Month: August 2008

So I promised in my post last week to set out the six approaches to using social media tools that I developed during my work on the GCN social media review, The first is – do nothing.

Despite all the innovation and good examples of use of social media tools in large organisations over the last year or so, investing in is still a tricky decision for many. In government, budgets and headcount allocations are tight and shrinking. The return on investment of social media is largely unproven. Many large organisations are naturally risk averse.

So it would be a legitimate tactic at this point in time for an organisation to do nothing.

This isn’t necessarily a strategy of avoidance, ignorance or even procrastination. But it is a short term position and not sustainable in the longer term.

While the skills remain relatively rare and the investment in time and people to embed the skills high, its natural to take a back seat and watch others innovate so that you can learn from their relative successes and failures. As more and more good examples of using social media tools for business are evaluated and shared, a consensus on good practice will develop and organisations will become more comfortable with the idea of investing in this area.

Meanwhile, you avoid the pain of early adoption.

On the downside, user adoption of the conversational opportunities afforded by social media is much faster than for the early web. They may well expect to be able to engage with you before you are ready for it. There’s also the risk of being left behind by the speed of others’ innovation.

Doing nothing costs nothing in monetary terms but the opportunity costs could be high if the strategy is sustained for too long and you have to play catch-up.

The title of this post refers to a piece of work I did as part of the GCN social media review about a a year and a half ago. Unfortunately it never got into the final document (and in fact it was cruelly taken from me and remodelled without attribution. But that’s another story….).

I’ve been revisiting it recently for all sorts of reasons and thought it would be worth posting up here, partly because of the conversations that have been going on recently about deploying social media tools in government (Emma’s musings about creating social media toolkits in particular), partly because I think its still relevant, and partly because – although I in no way claim the content of this work is original (it’s not) – its a distillation of my thoughts at the time that I thought may be useful to someone now.

This model is an attempt to set out six different approaches to using or deploying social media techniques; be that for a particular tool, channel, business need, or whole organisational approach. It is not meant to be prescriptive, neither does it necessarily describe a roadmap that must be followed from early stage adoption through to embedding organisationally. It is based on wide reading, observation and practice but – primarily – mainly – my personal opinion.

It really just sets out options, six in total. My concern at the time of writing was that government is good at the first or the last – either do nothing or do everything. Of course, this loses sight of the opportunities that the other options might present. So I’ll deal with each option separately – and I’m grateful for any thoughts or criticisms. After all, this has been knocking around in my head for a long while as a concept without sharing it widely and i’d welcome ideas on how to improve it.

So, the six options to the modelfall under three overarching principles: observation – interaction – initiation.

• Observation: Do nothing or Listen
• Interaction: Reflect or Converse
• Initiation: Experiment or Embed

In the next few posts, I’ll set out what I mean by each of these options (ooh, what a tease).