1 Joe Mitchell Our people are our voice Towards a social media strategy for the United Nations Summer 2012 v.0.5 First draft by Joe Mitchell (@j0e_m) Disclaimer: this document does not (yet) represent the views of any people actually employed by the UN.
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1
Joe Mitchell
Our people are our voice Towards a social media strategy for the United Nations Summer 2012 v.0.5
First draft by Joe Mitchell (@j0e_m) Disclaimer: this document does not (yet) represent the views of
any people actually employed by the UN.
Towards a UN social media strategy Joe Mitchell @j0e_m
L. Tools for brand accounts workflow................................................................... 78
M. How to deal with multilingual and multinational brands on Facebook ................... 80
Towards a UN social media strategy Joe Mitchell @j0e_m
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1. Executive summary
There is currently no social media strategy for the United Nations. This
document attempts to provide a platform upon which to build one. It was written
by Joe Mitchell, a social media intern, based on evidence from existing UN
documentation, interviews with UN system-wide social media specialists, and
desk-based internet research on the best practice in the public and private
sectors.
This document in 30 seconds
In sum, the UN should aim for a model of corporate social media use in which its
staff freely form a coherent group who discuss the UN’s work and engage with
the public in the digital space. Staff should be empowered with support and
training from the Department of Public Information (DPI). Corporate or brand
accounts should remain only where they contribute to a specific strategic goal,
such as being used to highlight the best of staff-produced content and
performing a sign-posting role, helping users find and engage with the UN staff
in the field they are interested in.
Our overall vision is that our people will be our voice.
Our mission is to help staff realise this vision through training and support. We
aim to create a UN that is: more human, open and transparent. It will be better
connected internally to staff, externally to stakeholders, and globally to the
world’s public.
These aims must be made real through specific, measurable, attainable, relevant
and timely (SMART) goals, such as: we will train 0.5% of UN staff in good social
media practice by 2014. We expect the outcome to be an a 1000% increase in
UN staff using digital media at least 5 times per week by 2014.
A full matrix of objectives, outputs (what we do), intermediate and overall
outcomes (the expected result), along with ways to measure each of these, is
provided in section 5.3.
Each section of the rest of this document is briefly summarised below.
Audience
There are at least two billion internet users on Earth. We cannot communicate
with all of them at once. We must segment the audience to make it easier to get
our messages across. This segmentation is partly designed into the world’s
population through language use and platform use, but we should also think
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about other ways we can segment the audience to improve efficiencies. Section
three also shows that there is a lack of information on what the audience wants
from the UN, and that we do not know enough about global perceptions and
knowledge of the UN. As social media use grows over the next decades to cover
the entire world, we must build the data that will help direct us to engage with
the world’s populations on the platforms that they choose, in the languages they
speak.
Existing objectives
A review of a range of documentation relating to mandates and suggested roles
for communication at the UN shows a lack of coherent, prioritised and ultimately,
strategic, objectives, targets and measures. The single strategic document found
that provides clear goals and an accountability framework is the Senior
Manager’s Compact, which will presumably need to be reviewed for the new
USG. This represents an excellent opportunity for grasping a more strategic
approach for the entire department.
Suggested Vision, Mission and Objectives
A final set of objectives will be developed with extensive DPI/wider secretariat
consultation and buy-in – a process that should be led by senior management.
However, it is helpful to present examples of what these should look like. This
follows the principles laid out in the box above.
Evaluation
New and improved evaluation techniques will be required to monitor the success
of our work and to guide refinements as necessary. This will include simple data
gathering, greater use of staff surveys (or pulling more data from those that
already exist) and, more expensively, but essentially for long term evaluation,
comprehensive audience research performed by independent bodies.
Plan for staff social media training
DPI should develop ‘train the trainer’ programmes, a network of UN-system
champions, and constantly make the case for best practice in social media. We
must reach out to other departments to ensure a coherent approach across UN
staff wherever they are. Training programmes should begin with senior staff to
seek the right buy-in, providing safe practice spaces where required. Essentially
the DPI should manage a behaviour change campaign, providing advocacy,
inspiration, seizing early adopters and using them to pass on the training to
colleagues. DPI could develop a ‘training’ kit for these champions, such as those
who already sit on the DPI social media team. The broad idea is that the goal to
become a social / networked organisation through social and networked
methods.
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Plan for UN corporate accounts
While we aim to encourage staff to lead digital discussions, ‘corporate’ or ‘brand’
accounts will still be required during the transition, and in the long term as
starting points for the audience and as amplifiers or highlighters of UN staff
communication. Realising this goal will require a comprehensive audit of social
media accounts owned by the UN (not just DPI) and a consolidation according to
the overall strategic goals. Accounts that remain after consolidation must be
more targeted to engage people at the closest possible level, which will require
greater use of, and greater responsibility being devolved to, UNICs and country
offices. Each brand account should have a micro-strategy with individual targets,
a content plan, and have one overall supervisor.
DPI’s coordination role across the UN system
While it would make sense for DPI to take a leadership role across the system, it
currently lacks the resources to do this, and the current decentralised system of
informal networking is working relatively well for now. The absence of an
authoritative centre may present problems in the long term, especially as social
media use expands. In the short term, DPI could improve efficiencies through
managing system-wide procurement and providing a single-point-of-contact for
platform owners (i.e. Facebook and Google public policy officers).
Next steps
Immediately, DPI should: survey all UN staff, audit all UN social media accounts
and start seeking cross-UN feedback on this strategy.
Within the next three months, DPI should develop a staff training programme,
liaise with HR, legal and senior management to build robust support for strategy.
Within the next six months, objectives and SMART goals for the next four years
should be decided by USG with consultation with members of the Committee on
Information.
Appendices and Annexes
The document provides a range of annexes and appendices that represent the
background data that the document was built upon. These will be useful in
creating a more formal strategy.
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2. Background and methodology This attempt to write a draft strategy was inspired by a need to rethink the UN’s
Facebook presence, including producing an appropriate platform strategy. But a
strategy for any individual platform cannot exist without referring to larger
overall goals of the UN in social media. These do not exist, so this document is
designed to generate discussion and encourage a move towards more strategic
use of social media, and better strategic communication by the UN overall.
Research was carried out in the forms of desk-based internet research,
interviews with social media practitioners across the UN system, and an
examination of particularly successful examples of social media use from across
the private sector (particularly in consumer goods companies) as well as notable
UN agencies and national governments.
About the author
Joe Mitchell was an intern with the social media team in the Department for
Public Information’s Strategic Communications Division from May 2012 to
September 2012. His academic background is in law and governance (BA
Oxford, LLM London) and he has worked in the communication and research
fields for range of charities, politicians, media. His most recent job was in UK
government communication strategy in which he worked on a range of digital
campaigns and strategic planning.
He joined the UN while undertaking an MA Global Governance at the University
of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) and is passionate about democratising global
governance institutions. He benefits from both a lack of experience and
knowledge of the internal workings of the UN and a clear idea of what a high
quality communications strategy looks like.
He just about scrapes into the sociological/marketing category of ‘digital native’,
‘millennial worker’ and ‘generation Y’.
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3. Audience
3.1. Who do we hope to engage with in social media?
The UN can reasonably claim to serve everyone on earth. As the Department of
Public Information forms the centre of UN-wide communications, it is assumed
that we aspire to communicate with all seven billion people.
For the DPI social media team specifically, this means everyone with a social
media profile. These are called ‘the audience’ throughout the document; though
note that this is shorthand for ‘group we want to engage with’, rather than
‘group we want to receive information’.
There are 2.3bn users of the internet.1 According to comScore, 82% of internet
users use social networking sites2 (this rises to 98% in certain countries3) – see
the image below. However, the comScore data is only based on 43 countries, a
typical problem with commercial data.
Whatever the precise number, there are at least 1bn people on earth who the
UN can hope to reach through social media – and this is growing all the time in
developing countries.
3.2. How can we segment this group of people?
Talking to a billion people at once is impossible: if you’re talking to everyone,
you’re talking to no one. Language, cultural and contextual difference mean that
1 http://www.itu.int/ITU-
D/ict/statistics/material/pdf/2011%20Statistical%20highlights_June_2012.pdf 2 http://blog.comscore.com/2012/01/its_a_social_world.html Note that they claim that
this means 1.2bn use social networking sites – clearly estimating a vastly smaller
internet user population than ITU. 3 http://www.foliomag.com/2011/report-98-percent-u-s-online-population-uses-social-
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3.6. What is social media’s mother tongue?
The digital public space theoretically makes country borders irrelevant in terms
of communication and information. Language, however, still divides the world’s
peoples. It is important to know what language people are engaging in social
media so that we can join them. Unfortunately, data on languages tends only to
be provided in terms of nations – there are very few ‘global’ language measures.
Another problem is that literacy, rather than spoken language, is what we need
to measure.8
Most widely used languages:
The table below contains a list of the world’s languages sorted by most populous
literate populations:
Language Literate population Percentage of the
world's literate
population
Chinese (Mandarin) 794,947,565 14.68%
English 572,977,034 10.58%
Spanish 295,968,824 5.47%
Hindi/Urdu 230,560,488 4.26%
Arabic 229,444,922 4.24%
French 220,326,329 4.07%
Russian 194,503,049 3.59%
Portuguese 191,739,619 3.54%
Japanese 126,159,159 2.33%
Bengali 107,897,009 1.99%
German 93,969,555 1.74%
The source document of the table above also suggests that English is by far the
most popular publishing language for books, newspapers, film and web pages. 9
The six official UN languages
The UN’s official languages, not the working languages, are Arabic, Chinese
(Mandarin), English, French, Russian, and Spanish (Castilian).10 These ‘are the
mother tongue or second language of about half of the world's population.’11
Thus social media in six languages led by the centre misses out more than half
8 This will remain true unless sound-based networks take off (e.g. SoundCloud). 9 Lobachev (2008) Top languages in global information production, Partnership: the
Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, vol. 3, no. 2 (2008):
http://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/826/1358 10 Their ‘official’ nature is not given in the Charter, but in Rule 51 of the Rules of
Procedure for the General Assembly. It is not immediately clear why the Secretariat has
to follow this rule in non-GA related work. 11 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html
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the world’s population – this does not meet with the presumed goal of talking to
everyone.
Even within these large language groups, there are significant differences in
national spelling, dialects and usage etc. For example, American English is not
the same as British English. The UN twitter account attempts to follow the UN
style guide, but this could end up satisfying neither reader.
Missing languages
The difficulties of finding robust data on literate populations of languages are
demonstrated below, in a table that presents data different from the table
above. The table below shows five countries for which none of the UN official
languages are a mother tongue or a lingua franca. While these countries may
use one of the six UN languages as one of their official languages, it may be that
only the government or a small elite use it, which is not helpful for reaching
people through social media. The data is taken mainly from Wikipedia and
Ethnologue, with literacy calculated by the CIA Factbook statistics.12
State First language Population literate in a
non-UN official language
India Hindi etc Approx. 900m (English
speakers est. ~125m)
Indonesia Bahasa etc Approx. 200m
Japan Japanese Approx. 126m
Brazil Portuguese Approx. 163m
Pakistan Urdu etc Approx. 100m
Each of these countries is home to a UN Information Centre, which could take
the lead in engaging with the digital audience in the right language and on the
right platform, after being set clear targets by DPI in New York.13
12 Data taken from the working database here, and Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population 13 For example, UNIC India could be better resourced, or given greater freedom to act in
social media along with targets to hugely increase their 619 Facebook likes and 2,000+
followers on Twitter to better reflect India’s 52m Facebook users. Total twitter numbers
are not available, but top Indian celebrities on twitter - Amitabh Bachan, Priyanka
Chopra, Shah Rukh Khan - each have over 2.5m followers. Socialbakers.com (Aug 2012)
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3.7. What is social media use like across the time zones?
No data was found on social media use (language, platform, etc) by time zones.
This would be useful, because if the time zones split naturally into dominant
language groups, this might be an easy way of targeting specific audiences,
based on the various studies of the times of day at which people most use social
networks. This would help more accurate language targeting and decisions as to
who should be running the central accounts. Clearly, time zones are another
reason to prefer greater action by local UN staff and UNICs.
3.8. What about those who don’t have internet access?
The ITU chart below shows the limits of internet access in many countries across
the world. According to ITU’s 2011 statistics, only 2.3bn have access to the
internet, leaving 4.7bn without, though access is growing quickly. This divide
between those with access and those without is known as the digital divide.
14
Other findings from ITU 2011
There are other divides: by gender (fewer women access the internet than
men); by education (those with only primary education are less likely to access
the internet); and by rural/urban habitation in developing countries (rural
connections are fewer).
14 ITU, 2011
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These divides create a risk that engagement through social media may unfairly
bias the connected - through extra opportunities, providing a greater weight to
their voices, etc. Those without access may be left behind – uninformed, not
consulted, unable to seek accountability, etc. This effect can be overstated,
given how quickly internet use is growing and the fact that social media is still a
long way from having significant policy impacts at organisations like the UN. By
the time it does, hopefully a majority of the world will have access.15
For this strategy, it is enough to state that social media at the UN must be ready
to include newly online audiences in the developing world, and that resources
are not focused too highly upon media-saturated markets in North America and
Europe.
16
It is also important to note the clear trend of rapid growth in mobile broadband
access via smartphones – currently +40% per year. By 2013, smartphone
ownership will overtake PC ownership,17 and by 2015, 3.2bn mobile broadband
connections will exist. At that growth rate, a social media strategy should
prepare for a 90% connected world by 2020.18
The United Nations should get ready to engage with a truly global audience and
to focus on networks that have successful phone-based applications. For
example, RenRen and Facebook have specific low-bandwidth phone versions,
e.g. Facebook Zero allows users free access to the simple text version of the
15 There are a lot of campaigns looking to solve the digital divide. Most famously, One
Laptop Per Child, (olpc.org) and the more important infrastructure stuff with ITU,
Internet Foundation etc. 16 ITU, 2011. 17 http://www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com/pdf/40u40_conway.pdf 18 http://www.gsma.com/newsroom/gsma-research-demonstrates-that-mobile-industry-
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c) gain approval of that draft from HR, legal, and senior UN leaders;
d) develop a training programme and staff guidelines as appropriate, which
could include training kits or templates and train-the-trainer courses;
3) Within the next six months
a) meet with a members of Committee on Information to consult and seek
feedback on the departmental goals;
b) decide upon, and gain senior approval of, specific, measurable, attainable,
relevant and time-bound objectives;
c) initiate peer to peer training system and iSeek social media guidance,
across departments and fields;
d) consider how to research audience in greater detail; collect data for
directing more effective use of stretched resources; (perhaps through
partnerships with digital media companies, rest of UN system for
commissioned polling and research);
e) plan for some of the broader, more challenging strategic goals, such as
devolving more power down to UNICs and establishing strong local digital
content provision;
f) turn this strategy into a living document – owned by directors across
several departments with responsibilities to keep it up to date; overall
ownership by USG.
4) In one year’s time
a) resurvey UN staff;
b) redraft the strategy as appropriate.
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Appendices/Annexes
A. DPI Structure33 The Department consists of the following divisions:
The News and Media Division produces and distributes United Nations news and information to the media around the world. It provides logistical support to journalists covering the UN and maintains a constant flow of news in six languages through the UN News Centre on the web. It provides coverage of UN meetings and events - including press releases, live TV feeds, radio programmes and photographs - and produces and distributes radio and video documentary and
news programmes about the United Nations. Director: Mr. Stephane Dujarric The Outreach Division consists of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library as well as offices that work with non-governmental organizations and educational institutions and that market United Nations publications. The Outreach Division also organizes special events and exhibitions on priority issues, sponsors an annual training programme for journalists from developing countries, and develops partnerships with private and public sector organizations to further the aims of the Organization. The Division organizes the guided tours programme at UN Headquarters and public speaking engagements for UN officials and responds to inquiries from the general public. It also produces the Yearbook of the United Nations.
Director: Mr. Maher Nasser The Strategic Communications Division develops communications strategies and campaigns to promote United Nations priorities and coordinates their implementation within the Department and across the UN system. It develops information products to publicize key thematic issues, targeting, in particular, the global media. It provides programmatic and operational support to the global network of UN Information Centres, as well as strategic communications advice and support to the information components of peace operations. The Division also serves as Secretariat for the General Assembly's Committee on Information and the UN Communications Group (for more information, please see Partnerships - UN Communications Group). Director: Ms. Deborah Seward
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B. Information on UNICs34 Information Centres are part of the Department of Public Information (DPI). At present, there are 63 Information Centres, Services and Offices worldwide.
The network of 63 United Nations Information Centres are key to the Organization’s ability to reach the peoples of the world and to share the United Nations story with them in their own languages. United Nations Information Centres (UNICs) are the principal sources of information about the United
Nations system in the countries where they are located. UNICs are responsible for promoting greater public understanding of and support for the aims and activities of the United Nations by disseminating information on the work of the Organization to people everywhere, especially in developing countries.
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13. Reaffirms that the Department of Public
Information must prioritize its work programme, while
respecting existing mandates and in line with
regulation 5.6 of the Regulations and Rules Governing
Programme Planning, the Programme Aspects of the
Budget, the Monitoring of Implementation and the
Methods of Evaluation, to focus its message and better
concentrate its efforts and to match its programmes
with the needs of its target audiences, on the basis of
improved feedback and evaluation mechanisms;
Multilingualism and public information
19. Emphasizes the importance of ensuring equitable
treatment of all the official languages of the United
Nations in all the activities of the Department of Public
Information, whether based on traditional or new
media, including in presentations to the Committee on
Information, with the aim of eliminating the disparity
between the use of English and the five other official
languages;
Bridging the digital divide
22. Requests the Department of Public Information to
contribute to raising the awareness of the international
community of the importance of the implementation of
the outcome documents of the World Summit on the
Information Society
Network of United Nations information centres
23. Emphasizes the importance of the network of
United Nations information centres in enhancing the
public image of the United Nations, in disseminating
messages on the United Nations to local populations,
especially in developing countries, bearing in mind that
information in local languages has the strongest
impact on local populations, and in mobilizing support
for the work of the United Nations at the local level;
E. Status, basic rights and duties of United Nations staff
members (ST/SGB/2002/13) Relevant sections. Copied from UNCG/2010/8.
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Regulation 1.2 (e)
By accepting appointment, staff members
pledge themselves to discharge their functions and
regulate their conduct with the interests of the
Organization only in view.
Regulation 1.2 (f)
While staff members’ personal views and
convictions, including their political and religious
convictions, remain inviolable, staff members shall
ensure that those views and convictions do not
adversely affect their official duties or the interests of
the United Nations. They shall conduct themselves at
all times in a manner befitting their status as
international civil servants and shall not engage in any
activity that is incompatible with the proper discharge
of their duties with the United Nations. They shall
avoid any action and, in particular, any kind of public
pronouncement that may adversely reflect on their
status, or on the integrity, independence and
impartiality that are required by that status.
Regulation 1.2 (h)
Staff members may exercise the right to vote
but shall ensure that their participation in any political
activity is consistent with, and does not reflect
adversely upon, the independence and impartiality
required by their status as international civil servants.
Regulation 1.2 (i)
Staff members shall exercise the utmost
discretion with regard to all matters of official
business. They shall not communicate to any
Government, entity, person or any other source any
information known to them by reason of their official
position that they know or ought to have known has
not been made public, except as appropriate in the
normal course of their duties or by authorization of the
Secretary-General. These obligations do not cease
upon separation from service.
F. World Summit 2005
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At the World Summit 2005, the General Assembly adopted the 2005 World
Summit outcome, which included the paragraphs below.
Secretariat and management reform
161. We recognize that in order to effectively comply
with the principles and objectives of the Charter, we
need an efficient, effective and accountable
Secretariat. Its staff shall act in accordance with Article
100 of the Charter, in a culture of organizational
accountability, transparency and integrity.
Consequently we:
…
(f) Strongly urge the Secretary-General to make the
best and most efficient use of resources in accordance
with clear rules and procedures agreed by the General
Assembly, in the interest of all Member States, by
adopting the best management practices, including
effective use of information and communication
technologies, with a view to increasing efficiency and
enhancing organizational capacity, concentrating on
those tasks that reflect the agreed priorities of the
Organization.
It is likely that the GA was referring to basic IT stuff – rather than SM, but
clearly the objective’s laid out are made more achievable through social media ,
esp the ‘culture of organizational accountability, transparency and integrity’.
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G. Interviews with social media practitioners in UN
system
Who is your target audience?
1. It’s easier to target the general audience. With Facebook algorithms the way they are, it’s important to reach as many people as quickly as possible. Segmenting by location results in less engagement. This is one
area where SM is behind email. 2. En/Fr/Es are our working languages. Our Spanish audience is large. We
are a decentralised agency, with offices around the world – each local office is in charge of local communication and uses the local language. The
corporate accounts are mainly for our Western donor countries, media, NGOs and act as a force multiplier for the local accounts.
3. Our agency has a more specialised audience than many, which makes
targeting them easier. We engage mainly with journalists in our field and a relatively specific industry – both workers and owners.
4. While obviously it’s better to have a target audience, it’s very hard to identify one for our agency. Instead we aim to be a content curator across our policy area and hope to be of general interest. We’re also very event
focussed. 5. Member states, both donors and recipients. The private sector, CSOs and
the general public. So we have to balance our content to be generic enough for the public, but not too superficial for our authority audiences.
What is your overall vision for social media?
1. We need to decide what SM offers. Brand awareness isn’t great in donor
countries cf. the field. We’re learning how to use SM for advocacy. Trying to build a strong brand, much more cost-effectively than advertising.
We’re building a community of people who really care about our issue. 2. We aim to make our agency transparent, human and personal. We share
stories and engage with our audience, skipping traditional media. We aim
to position our staff as thought leaders in their field. 3. Not discussed.
4. SM should complement the other work we do – should be timely and effective. Identify what you can’t do with trad media, and use SM to fill the gaps.
5. To meet the broader comms objectives of the organisation in terms of broadcasting, but to go beyond that and create transparency.
What are [agency’s] overall communications objectives? What are the
objectives for social media?
1. AwarenessEngagementDonate/Help – some kind of concrete action. Fundraising better thru email.
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2. Social media strategy forms part of our overall communications strategy. We publish a wiki of policy and guidelines that constantly evolves over
time. One goal is to train all staff in using social media responsibly. 3. We are currently drafting a SM strategy. Our main aims are profile-raising
and making sure the specific divisional messages are promoted. 4. We aim to raise awareness about our issues; create better mobilisation for
advocates, and to improve our networks with peers and partners,
especially at events such as Rio+20. 5. We’re trying to raise awareness and transparency around what we do. We
aim to increase our reach (boosting press office), to engage in a conversation on our top priorities, and increase advocacy on women’s issues.
Do you have a staff policy? Are any of your senior officials using SM?
1. Growing field presence, ‘action reporting’ such as tweeting from Ugandan refugee camps. We make up for the lack of resource by encouraging
volunteers and champions. These are people we’ve trained, or who are already SM enthusiasts. Works especially well in East Africa, we have plenty of people in the field who can tweet for us. We have a policy official
tweeting from Rio. Our Director of Comms tweets. And our Exec Director will be on twitter soon.
2. We use the specific guidelines same as DPI, but it’s all in the wiki. We managed to get our DG involved, she enjoyed the interaction, the direct feedback – was a bit of a lightbulb moment, and now she is a regular
tweeter. Think the important thing to recognise is that it’s not necessarily Twitter that is everyone’s channel. Some people like more time – so they
should blog. 3. Senior official use is limited. There is a generation gap, a lot of people
don’t know how it works. We have presented to senior mgmt, and there
are concrete successes – wherever we have a great SM story we share it. 4. We have guidelines for staff. We make use of volunteers from across the
organisation for livetweeting/blogging events. Awareness of SM internally is growing – esp when senior management showed up to our evangelist events! Senior mgmt supported my wish for a twitterfall at our annual
meeting – was great, we had Paul Kagame and Bill Gates involved, we used unfiltered tweets (but had a mitigation strategy in case of abuse).
People loved it. We used an outside contractor to arrange the set up in the room.
5. Not yet. We started quite closed, trying to establish a global voice, now
we’re opening up to allowing staff and regional offices to create their own presences. Some country offices have difficulties with access etc. No
senior officials yet. We are planning training, lunchtime sessions, etc. Overall, however, the guidance already exists in the HR docs and in the
Code of Conduct for Int’l Civil Servants.
How do you decide which channels to use?
1. Not discussed
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2. We test all the channels as they catch on. Each performs something of value. For example, Google+ affects your search engine ranking, so we
post our web stories on their in order to create a higher ranking for the website. LinkedIn helps us advertise jobs, attract and engage with
experts, etc. 3. This is driven by the content we have. We produce a lot of presentations,
so Slideshare was an obvious choice, for example.
4. Not discussed. 5. We use all the main channels. We have a G+ because we feel like we have
to be there or we’ll be punished in the Page Ranking. Day-to-day: How do you manage the production of content?
(teamworking, responsibilities etc)
[Where asked, all SM staff said that they sat with other communications staff]
1. We have three community managers : DC, Bangkok, Rome, in order that we can cover the 24 hour day. They know their stuff. Horizontal
workloads, but if had more staff might think differently (i.e. one channel per staffer). We try not to use hootsuite etc and do as much as possible
by hand. 2. I publish much of the English material, our language experts write the
language accounts. We see ourselves as a hub for all staff. We use Hootsuite Enterprise, where I am the SuperAdmin and there are 10 other admins who get different levels of access to Approve, Edit, etc.
3. I am the focal point for SM – so I’ll republish as much as possible from across the other comms team. Find Hootsuite very good, esp for Twitter.
4. We have a few people who all have access to the accounts and publish away. For events, we ask people to use their own accounts, then we signpost and RT via the corporate accounts. We use the free versions of
Tweetdeck and Hootsuite as management tools. 5. For Twitter, we use Hootsuite enterprise. We have 20 users around the
world who feed stuff into the system, which I try to approve within 24 hours. We divide tasks around hq – to check the website for latest news, to monitor the media for interesting content, and we invite the country
offices to send in project news. Plus we run twitter live chats. This generates a fair amount of content, but we’re not a content-creator.
Facebook is done manually.
Evaluation and monitoring
1. Use Tweetdeck for monitoring. Various applications for analytics (e.g. Buffer)
2. We use Radian6 – it takes time to learn, but is the best tool for reputation monitoring, finding influencers and multipliers and the shifts in the social
debate. We also use the analytics in Hootsuite, Hashtracking and Socialbro. We look at the web traffic too.
3. Use the Hootsuite analytics, but only have the basic free version, so not
great. We also use YouTube, Facebook and Google Analytics to produce media reports after a campaign.
4. We don’t have the resource to do this properly. We produce Tweetreach reports after annual events, and we try to storify content more regularly.
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But the cost of something like Radian6 is prohibitive. Could a centralised buying group reduce the cost?
5. We haven’t found the perfect tool – using Twittercounter, Hashtracking and Crowdbooster simultaneously. Good for key influences, impressions
and so on. Senior staff like to see numbers, though to what extent are they realistic/accurate? Not convinced by Radian6 – not very user-friendly and don’t trust/need sentiment analysis. We don’t produce regular
reports, but feed into the campaign/event reporting.
Successes
1. Organising and delivering a Google Hangout with CNN anchor was a
learning experience. Great that it actually happened. 2. We’re still learning, and SM has huge potential, but some successes have
been our live events, esp. livestreaming with the DG (10,000 viewers) and
took questions from the online audience. 3. We’ve done well from a standing start – in a year gained 5,000 followers
from nothing. Getting a lot of positive feedback from industry, and from journalists (esp as we also now produce video content for them).
4. The twitterfall at our annual meeting, and also our offline/online press
conferences which we streamed and invited questions. 5. Some good campaign outcomes – we brought voices from outside Rio to
the conference through SM and the audience liked it – high reach for Rio stuff. Had other campaign successes which are all due to the planning and preparation beforehand. We have some very good influencers who bring a
lot of attention to our work (Nicole Kidman, Shakira etc).
Something not gone so well / lessons learned
1. Hoped we would get more views for our Google Hangout.
2. It’s not for everyone, there is a generation gap – some people are born communicators, others are not. Do some press teams still fear SM?
3. We’ve tried to reach certain influencers without much luck.
4. We tweeted too much from live events – so we parcelled this out to individuals and then RT’d the best. We all need more management
support, and better leadership on social media. You’ve got to use believers! No point trying to teach/encourage people who aren’t interested in using these tools, i.e. don’t add it to people’s job descriptions.
5. Content is king. We get sent some stuff which just isn’t suitable and other staff might not really understand why. We had an event at which someone
tried to hijack the hashtag – but you just have to outnumber them with more relevant tweets.
Additional comments – on UN system as a whole, on the future for social
media in international organisations, etc.
1. Going forward, we want to get real people on real events, and use
corporate accounts as amplifiers for those. Esp on Twitter. UN system could try coordinating a shared calendar better. Get a lot of emails with
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suggested tweets that aren’t appropriate to our followers, but if something worked out well and intelligently, it could be powerful to have a whole
system pushing at the same issue. 2. Focus and support champions who then convince their colleagues. Clear
guidelines help everyone to understand the power of SM and the associated risks. Must remember that we work for 193 states. Need to cooperate and coordinate with others to help build community.
3. How we reach audiences in Asia is a challenge for all of us 4. We sometimes struggle with relations with the press officers. Could we get
a common licence for certain tools (Radian6, Hootsuite) for use across the system? In general – it’s a battle, but got to encourage people to feel the fear and do it anyway. We’re supposed to be reaching a new generation –
this is their world. How long before we have a twitterfall in the General Assembly? What do we need to do to strengthen SM efforts and make it
central in public meetings? 5. DPI should definitely take a coordination role – being the focal point for
tool selection, procurement etc.
Interviewees: Silke Von Brockhausen, UNDP; Beatrice Frey, UN Women;
Karine Langlois, IMO; Roxanna Samii, IFAD; Justin Smith, WFP. Thanks for your
time.
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H. Data on literacy, first and second languages, social
media platform use
See this Google spreadsheet. Note the figures highlighted for countries in which
a majority of the population are not first-language literate in one of the six
official UN languages.
Data is patchy and its improvement is something DPI should be supporting with
research funding.
The main sources were the CIA World Factbook and the Ethnologue guide.
The spreadsheet is open and editable by anyone. Please update it if you find
better/new data. Please note where you got the data from (use a comment for
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I. The US State Dept model (staff numbers in brackets)35 This is included in order to gain some relatively similar comparison of how a bureaucracy manages its social media work. Note the staff numbers in brackets,
e.g. the Office for Audience Research has 10 full time members of staff. “Chart 1: Ediplomacy nodes at State and staffing levels, by organisational area
(+ indicates considerable ediplomacy work outsourced to external partners).” (p.6)
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“While the above chart follows State’s organisational chart, the chart below breaks the
same ediplomacy nodes down by principal work program and objectives according to the
conceptual framework set out above. The following section will examine the work
program of each of State’s ediplomacy nodes under the eight different work programs.”
(p.6)
“Chart 2: Ediplomacy nodes at State, by work programs” (p.7)
Broad goals for e-diplomacy (as understood by Lowry Institute author,
not by State Dept)
“1) Knowledge management: To harness departmental and whole of government
knowledge, so that it is retained, shared and its use optimised in pursuit of national
interests abroad.
2) Public diplomacy: To maintain contact with audiences as they migrate online and to
harness new communications tools to listen to and target important audiences with key
messages and to influence major online influencers.
3) Information management: To help aggregate the overwhelming flow of information
and to use this to better inform policy-making and to help anticipate and respond to
emerging social and political movements.
4) Consular communications and response: To create direct, personal
communications channels with citizens travelling overseas, with manageable
communications in crisis situations.
5) Disaster response: To harness the power of connective technologies in disaster
response situations.
6) Internet freedom: Creation of technologies to keep the internet free and open. This
has the related objectives of promoting freedom of speech and democracy as well as
undermining authoritarian regimes.”
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7) External resources: Creating digital mechanisms to draw on and harness external
expertise to advance national goals.
8) Policy planning: To allow for effective oversight, coordination and planning of
international policy across government, in response to the internationalisation of the
bureaucracy.”
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J. Giant spreadsheet of everything This is an alternative way of showing a strategy. This is the sort of table that should be able to be filled in and given to staff
as a quick reference guide.
Short term:
Overarching
UN or DPI
goal
Social
media
SMART goal
Audience
insight
needed
Tactics
(what do
we do)
Responsibility
and input
(who, when)
Output
(number of
tweets,
blogs etc)
Intermediate
outcome
(metrics:
followers,
RTs, replie)
Overall
outcomes
(measure of
change)
Long term:
Vision Objectives Work
required
Result
wished for
Responsibility Output
(measure)
Intermediate
outcome
(measure)
Overall
outcomes
(measure)
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K. Micro goals for each platform
a) Twitter
User base: Twitter has around 150m active accounts. According to the Oxford
Internet Institute, ‘the top six tweet-producing countries (for geo-coded tweets,
in absolute terms) are the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, the UK, Mexico, and
Malaysia.’36
Description of platform
UN current use
Strategic goal that use of this platform meets
Long-term vision for this platform
Micro SMART goal(s) for this platform (what does success look like?)
Risks of using this platform
Mitigation
Successful examples of platform use by similar organisations