gov. That’s a tall order for sure.
But the part that stood out to me when I listened in on a Measured Voice webinar last month is that it’s SLOOOW. The entire point of their product is to take something that’s supposed to happen in real-time (social media) and sloooow it down by adding layers of editing and approval. This, to me, is almost unconscionable. Something is wrong in local government if we feel the need to add bureaucracy to social media, which is supposed to be agile, responsive and, y’know, FUN. Rather than slow social media down to the snail’s pace of government bureaucracy, we should be looking for ways to speed it up while still delivering fast, accurate information.
I wouldn’t be quite so critical of Mindmixer and Measured Voice if they weren’t running up against free analytic services that are already available from Facebook and Twitter. The value they add for small to mid-sized towns seems marginal compared to the raw data you can tease out of Facebook and Twitter metrics.
Prove Me Wrong
Now’s your chance to prove me wrong. I’d like to hear from you. Are you using metrics to track your social media efforts? Have you considered Mindmixer or related services to foster community engagement? Can you beat my half-percent engagement metric? The only thing I like better than making a point is being proven wrong! Send me your success stories and we’ll continue the discussion in a subsequent column.