One ‘problem’ that many practitioners get hung up on is how to drive prospective consultees to their online or offline engagement projects. In a social media context, many (most) Councils or Government Agencies have social media followings in the hundreds, or low thousands, but rarely of the sort of scale to provide any real confidence in reaching the wider public through social media channels.
But there’s another way of thinking about this: fish where the fish are!
In any given area there will a wide range of groups and agencies that have a much wider network of social media followers, and you can usefully consider how to promote your key engagement messages through those networks. In one recent example of a local authority that we are working with, the corporate facebook and twitter network of just under 5,000 likers/followers (many of which may be duplicates) but their wider partnership organisations (police, fire & rescue, college, newspaper, football club) had almost 110,000 follow/likes between them. Again, many of these will be duplicates, but even so...
Getting these partner organisations to retweet or like Council engagement messages could potentially increase the network of consultees from 5,000 to 110,000 with no need for additional resources or budgets. Now that’s got to be something worth considering!
So when you’re mapping your stakeholders for a particular engagement process, try asking yourself not how to bring those people to you – but where do these people meet and engage already and how best can we tune our message to that audience and place?
Giant:
Ian Morris
Giant:
Ian Morris
Principal Business Consultant
Objective
07833259224
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