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A Triumph of Trust: Five Principles of Nonprofit Social Media Strategy
By Michael C. Gilbert, October 9, 2008
I've been teaching a number of seminars about social media for a few years now and most recently I've been preparing for a pretty exciting workshop called Building a Blog Network. This article grew out of my preparation for that workshop.
Nonprofits are getting a grip on the fact that their stakeholder have the tools to reach as many people as they do and that there are powerful opportunities to be pursued as a result. Broadly speaking, this is seen as the challenge of social media. Too many organizations are treating their vocal stakeholders as either journalists with whom they must be careful, or as followers to whom they must market. Drawing from my experience in treating journalists as human beings, this article describes five principles of social media strategy that chart a better way.
Very early in my career, I ran a small lobbying firm. We represented environmental and consumer organizations, primarily in state legislatures on the west coast of the U.S. I'm pleased to say that we had some successes, including the Telephone Buyers Protection Act and a bill restricting the use of automated dialing machines. (The former required disclosure of a range of facts about telephones, which was critical in the confusing days after the ATT breakup. The latter eliminated most machine generated spam phone calls. Unfortunately, both have been substantially weakened in the years since.) I learned some communication lessons during that time that remain relevant to this day.
Not having the benefit of campaign contributions or other bribes in order to build influence with legislators, we naturally turned to the press. Because many legislators act like high schoolers who desire status and fear embarrassment, this just made sense. Although we might be able to turn out a thousand citizens on a lobbying day, but like it or not, what really mattered to legislators was how the press covered it.
There are many interesting schools of thought regarding approaches to press relations, but for my purposes here I want to compare three patterns. I will call them: Access, Formula, and Trust. They are not mutually exclusive strategies, but they each seem to provide a central pillar of confidence to those who rely upon them.
Access is the strategy that rulers use. If you have the power to control access to resources - events, status, information, but most particularly official sources - then you have substantial influence over the press. We should all be painfully familiar with this strategy, given how its ruthless practice by the current U.S. regime and its predecessors has utterly reshaped the mainstream media.
Formula is named as such because it's what most of us do. We put out press releases. We have press events or press conferences. We manage our spokespeople carefully. We monitor what the press says. We put out fires. We whine about not getting the attention we want. Then we do more of the same. Formula accounts for the vast majority of communication that journalists receive. Frankly, it accounts for the vast majority of promotional communication that I receive as the Editor of Nonprofit Online News, despite not ever publishing a single story that I got that way and despite years of positioning as an alternative medium.
Although many of my public interest colleagues chose Formula, there were some of us who were, well, simply not professional and experienced enough to know what that was and contrarian enough to figure we knew better. I've since learned just how horribly ignorant I was about public relations and why there are some very good reasons for the Formula. Nevertheless, we pursued a different strategy, one that here I will call Trust.
Here were some of the elements of that strategy, as naively practiced by me and my colleagues twenty-five years ago: We saw that journalists and their peers were the ones who decided what a story was and what was newsworthy, so we didn't take what they wrote personally. We saw that they were constantly being lied to, so we told them the truth, even when that would damage our cause. We saw that they were underpaid, under pressure, and under-appreciated, so we did everything we could to make their job easier, particularly when it came to accommodating the mundane realities of their work. We saw that what they wanted most of all was to know what was going on, especially if it was things their peers didn't know, so we worked hard to become useful sources for them, largely for information that didn't directly bear on our cause. Finally, we saw that some journalists like the other two strategies just fine, so we focused our efforts on those with whom our approach took root.
While this is by no means a comprehensive list of what it takes to build trust with someone who has an audience, I think it's a pretty good start. More importantly, I believe that it can form the basis for a strategy in social media, which is the ultimate point of this piece.
Whether we're building a blog network, developing our Facebook strategy, pitching stories to our most active stakeholders, or nurturing messages we hope will go viral, we're all in the same situation that I was in when I was a lobbyist. None of us are really professionals at this, if indeed there even is such a thing yet. None of us control Access in any meaningful way. At least some of us are becoming painfully aware that the PR Formula has no chance with ordinary people who happen to have an audience. Instead, all we're left with is building Trust. So, with the lessons of my lobbying career serving as a useful guideline, here is a quick sketch of the five principles of a trust-based social media strategy for civil society:
- Don't Take It Personally: Assume that most of the time, most people will have little interest in what you have to say. Don't give extra weight to negative messages, or extra authority to negative messengers. Respond with integrity as needed. Don't sweat the small inaccuracies, especially from your allies. Remember always to put yourself in their position.
- Tell the Truth: Don't lie. Don't sanitize. Don't obfuscate. Sound like a real person. Prove your trustworthiness by sharing things that may not be in your best interest. Get familiar with the common online PR tone (whether it's traditional or hip) and distinguish yourself from it. Look for the most skeptical people (not those who merely disagree with you) and win them over, especially if lots of people listen to them.
- Make Their Job Easy: Study what people write and share. Study their workflows and formats. Figure out what sorts of resources would support those. Follow the inverted pyramid model by delivering resources in small pieces, backed up with as much additional material as they might want. Figure out what else they need when they're considering your stuff and give it to them.
- Be a Useful Source: Look at what they write, discover their current sources and what is useful about them. Become part of their current sources. Map out who and what you have access to that nobody else does, and open those doors for them. Determine what kind of information makes them look good, and give them that.
- Prioritize Your Efforts: Track everything. Follow the energy. Invest more in those for whom your strategies are working and for whom your resources are useful, even if they have smaller audiences. Help the people with whom you have the best relationships grow their audiences. Determine who are the best intermediaries within your organization and support them.
Obviously this is all strategic-level advice. There is nothing in these principles about tactics such as how to organize your communication, how to sequence your activities, or how to allocate resources. But if you are in a place where you are making strategic decisions about social media, about the voices of your stakeholders, then this is a good place to start.
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