I was discussing online communication plans with one of our
clients recently, and I heard something that surprised me.
We’d like to use more social media, but we don’t want to do
anything if we’re just going to be criticized for doing it
wrong. Everyone is so opinionated about how blogs and
Facebook pages should be used, and we don’t want to set off a bunch
of bloggers criticizing our efforts.
That’s right friends, there are many people out there who are
reluctant to use blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. And not
because of their security and privacy concerns, but because they
are afraid of being criticized by the Social Media Police.
I’ve seen a lot of this “policing” related to Twitter lately so
I’m going to focus on that channel to illustrate Social Media
Police behavior.
I have heard two prominent “Web 2.0 Experts” recently criticize
agencies that setup Twitter feeds to stream news updates. The
criticism came in two forms. One “expert” thinks everyone on
Twitter should be a person. He says that the benefit of
Twitter is to put a personal face on government. Another
expert thinks that Twitter must be a two-way medium. If you
aren’t going to engage others, he thinks you should not share your
information at all.
My first caution to the “social media police”… if you want to be
an expert in a medium as fluid as social media, I think you
need to be careful about stating facts with too much
confidence.
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One fact I’m sure of: I like to get the official EPA updates
from @usepagov in my
Twitter feed (as do over 500 other people). The real power of
Twitter, for me,
is that I setup a stream of updates that are of interest to me, but
I don’t have to monitor that stream like I have to monitor my
inbox.
Tim O’Reilly has
"http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/why-i-like-twitter.html">a really
good blog post here regarding what he likes about
Twitter. He stated his view on NPR’s Science Friday program
that the power of Twitter,
"text-decoration: underline;">for him, is that it’s a stream
of information running by his door that he can get in and out of as
time allows.
For a lot of people, Twitter is a more social channel. They might
find the @usepagov feed
to be too “impersonal” and one way. Rather than criticize an
agency trying to dive in and participate in a channel, I suggest
that those who find a particular feed or approach annoying, just
avoid it and let the collective wisdom of the crowd dictate how
a channel can be used. The benefit of social
media is that it’s easy to iterate based on user feedback and
behavior so agencies don’t have to get things perfect the first
time.
Different groups of stakeholders will gravitate to different
approaches for different reasons. Social Media uses that
don’t gain audience will eventually fade away, but not before
providing a lot of useful learning to the agencies that tried them
in the first place.
If your first instinct is to criticize an agency (or individual for
that matter) for using a medium in a way you don’t appreciate, you
might be having a chilling effect on agencies embracing these new
channels that is not unlike the chilling effect from overzealous
privacy & security experts.
