Try POST Strategy: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology
To be completely honest, I created this blog several years ago as an experiment. I wanted to see if I could maintain it. As you can see, that didn’t work out. I also wanted to see if blogs really work. I’m still not sure. As a marketing communications professional, I see more value in blogs for marketing and community outreach purposes than for personal purposes.
If I was developing a strategic plan for a blog hosted by a municipal government, I would use the method recommended by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research in their book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. According to the authors, they use the “POST method” to build social technology strategies. “POST” stands for people, objectives, strategy and technology (p. 66). The technology will be a blog.
People: In a nutshell, a municipal government delivers services to its residents. Those services can include anything from garbage collection and infrastructure to public safety and facilities. If I was to create a blog for these residents, I need to make sure that they would engage with this type of social media and find value in its use.
Objectives: Li and Bernoff recommend choosing from the five most common business objectives for a social media initiative of this type – listening, talking, energizing, supporting and/or embracing (p. 68-69). For a municipal government, I would choose the listening and talking objectives. Governments don’t sell products like private businesses so the other objectives don’t apply or wouldn’t be considered priorities. City governments should listen to the needs of their residents and show residents how the City is investing their tax dollars.
Strategy: I believe a City government should begin with a strategy to listen to its residents and then prepare to educate and engage them through online interaction. I would suggest developing a strategy to monitor the social media technologies most used by residents of the jurisdiction. While reading and listening to their online comments, create a method for tracking those comments and gaining insights from common themes. Then formulate methods to provide information that will help the residents understand the special issues or complexities of City government. And finally, engage these online resources as often as possible. Two-way communication is the key to gaining their trust and honest feedback. Disagreeing and arguing would ruin the value of this strategy. In essence, this strategy is best summed up in three words: listen, educate and engage.
What do you think of this strategy? Am I missing anything?
Tags: communications strategy
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
