I’m at TransparencyCamp today. It’s phenomenal, exciting and overwhelming. I participated in a great session this afternoon before lunch called “Drinking from the fire hose: how is a community manager to handle citizen participation in the Web 2.0 age?’ Here are some of my thoughts inspired by this session.
Social media is not about joining THE conversation, it’s about joining the conversationSSSSSS. Today’s social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies make communications so easy and quick that there are an infinite number of conversations about an infinite number of topics going on within, outside and about any given organization. No ONE spokesperson or team of spokespeople can handle this fire hose.
It’s not so much about changing or even more efficiently using communication tools as it is about changing the architecture of organizational communication. We are used to a broadcast communication model in which organizations speak AT people. We need to change this to a collaborative model in which the people within organizations speak WITH one another and WITH people outside the organization.
The only way to really manage this fire hose, then, is to empower everyone within an organization to participate and communicate. If we do this right, the “community manager” role ultimately becomes obsolete because communication and public affairs becomes a decentralized. Community relations/public affairs/customer service needs to move from being a vertical department to being a horizontal function within an organization.
In this collaborative communications model, organizations would deputize everyone to be conversationalists–a.k.a spokespeople–for the organization. This is preferable because:
- It enables the content experts to speak for themselves rather than having public affairs or customer service mouthpieces speaking on their behalf.
- It empowers people to participate in the conversation and, by doing so, catalyze innovation and new thinking
This raises a number of challenges, of course. Here are a few:
- Not all content experts are comfortable with or good at creating conversations, collaborating and participating in dialogue.
- This changes the role of public affairs/communications leaders from spokespeople to trainers–this requires a different skill set and interest set.
- This fragments the conversation, thereby increasing the potential for toe-stepping as there are increased areas of overlap.
Changing the community management paradigm has an equally-important counterpart. Not only do we need to reinvent how the organization engages with its communities, but we also need to change the model and expectations of constituent involvement.
In the case of government, citizen engagement would ultimately be a little part of everyone’s responsibility and civic life, driven not by coercion, but rather by personal interest and motivation. To make this real and valuable we’d need to change people’s expectations from people asking questions to receive an answer, to people asking questions as a way to engage, participate and problem solve.
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Maxine, I like the point about at least two directions of conversation: the one within the organization, and the one reaching outside. (I do think “the potential for toe-stepping” is much like the potential for April in the next 31 days, but that’s no reason to drop the effort to engage.)
Your last paragraph makes a good point, though I don’t think it’s the only one (and I don’t think you meant it to be). If you’re talking about citizen engagement, then I think that sometimes people do want to ask questions, and do just want answers. What’s more, sometimes the answer’s the right thing.
As an example: I’ve been an election judge (voting precinct worker) in Maryland. I learned a fair amount about the mechanics of who could vote where, about party registration deadlines, etc. If a citizen was upset because she couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary, she didn’t really want a debate about the closed primary system. My job was to explain why she couldn’t change affiliation on primary day (state law says no), how she could change in the future if she wanted to, and, if relevant, what offices she could still vote for that day, if any.
Similarly with provisional voting: if you don’t live in this precinct, you have a choice: go where you are registered (I can tell you where, thanks to the electronic poll book), or vote provisionally here. In the latter case, I need to make clear that your vote won’t count for certain offices (you’re not registered in this congressional district), so that you make an informed choice.
These are small examples; I think illustrate that not every citizen encounter needs an ongoing conversation; some of them just need informed answers.
In no way do they detract from what I see as a corollary to what you say: the engagement, on the part of the government, needs to be as agenda-free as possible: if the citizen disagrees with the law or policy behind things as they are, they may want to learn where to turn to disagree or attempt to change these things.