experience matters

By Jeana Anderson | Critical Mass Chicago

Illustration by EffingBoring

I recently started following the White House on Twitter, @WhiteHouse for those of you who want to check it out. A closer look at the content in the twitter stream sped me on a path towards applying some of Critical Mass’s Community Management best practices to the White House’s social media presence.

Best practice one: Research and understand the community before engaging. Moderating a community of President Obama’s supporters alone, the over 13 million citizens who opted into the campaign’s e-mail list, presents itself as a gut wrenching challenge for a single moderator. Thinking big picture: moderating President Obama’s social media community would never just be those 13 million opt-ins. The community would potentially consist of every U.S. internet user, 163.3 million people according to comScore.

Best practice two: Align the moderator’s skill set to the community’s interests. When I sat down to write a post commenting on the use of social media by the White House, I had planned to outline a strategy for the implementation of a single White House Community Manager. Considering the size and moving pieces in any White House agenda, it became increasingly clear that the White house couldn’t use just one community moderator – it would need one for every major initiative.

Each initiative is essentially a brand, with groups that buy into or oppose a viewpoint based on certain demographic and psychographic characteristics, giving each issue a different agenda and audience. Picky hiring for these community moderator positions would be a must. The moderator would likely need to have the perfect storm of a professional background, bringing together both a working knowledge of social media, government process and the issue.

Best practice three: Keep your community moderator in the loop. The sanity and success of these moderators would hinge on being treated as essential members of the team. They would have to be present in strategy discussions, provided texts of presidential addresses before they are presented and would need to be given resources for discovering answers to constituent questions in a timely manner.

Best practice four: Be consistent. A little over two years ago, the meme buzzing through both traditional and social media was Barack Obama’s campaign change. Not the “Change We Can Believe In” variety, the change that used social media to enable small donations and mobilize the unengaged gen Y. I mean they were really talking. This administration, known for its “first online social networking president” has been criticized by the Press Corps for muting its campaign-trail openness and honesty. For these community managers to be successful, they would need to be able to answer questions from all sides of the aisle, fence, or whichever metaphor you’d like to use.

In all fairness, the President opened up his State of the Union address in January to questions from social media submitted via YouTube, but the process of selecting questions was criticized for being closed and biased. If the White House had opted for a Digg Dialogg format, with questions submitted and publically voted up or down, a true public dialogue could have been achieved through social media. Thinking beyond that, with a moderator and a monitoring tool, the White House wouldn’t need to wait for a State of the Union address to gather questions; they could step up their efforts to pre-election standards and have ready-to-go FAQs and answers.

Implementing these best practices to enable staffers’ to responding to questions in real-time instead of sending form letters to constituents may be the way to the transparency and open government called for by this administration. After all, there can only be one first online social networking president, and one can only hope that he does the title proud.

Jeana is a Community Manager in our Chicago office.