Social media is not your job

You, the government marketer, are no longer the organization’s lead communicator. I was asked by my planner colleagues, “Where’s your blog?” Well, I don’t have a blog (other than this one). One of them pointed out rather correctly that my job was to be a “social media enabler”. I like that term.

So you’re a public (or nonprofit) sector marketer. Are you the one blogging, posting on Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr? If this is the situation (and it usually is), it’s a bad situation. You shouldn’t be doing this. Your job is to get your service providers, administrators, planners, and policy analysts to blog — to teach them how to communicate their ideas to the public.

They’ll say, “we’re too busy!” Everyone knows that isn’t true. Public sector workers aren’t busy, that’s why nobody trusts them. They certainly aren’t busy cleaning up the oil spill or growing the economy. What are they doing? They need to be out there communicating with the public and talking about what they are doing. Yes, it’s important for community engagement. We’ve talked about that plenty. But there is another reason why your front line public servants need to be blogging and tweeting. They need to be justifying their jobs.

In a day when governments are facing steep budget cuts, we’re finding a lot of workers being furloughed or laid off. Is the public sympathetic? Not really. It’s your job to change that. Or rather, it’s everyone’s job.

Related posts:

1. Blogging and social media for project management
2. Social media message: do what feels natural
3. Expanding social media use in public agencies: a map?
4. Social Media: 5 Ways to Bypass Management
5. Government and social media use message: Don’t be a cog