I keep hearing people talking about how they’ve written a ‘set of Twitter protocols’ or ‘a social media policy’. They cover things like what to tweet and what not to tweet, how often to tweet it and the ‘right way’ to use Twitter. (If you think you know the answer to that last one please keep it to yourself.)

Do we really need policies and protocols for every aspect of our job? If so, why are people employing us? Surely we use social media tools only if appropriate, if doing so helps deliver our communications goals and in compliance with our organisation’s existing codes of practice? Just like any other tools for communicating. When was the last time you saw a six-page document detailing how to use a telephone, what not to say on it and how often you should ring people? (Ok, in some lines of work (such as call centres) there will be protocols for using the phone, but you get my drift.)

I tried writing a social media policy myself recently. I started with the intention of providing broad concepts to help people communicate confidently online (such as ‘think about your audience’ rather than ‘don’t tweet more than fourteen times a minute’), and abandoned it when I realised I was simply reiterating what was already in our contracts and organisational policies; and what was, on the whole, common sense borne of experience.

Instead I wrote a guide to blogging and social media that aims to give colleagues some advice but tries to avoid a ‘right way’ of doing it (it is a document of good practice, not a policy). If communicating is part of someone’s job then we should trust them to do it appropriately; if they don’t then there are management protocols already at our disposal for dealing with them.

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The thing is I didn’t discover this news on Twitter. For a start I don’t follow Clarence House, because frankly I’m not that interested in them (and even if I did follow everyone I found interesting I wouldn’t have time left to breathe).

But I am interested in seeing a variety of news stories; if I read only the news I gather myself then I will only ever see what I want to, and never discover anything particularly new or challenging. Curated news is still king for me, be that online or in print (and I’ve yet to find an online newspaper lying discarded in a train carriage).

Also I need to feel confident that I’ll find at least something of interest, and I want it to be written well. That takes skill in both writing and editing, and at the moment it remains the professional media that instills in me the most confidence in those areas.

Anyway, you’ve probably read far too much hot air on this subject; and so I say goodnight.

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If there was a mantra of ‘you only get back if you put in’, I would have heard it a thousand times by now. It’s very true of course: forming connections with people via social media takes energy and commitment, just as it does in any other setting. But also the nature of your work will impact on the level of engagement you’re comfortable with.

For example, imagine someone works for an organisation with an attractive cause. They use Twitter regularly and comfortably to chat and engage with their audience. But move that person to an organisation with a complex or controversial cause and I almost guarantee they will find the experience very different, even if they’re given the same capacity and resources as before.

Take the charity Dogs Trust. It is often (and quite rightly) held up as a shining example of how a charity can use Twitter effectively. Some people see them as a benchmark; I would caution against that, and instead encourage people to understand the communications needs of their own organisation before trying to fit into someone else’s social media model. Alexandra Goldstein, of Dogs Trusts’ digital team, puts it like this:

“When we do a presentation, we’re saying ‘this is what we do’, not ‘this is what you should do’. The idea is to pick those ideas that work for your message and objectives. The conversational style for Twitter can be very powerful, but doesn’t work for everyone”.

To illustrate, imagine you are given the following instructions:

Define a dog in simple terms. Define animal welfare in simple terms. Go to a random pub. Find some people who are interested in dogs. Start an enjoyable conversation with someone about dogs. Find some people who agree with you about animal welfare.

Not too difficult, I imagine.** Now try it again, this time with a different subject:

Define citizenship in simple terms. Define citizenship education in simple terms. Go to a random pub. Find some people who are interested in citizenship education. Start an enjoyable conversation with someone about citizenship education. Find some people who agree with you about citizenship education.

Easy? I doubt it.

Citizenship and citizenship education are not easy subjects to talk about comfortably with any authority. To do so requires a lot of knowledge, a fair amount of experience and more than a generous dollop of confidence. Conversation participants will tend towards the intellectual, often have strong views, and can be quick to challenge. The poor sod ‘holding the keys’ to the Twitter account has to be able to respond engagingly, sensitively and – especially – on the same intellectual level.

It’s also much easier to strike up a relationship by responding to light, open banter than by imposing on someone’s time with a serious subject that expects a degree of reflection. It’s very hard to make small-talk around a topic such as citizenship education (small-talk about pets, on the other hand, is second nature to many people), and therefore starting a meaningful relationship with a stranger is quite difficult – particularly when they’re as physically and socially removed from you as they often are on Twitter.

I used to think Twitter was all about conversing and engaging. It certainly can be, and it is very good for that: I have found it easy to build a strong network of friends and colleagues in my personal capacity as @citizensheep. But I have also found it incredibly hard to strike the right balance with our organisation’s Twitter presence (@citizenship).

I have come to the conclusion that if my work strategy, capacity and comfort levels lead me simply to broadcast rather than chat, then why shouldn’t I? After all, the power is in the hands of the reader: it’s their choice to read my tweets; in fact, they probably won’t even follow me if they don’t find me interesting.

The loss from not engaging is ours; and, if our strategy is to get information out, those losses would be even greater if I didn’t use Twitter at all.

Twitter is a social tool; there is no correct way to use it. Different organisations will need to use it in different ways (if at all), and with different levels of importance given to it. Dogs and citizens are, after all, very different beasts.

PS

* You can probably replace ‘Twitter’ with ‘social media’ throughout this post.

** This is in no way meant to undervalue the excellent work of the Dogs Trust’s Digital team. I’m not for a moment suggesting their job is easier than ours, just that the use of tools appropriate for one organisation will not always be so for another. And many thanks to said team for their input in this post.

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The research was undertaken last week by online pollsters YouGov, on behalf of the Citizenship Foundation. Almost 4,000 young people between 14 and 25 took part in the survey.

In answer to the question ‘How much, if at all, do you trust the following to tell the truth?’, journalists fared poorly. The scores for ‘little to no trust’ make worrying reading:

Or do they? Is it in fact reassuring that The Sun isn’t trusted by its vast readership, or that newspapers don’t necessarily hold as much sway over the public as maybe we believe?

Further information

• Survey results summary (pdf)
• Full survey results (pdf)

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A recent YouGov poll for the Citizenship Foundation interviewed almost 4,000 14-25 year-olds about their attitudes to political participation, politicians and power in the United Kingdom.

• The majority of respondents said they would be likely to vote, with 59 per cent seeing voting as the most useful way of participating in local or national politics.
• 32 per cent said they were knowledgeable about “the way that local and national government works”; of those, 71 per cent said the internet was a source of their news.
• 85 per cent had never joined a campaigning group in their local community (fairly consistent across the age ranges), and 50 per cent thought doing so would make no difference to the issues the tackle (also fairly consistent).
• 51 per cent had never joined a campaigning group on a social networking site, but 42 per cent had; however 65 per cent thought doing so would make no difference.
• 54 per cent said they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online.
• Email was seen as the most effective tool for making a political difference online. This doubles at the top end of the age bracket. Twitter scores very low and only increases fractionally with older respondents; although interestingly there is a significant spike among 16 year-olds (almost treble the score of younger age groups).

Further information

This post was originally published on the Citizenship Foundation Webmaster blog. The research was commissioned to mark the Citizenship Foundation’s 20th year.

• Press releases
• Download the survey results summary (pdf)
• Download the full survey results (pdf)

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“GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool which shows about 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period between August 20th and 21st. The tweets were harvested to find people saying ‘good morning’ in English as well as several other languages.”

GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo.

Visit GoodMorning!

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Since nothing happened the first time I tweeted, I suspect that Chiltern were not using Twitter then. However, when I tweeted again recently…

“I’ve asked before & I’ll ask again: whose stupid idea was it to put a fixed, redundant arm on the window side of Chiltern Train seats? Grr.”

they were quick to respond:

“@citizensheep I’ll find out. Do you have a direct email address so I can get an answer for you?”

Wow. I felt quite ashamed by the tone of my tweet, and I made that clear in our subsequent email exchange. I was briefly in contact with Emma, who was personal, friendly and helpful; she offered to take my enquiries to colleagues and promised to keep me informed, even though it could take a while.

Today I got another email from Emma, with a helpful response about arm rests:

“This was standard on the refurbished fleet. The twin seats have three arm rests, one at each end, and one between the two seats. I believe that the aisle-side arm rest and the central arm rest are moveable to allow for easy seat access for people of reduced mobility, or those who are of a slightly larger disposition. The window-side arm rests are fixed as this is not a requirement in this position.  Essentially, it is a copy of the original train seating – we have not changed it, but your comments about the fixed arm rests have been noted by our engineering department.” [my bold]

So, Chiltern Railways, today you win at communication.

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However, the episode did spawn this blog post, which – as well as lambasting Habitat for getting it wrong – has some good tips for making productive use of corporate mistakes on Twitter (and indeed any other space in which an organisation has a presence).

Visit How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study

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Visit Government Department News Feeds on Twitter

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This post will appear particularly self-indulgent: it’s trying to articulate something that I haven’t managed well out loud. It’s also one of those awkward situations where the post is really meant for a specific group of people but is on a public blog. And besides, I’ve only dared to write it because Nick told me to. So do feel free to leave at this point.

After my marriage broke up three and a half years ago I didn’t really have any friends in Birmingham that I could just drop in on (or maybe I did, but I tend to need explicit permission else I feel intrusive). They are all in couples and some have children. And most are mutual friends: I didn’t want to put them in the awkward position of being in the middle (and I felt awkward too) so I would just hide away from them. And in any case they are rarely free at weekends.

They would encourage me to try and meet people. I really wanted to but I didn’t know how, and would just wander around town drinking coffee, reading, watching people, and berating myself for never talking to anyone. I did that pretty much every weekend for three years, to the point that I hated weekends.

Then one evening a friend invited me to a pub to meet a few Birmingham bloggers. I had a blog that I updated about as often as my cat went outside (she hates going outside: I have to chuck her out the front so that she has to walk round to the back to be let in; it’s the only exercise she gets). I had also tried dabbling with Twitter, but I updated that even less frequently. So I went along; partly out of curiosity, but mainly in order to return the camera that my friend had accidentally left with me. I felt awkward, presumed I’d made a tit of myself, and eventually went home wishing I’d never gone and vowing never to go again.

The next morning, to my great surprise, I discovered that the people I thought I’d made a fool of myself in front of had started following me on Twitter. So I followed back.

Since then I’ve been involved (admittedly with varying levels of reliability on my part) with Birmingham bloggers, Birmingham Social Media Cafe, Eleven hours on the Eleven Bus, Twitpanto, Big City Talk, Digital Mentors, We Share Stuff, Rhubarb Radio, 4am Project, BARG, and any number of other activities that result from a criss-cross of each other. And more importantly I’ve found a lot of friends, including some that I hope will allow me to call them fairly close friends.

I won’t name people because it wouldn’t be fair, but I could easily list twenty who I see fairly regularly and would regard as friends; and seven or eight of those are particularly important to me. And bear in mind that I’m not usually good at thinking of people as ‘friends’. I tend to love people and want to befriend them, but presume they don’t feel the same; and I get very low if I think I’ve upset them or said something stupid (which happens pretty much all the time). So it takes me a long time to feel comfortable with people and to presume I’m worthy of being labeled their ‘friend’.

Except, with the speed of conversation – both inane and important – that happens on Twitter, friendships flourished much more quickly than I could have imagined.

But, like I said, it’s not just down to Twitter. It helped the process, and without it I would probably never have met these people; but the people had to be there in the first place. And lovely people have lovely friends, and so the networks grow.

And that’s the tangible part. Since meeting these people a mere eight months ago, my social life has transformed. In a good way, because I have lots of friends and people to go drinking with.

However it’s also very strange, because I still don’t understand what people see in me. (I’m not trying to be pittyingly self-effacing, this is leading up to something; bear with me.) I love interacting with these people, and I think every one of them is pretty remarkable.

But not me. I’m just me: bumbling, insecure and too scared of change to do anything at all (except escape my house as often as I can). So when someone made a website in tribute of me I didn’t really know how to deal with it. People affectionately (I believe) posted up stuff that I’d done or said.

It’s very sweet, but why me? Why not one of the others? I can think of plenty of people who are way more worthy. The thing is, do they see it? I don’t see what’s so special about me; in fact I’m convinced that nothing is. Apparently some people disagree with me; but would they recognise themselves as being special? Probably not.

So I want them to know that – for every one of them who has posted to that site – I would have had it the other way round.

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