From Cool to Customer
Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 have everyone in government a-twitter. The Department of Health and Human Services has forged a very public lead with their social media work on the peanut recall and now swine flu. Other agencies may be holding back—because they do not understand what the social media fuss is all about, do not know how to implement social media, or simply do not have the staff to take on “one more thing.”
I wonder too if agencies question the value of social media. Those agencies that have deployed Twitter and Facebook have attained followers and friends, a good measure perhaps of customers. But the government does not sell goods, it promotes information. So what is the correct measure, the equivalent of goods sold in government? I believe the real measure is customers and customer acquisition.
So much has been formulated in government around public awareness. Think of the venerable public service announcement. With PSAs we can measure media impressions and make educated guesses about how many people heard the spot. A corporation that advertises will count the impact of its media campaign in terms of gross rating points (GRPs) or the percentage of the population that has been reached by the message. But they will count the true effectiveness of the campaign by goods sold. To only count impressions or awareness provides no real equivalent to sales. The only equivalent in government would be the names and addresses of individuals and organizations to which the messages have been sent, for example, through a clearinghouse. Those are government agency customers. You can count them. You can see which states they live in. You can determine their demographic composition and customer acquisition. That is the true metric of government value—the people served or GPRA measures (Government Performance Results Act of 1993).
So how does all this apply to social media? Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are cool indeed, but coolness is not the measure of how effective social media is as an information dissemination tool. There must be a link to the numbers of people served. Typically, the social media measure has been in views, friends, and followers. But these are simply a better version of awareness, as in the PSA example above. Like the funniest Super Bowl commercials, the ad is often memorable but the product only vaguely recalled. And if sales don’t result, the ad will be pulled. So viewers, friends, and followers alone may not be the ultimate measure. Only when we can create linkages to downloads, products ordered, or the equivalent of sales can we truly claim a customer acquisition.
I believe that cool-to-customer is the next wave in social media metrics. Companies such as Salesforce are already leveraging customer relationship management (CRM) tools to create linkages to Twitter and Facebook. Take a look at www.salesforce.com/servicecloud/tour/ to see how a query posted in Facebook becomes a response on a corporation’s FAQ page and then a globally advertised answer available to any Google searcher interested in that question. Companies and government need to have a global view of their customers wherever they reside—and today they reside in social media.
When you involve yourself in social media you are not just cool, you are responding to real customers who have real questions. By using the right tools, you can move beyond guesstimates and extrapolated vapor about how many people you have served and who they are. You can pinpoint results and people served by conversation, by state, and even by household. Big Brother? Well, if I am a person who needs and wants servicing on topics you provide, I say you are offering a disservice to me if you don’t provide me answers. To go one step further, what price privacy in an age of “follow me?”