Independence Day

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

As an English person without a vote in the Scots referendum, I cannot fail to be amazed at how the Yes & No campaign has leverages social media to get their message across. The number of Facebook and Twitter posts, with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘Naw’ in the bottom left, has helped spread a viral message, quickly and painlessly.

Although not unknown in recent parliamentary elections, the proliferation of hashtags, such as #indyref, #BetterTogether, #SaorAlba , #LetsStayTogether and #VoteYes has helped galvanise public opinion and helped get as many as 97%, in some areas, registered to vote.
In comparison, for the last election, turnout in some areas in Scotland was down to 19%.

Facebook was a big battle ground, with some of the rich, famous and righteous wading in. Here is a 2d worth from Annie Lennox - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152215730434589

All this stuff has certainly mobilised followers and helped to spread the message. What happens on-line then is taken off-line and Scots have joined meetings, marches and events, from their selected camps. Indeed, some would say that it is unthinkable these days to engage people in events such as the Referendum, without social media tools such as these.

So what could social housing learn from this? Could we and our staff be leveraging social media better? It can be easy sometimes to spot where some RSLs have just had some comms’ and social media training. All attendees join twitter with a name linked to their organisation, add their colleagues on the course to follow, some change the egg to a face, add a few tweets and go back to the day job. 

Is your organisation guilty of this?
One element of the comms training on SM, which may be missing, is advice on management guidelines. Without these, I doubt if staff can feel empowered to tweet and use our common hashtags, such as #UKhousing, #Housingcamp, #DigitalFirst or whatever, to reach the wider world and our peers.

Do a twitter person search using your organisation name and see how many eggs (not faces) and people with just a few tweets to their name, from last May (or before), with minimal followers are on there. Is it any wonder that we are generally struggling to get the #UKhousing message out?

I have noticed when assisting organisations with KPI’s and cleanly bringing data together across their organisations, for benchmarking etc, Twitter KPIs are on the rise. Would you dare measure number of staff registered on twitter for your organisation, no of monthly tweets, number of total staff followers, number of monthly re-tweets. Now, is that making you think? I hope so.

Maybe it’s time we helped our staff vote ‘Yes’, to engaging with the world on Twitter and other social media to help inform the world about ‘why social housing matters’ and ‘what we are for’.

Related Post: Social Fools, are you getting social?

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You can link with me on LinkedIn here - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy It would be great to connect !

The Comsat Angels – Independence Day.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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