At the annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration in Las Vegas on March 4, 2012, JD Lasica and Chris Abraham of Socialmedia.biz will be giving a Super Session on social media strategy for public sector managers and employees. This presentation covers topics such as the importance of a social media strategy, metrics, SEO, keywords, Gov 2.0 sites, and lots more.

1. SUPER SESSION
Create impact with
a Social Media Action Plan
American Society
for Public Administration
Las Vegas, March 4, 2012
JD Lasica Chris Abraham
Socialmedia.biz Social-Ally.com

2. Today’s hashtag
Creative Commons
photo on Flickr
by Prakhar
Tweet this preso! Hashtag:
#aspacon

3. What we’ll cover today
1. Survey of ecosystem
2. Begin with a strategy
3. Meaningful metrics
4. Content & conversation
5. Gov use of social media
6. Campaigns with impact
7. Use your community
Q&A, summary, hugs, tearful goodbyes

4. Relax!
Creative Commons
BY photo on Flickr
by Tom@HK
http://socialmedia.biz/aspa

5. 8 color handouts. Be happy!
http://socialmedia.biz/aspa

6. THE ECOSYSTEM
Social media a game-changer
• Blogs
• Social networks
• Microblogs (Twitter)
• Online video (YouTube,
Vimeo, Dailymotion)
• Widgets
• Photo sharing (Flickr,
Photobucket, etc.)
• Podcasts
• Virtual worlds
• Wikis
• Social bookmarking
• Forums
• Presentation sharing

7. Staggering growth
• 77% US adults are frequent social media users.*
• 150 million active blogs; 1 million blog posts created per day
• 6 of top 10 websites in US are social sites (YouTube,
Facebook, Wikipedia, Blogger, Craigslist, Twitter)
• Twitter: 100+ million active users, 250 million tweets per day
• Flickr: 35 million people, 4 billion-plus photos
• YouTube: 3 billion videos watched per day
*source: Nielsen Online, spring 2010

8. Facebook: The social network
850 million members worldwide —
76% of US Internet users are on Facebook
900
600
300
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009 0
2010
2011
Today
Facebook’s global growth rate, 2004-2012, in millions

9. Revolutionizing revolutions
• Egypt: 18 days from Facebook-organized protest to Mubarak’s fall
• Facebook group One Million Voices Against FARC mobilized 10 million
people to march against FARC in hundreds of cities in Colombia
• Different outcome in Iran & Myanamar

10. Revolutionizing politics
2012 Obama Re-election Campaign

11. Revolutionizing governance
• Open gov initiatives in New York,
Chicago, elsewhere
• Nationwide 311 efforts
• Data.gov
• Utah.gov 2.0
• Virtual Alabama
• Washington, DC’s Gov 2.0 efforts
• Cook County’s open data portal
• New Orleans’ open data platform

12. Revolutionizing communications
• 8 trillion text messages sent in 2011
• 5.3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide
— 77% of Earth’s population
• 500 million to 1 billion people access
Internet via mobile, many of them only
through mobile
• Almost 1 in 5 global mobile subscribers
have access to fast mobile Internet (3G+)
• Today 85%+ of new handsets can
access mobile Web
Sources: mobiThinking, Wikipedia

13. DON’T FORGET MOBILE!
Is your site mobile-ready?
WPtouch Pro for mobile phones, Onswipe for iPad

14. EXERCISE
Create a mobile calling card
Text 'jdlasica' to 50500
Create your own at http://contxts.com

15. 2 . L AY T H E G R O U N D W O R K
Before you plunge in ...
• Understand that social media is a series of stages: crawl,
walk, run, fly
• Do you have a social media policy or guidelines?
• Do you have a Strategic Social Media Plan in place?
• Have you defined a clear theme?
• Are you listening to your constituents & community?
• Have you built a program before you turn to a campaign?
• Have you identified and trained your team members?
• Do you have buy-in from top management?

16. Begin with a strategy
Elements of a Social Media Action Plan:
360 assessment of social
media capabilities
Spell out business goals
Identify online community
Proposed use of social
tools & platforms
Lay out metrics program
Recommendations on
expanded capabilities
Competitive/peer analysis

17. E S TA B L I S H G O A L S
How can you use social media?
• Raise public awareness of your program or cause
• Reach new constituents & supporters
• Involve the community in decision-making
• Build a community of passionate champions
• Get people to take real-world actions
• Enhance existing communications programs
• Raise funds for a cause
• Advance your organization’s mission

18. 3. MEANINGFUL METRICS
Before you start, measure!
‘Data is better than gut’: Gather, analyze, act
Photos on Flickr by Emran Kassim, left, and Vee Dub (CC-BY)

19. THE METRICS PROCESS
INFORMATION
INSIGHTS
KPIs
Who, how, why
Funnel ACTION
of love

20. Map goals to metrics
Goals KPIs to measure
• Grow email list # newsletter subscribers
• SEO: Increase online visibility increase in traffic or linkback #s
• Increase comments on blog avg. # comments/post
• Increase positive mentions of mentions or pick-ups in blogs
organization or program & social networks
• Have visitors stick around stick rate, bounce rate
• Make our content more viral # of shares
• Get people to take action # of petition signatures
• Get people to attend event # of registrants, year over year

21. KEYWORDS ARE KEY
What does your site rank for?
Search your own site’s keyword juju
on semrush.com & spyfu.com

22. New metrics of engagement
Beyond page views
"We don't really care about
page views as much as we
care about comments. If we
get 1,000 video views, that is
good. The comments are a
focus group with our
influencers. If they like it,
they'll spread it and that
helps get us to our
objectives."
- Jake Brewer, PowerShift

23. HANDOUTS
Two cheat sheets
http://socialmedia.biz/aspa

24. 4 . C O N T E N T & C O N V E R S AT I O N
The power of storytelling
Cave drawing, Lascaux, France, 17,000 years ago

25. C O N V E R S AT I O N F O L L O W S I N T E R E S T I N G C O N T E N T
Your organization is a media outlet
Awareness > Influence > Action > Impact

26. Create lightweight media
Don’t look now but you’re a content creator! Using Animoto

27. F O R N O N P R O F I T S & C A U S E O R G A N I Z AT I O N S
Make the stories personal
Find emotional core, use videos or photos to make us feel
invisiblepeople.tv

28. Find your internal storytellers
• List staffers’ skills
• Who’s good at photos?
• Video?
• Writing?
• Facebook or Twitter?
• Create a Blog Squad
• Who’s good at campaigns?
• Open your blog to guest posts

29. 5. GOVERNMENT USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Open government
When citizens believe
their governments are
sharing more
information, they are
more likely to feel
satisfied with civic life.
Pew Internet & American Life
Project, “How the Public
Perceives Community
Information Systems”

30. Civic engagement platform
SeeClickFix.com

31. CONNECTING CITIES & CODERS
Code for America
codeforamerica.org

32. O B A M A I N I T I AT I V E
Helping kids get healthier
LetsMove.gov

33. W I N T E R C I T Y S T R AT E G Y
City of Edmonton
edmontonwintercity.ideascale.com

34. IN GOVERNMENT
Twitter power users
@corybooker @bouldercolorado
@clairemc @PhiladelphiaGov
@MikeBloomberg @StateDept

35. D . C . O F F I C E O F C I T Y A D M I N I S T R AT O R
One City Map
capstat.oca.dc.gov & map.data.dc.gov

36. D C . G O V D ATA C ATA L O G
Roll your own data
data.octo.dc.gov

37. D ATA V I S U A L I Z AT I O N
Map mashups with open data
Broadband speeds at schools & colleges in Miami

38. D ATA V I S U A L I Z AT I O N
Descry Project’s Obesity Epidemic
visitmix.com/labs/descry/theobesityepidemic/

39. 6 . C A M PA I G N S W I T H I M PA C T
Championing a cause online
Unity Productions Foundation

40. U N I T Y P R O D U C T I O N S C A M PA I G N
Using the Long Tail
myfellowamerican.us
• 1,387 bloggers responded,
800 shared My Fellow
American video
• Video has received 655,000+
views
• Thousands of Americans
shared personal stories about
positive experiences with
Muslim-American neighbors

41. FRESH AIR FUND
Integrated social media

42. FRESH AIR FUND
Real-world outcomes
• 11 blogger outreach • 1600% increase in
campaigns online mentions
• Expanded Facebook, • Strengthened brand
Twitter presences awareness
• Enhanced website SEO • Expanded donor funnel

43. SAVE MARY LAKE
The rise of micro-giving
SaveMaryLake.com: $300,000 raised in 2 months

44. C H A R I T Y: WAT E R
Make your cause tangible
http://charitywater.org/projects/map/

45. TWEET FOR A CURE
Spinal Muscular Atrophy
2,922 people have tweeted reaching 1.6 million followers
http://gwendolynstrongfoundation.org

46. EXERCISE
SMA: Tweet for a Cure
http://bit.ly/tweet4cure

47. SAVE MY MORTGAGE INTEREST DEDUCTION
Advocacy campaign
savemymid.com

48. 7. USE YOUR COMMUNITY
Don’t do all the heavy lifting!
Creative Commons
photo on Flickr by
Jason Means
Tap into the sharing community

49. Find your external champions!
Find the big kahunas in your sector by using your listening
post. Then, influence the influencers. Post on their blogs &
retweet.
Establish a rapport and only then reach out to try to convert
them into evangelists & ambassadors for your cause.
Scope out Twitter Lists that intersect with your organization or
social cause.
Useful tools: Klout, SocialMention, Google Analytics.

50. Use social love handles!
Generate an Attention Wave to socialize your campaign

51. The awesome power of free
Free content! Free resources!
• Free photos • Socialbrite.org/sharing-center
• Free videos (eg, TED talks) • Creativecommons.org
• Free music & audio • Techsoup
Free services! Free expertise!
• Google Grants • BarCamp
• YouTube for Nonprofits • PodCamp
• Google Earth for Nonprofits • WordCamp
• Social Media Club
Free software & platforms!
• WordPress & its plug-ins
• Open Office, Google docs
• Drupal, Joomla

52. RESOURCE
flickr.com/creativecommons
Creativecommons.org
• Rich source of free
commercial & noncommercial
images
• Flickr: 210 million Attribution,
Noncommercial, No Derivatives
& ShareAlike licenses
• Use them for your blog,
website, email or print
newsletter, presentations, etc.
• Don’t just take. Share!

53. RESOURCES
Productivity tools
• Google docs
• LibreOffice
• Google groups
• Private group on
Facebook
• Project management
(Huddle.net, SharePoint)
• Skype

54. SOCIAL MEDIA DASHBOARDS
Pace yourself, don’t stress!
HootSuite ThinkUp
Tweetdeck Spredfast
Crowdbooster Netvibes
http://bit.ly/smdash

55. Key takeaways
• Begin with an aligned strategy,
not with the tools.
• Measure, measure, measure!
Evaluate, iterate, relaunch.
• Tell your stories.
• Use your community — your
biggest resource: your advocates!

56. Don’t settle for the status quo
If you do not change
direction, you may
end up where you are
heading.
— Lao Tse

57. Thank you, let’s talk!
http://socialmedia.biz/aspa
JD Lasica Chris Abraham
jd@socialmedia.biz chris@socialmedia.biz
Twitter: @jdlasica Twitter: @chrisabraham