I’m at TransparencyCamp today. It’s phenomenal, exciting and overwhelming. I participated in a great session this afternoon before lunch called “Drinking from the fire hose: how is a community manager to handle citizen participation in the Web 2.0 age?’ Here are some of my thoughts inspired by this session.
Social media is not about joining THE conversation, it’s about joining the conversationSSSSSS. Today’s social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies make communications so easy and quick that there are an infinite number of conversations about an infinite number of topics going on within, outside and about any given organization. No ONE spokesperson or team of spokespeople can handle this fire hose.
It’s not so much about changing or even more efficiently using communication tools as it is about changing the architecture of organizational communication. We are used to a broadcast communication model in which organizations speak AT people. We need to change this to a collaborative model in which the people within organizations speak WITH one another and WITH people outside the organization.
The only way to really manage this fire hose, then, is to empower everyone within an organization to participate and communicate. If we do this right, the “community manager” role ultimately becomes obsolete because communication and public affairs becomes a decentralized. Community relations/public affairs/customer service needs to move from being a vertical department to being a horizontal function within an organization.
In this collaborative communications model, organizations would deputize everyone to be conversationalists–a.k.a spokespeople–for the organization. This is preferable because:
- It enables the content experts to speak for themselves rather than having public affairs or customer service mouthpieces speaking on their behalf.
- It empowers people to participate in the conversation and, by doing so, catalyze innovation and new thinking
This raises a number of challenges, of course. Here are a few:
- Not all content experts are comfortable with or good at creating conversations, collaborating and participating in dialogue.
- This changes the role of public affairs/communications leaders from spokespeople to trainers–this requires a different skill set and interest set.
- This fragments the conversation, thereby increasing the potential for toe-stepping as there are increased areas of overlap.
Changing the community management paradigm has an equally-important counterpart. Not only do we need to reinvent how the organization engages with its communities, but we also need to change the model and expectations of constituent involvement.
In the case of government, citizen engagement would ultimately be a little part of everyone’s responsibility and civic life, driven not by coercion, but rather by personal interest and motivation. To make this real and valuable we’d need to change people’s expectations from people asking questions to receive an answer, to people asking questions as a way to engage, participate and problem solve.
