Online Diplomacy: Is your campaign a “best practice”?

How would you define a succesful gov 2.0 or online diplomacy campaign? Eye balls, clicks? or rather actions, engagements and spread (also see http://tinyurl.com/39bhkzg) .

Social media is the first which can measure what we as marketers always thrived for. Real engagement, actions and awareness (vs. remembrance). We can know how many people are pro the objective we put out. Not just in words but rather actions. It can be as simple as a “like” or share and retweet as well as a measurable action.

When it comes to public diplomacy, theres a lot to learn from the commercial marketing pro’s. When it comes to social media the measurables are similar if not the same.

How do you know if your campaign is a hit? If you answered yes to 3 out of the following 5 questions you’ve got a winner:

1. Reach: Have you reached the number of users you initially planned on? (eyeballs and actions?)

2. Actions: Have you managed to generate substantial change? in conversation, public opinion or tip the scale?

3. Engagement: What is the percentage of users who really acted to make a change: shared on their feed, commented, retweeted, blogged, about your initiative?

4. Tipping point: Has your campaign reached a point in which you have audience, which was secondary to your target audience actively participating and promoting your cause?

 5. Speed: How long did it take? When looking at crisis management campaigns the plug number is usually measured in hours. When it’s about a specific event – your event is when you hit the stop button. For branding and awareness purposes you must define specific milestones as the process is measured in month.

more to come: tools for engagement, monitoring and measurement.

Diplomacy 2.0 team: in-house or out-sourced

Ok. You’ve reached the point of no return. The online department has set its social media strategy. Budgets have been allocated. a timetable has been set. You’re good to go.

But how? is it now time to recruit a social media team? Or is it legit to use the best people out there and save time, bureaucracy hassles and long training session all leading to a slow up take in the fastest moving sphere ever. 

The debate is clear. Diplomacy deals with fragile information both on the communications front as when it comes to strategic thinking and planning, all demanding a high clearance level. In addition, are bloggers, social media sponsored conversation affiliates, or even the best social media marketer in town know how to “talk diplomacy”?  Is it all black and white?

When in need to take a stand ask yourself these questions:

– Am I or any one on my team capable? Not with outlining the agenda but rather generating a genuine conversation and mass engagements?

– Do we have the resources in means of time? And it takes time…all the time

– What are the  issues and goals for which we want to put social media to use?

Today, while most governmental organizations have still not fully established the community manager role, as well as the know how you can have the cake and eat it too.

– Build your internal team or at least its leaders and go with the pro’s.

– Out sourcing will enable you to enjoy immediate success, and show your organization that social media is the right way to go,            while you can learn all the do’s and don’t from the experts you hire.

– Though someone is taking on responsibility you can’t let go. Make sure your contractor is aligned with the strategy as well as the messages they convey, let alone the engagements generated.

– Monitor, get daily and weekly extended reports of both the campaigns run as well as the conversation re the topic you are dealing with (i.e – ecosystem). These reports are available by monitoring and campaign management companies like tracx

– Start of with a pilot on “light weight” issues while maintaining a relatively small target audience, but plan to expand once you feel under control and in full sync with your provider

– Don’t be afraid to use technology. There are great, secure platforms which will simplify your work and help you achieve your goals. (Make sure your contractors are well acquainted with them)

Reaching Public Diplomacy objectives using Web 2.0 is easier than branding shampoo via the web

show people how they can make a change, and they will follow

Getting an audience to follow and actively interact with any figure or cause either in the online or off line sphere is a tough job. Though celebrities or glamorous events are easy objects to market, stopping hunger in 3rd world countries, branding countries or organizing study missions will unfortunately generate less of a hype.

The upside is, that once locating the right audience, the recruiting process is usually easier than for commercial goods. (=higher conversion rates)                                                                                                                                                                                      That is due to the fact that the emotional connection already exists (the crowd is already pro the  cause).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Combine that with the feeling that making a change is a just click away (and connect actions to prove it) will lead to an active online community you can count on as your 2.0 diplomats.

mean while remember your chances for success are actually larger than the commercial arena, the community is out there waiting, while most tools already exist.

Stay tuned or contact me directly for the action plans and ‘how to’ tips making online diplomacy work.

nili@diplomarketing.com

diplomacy 2.0 use the web to make a change

Up until now the key success factor for using the web was getting maximum traffic exposed to specific content. Measurable factors were number of eyeballs, unique users, clicks etc.

However, the downside is that we never managed to answer the questions: did we move our audience? Are they with us? Do they support us? At what level? Will they be my ambassadors? Can I count on them (stay tuned a post on the spectrum of involvement).

Using web 2.0 we can now move from Content-Traffic relationship with users to getting the largest amount of traffic onto motivating content that will generate actions.

The KSF are now how many users are part of the groups we create, have supported our cause, have shared our content with others. It’s time to take it up a notch.

We can now form real ambassador groups who will convey our messages, connect the online and off line worlds, raise funds, organize missions and make a change. Not just in the Public diplomacy arena but rather in all diplomatic actions which involve different communities: mass markets, interest groups, business organizations, media and more