People ask me. They say, “Hey Dave, what about Social Media?” What about it? It’s a cesspool.
I don’t have a point. Here are some disconnected thoughts:
Cool Graphs Make You Look Smart – But They’re Dumb
I fondly recall the days when I briefed my social media illiterate boss on our booming Facebook stats.
Let’s be honest, sometimes you need to sling a sexy social media graph in front of your organization to show them that you’re the man. That’s cool and it works.
“Sir, last week we had 3,000 views on our Facebook photo of the week.”
“Wow,” he said confidently, “keep up the great work.” He made a note to himself to go home and tell his wife because she likes Facebook.
As a PAO you’re often the social media dude. You’re the organization’s go-to person when something happens in the wild world of likes. We know its more important to communicate about effects, not efforts; keep reading and decide what you can do with social media.
Between us PAOs – the easy stats mean nothing. “We have 6K followers.” That means nothing. “Our tweet received 67 likes.” Still nothing. “There were 43 reflections on this post.” Meaningless.
To quote one of my favorite coup strategists, “How many polar bears have you saved this morning by clicking Like on a Facebook page? Not really.” Spoken with Russian accent, his point is that people are more important than social media followers.
PAO – The Social Media Man
If you really want your organization to understand social media, give them a class on what all this shit means. If you don’t know, learn.
Once you learn you’ll likely be pretty disappointed on what your stats actually mean; likely nothing in terms of effectiveness.
Create Less Choices
The less pages you have, the better. The better you will control your message, the broader you can connect your audience and the less content you need.
Our poor unit and family members now have to follow the post’s page, the division’s page, the brigade’s page, the division commander and sergeant major’s page, same for the command team at brigade, the family page for each. Oh man, it’s too much.
Decide which level you want to connect with your audience and drive traffic to that. I personally recommend brigade level (O6) but it depends on your organization and audience.
Creating the Flock
On the bright side, the one thing more and active followers gets you is a group of passive supporters. Use this when you’re organization has a crisis. The couple thousand sheep following your unit’s Facebook page will likely prove to be a small alliance when your organization is in trouble.
So should your organization be on social media? Yep. Every channel. Should you communicate on social media? For sure. It’s another medium to communicate and you need as many as you can get. It’s especially effective for some audiences and especially ineffective for others. It’s like burpees, they suck but they must be useful for something. Embrace it.
It’s not all useless … I guess.
