The perils of social media
0Why is it that whenever the subject of communications comes up, one of the first comments is that social media need(s) to be embraced? It’s almost as if social media is the be all and end all of communications. Several studies into the future of “the internet” have suggested that email, for example, is a dying form of communication and that the likes of Twitter and Facebook will kill it off completely before long. And other studies say that the postal system will be killed off by email.
If you look at the tail end of a bull (that’s a male of the cow species) you will usually see a rather large bag thing hanging down between his back legs. The contents of that bag thing may be described as a load of what these studies comprise.
When Marc Anthony started a speech with “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” he was hedging his bets a bit. Landlords need to similarly hedge when communicating with their tenants. Though this time it might be something like “Twitter followers, web site checkers and those without computers.”
Consider for a minute that august body the Information Commissioner’s Office. If someone should understand technology, that body should! On 10 May 2012 it was affected by strike action. The ICO Tweeted that the office would be affected. Did it post a notice on its web site? No. So a half measure. Tweeting was easy; the web site involved more work so forget it.
So time to ask a question or two.
How many tenants do you have?
How many of them follow you on Twitter?
When you last Tweeted some information, did you make sure that those who do not follow you on Twitter were told in some other way?
If not, do you regard your non-Twitter-followers as second class citizens?
Now a real story. A little while ago, I was visiting an elderly couple to help them to understand how to record Coronation Street if they were out and to show them how to delete old messages from their answerphone. They didn’t have, and wouldn’t understand, a computer. They had just received through the letterbox a glossy magazine from their social landlord. Every item in that magazine ended with something like “for more information, go to our web site”. They didn’t know what a web site was.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read a tweet saying “our web site is down”. Only once have I subsequently received a tweet saying “our web site is working again”.
So embracing social media is a step, not an end. It is not an excuse for not bothering to find out about your audience. I often think that it’s merely an excuse to be lazy.
How many questionnaires have been sent out, I wonder, which ask “Do you use Twitter/Facebook …?”, “Do you use the internet?” and so on?
Now how many of those questionnaires have asked “How would you like us to communicate with you”?
By all means embrace social media but do not claim that the fact you do makes you a good, inclusive and effective communicator.
Credit where it’s due
0Less than 24 hours ago, in my last post, I referred to a social landlord web site. I deliberately didn’t identify that landlord and I made an equally deliberate mistake in referring to something on the web site to make it just that bit more difficult for a reader to work out which one it was. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad landlord by any means but the web site just happened to be the one in the wrong place (my browser) at the wrong time (when I was looking to illustrate a point).
But I did say that something was missing from the site.
And someone from that landord read my blog (thanks for that) and worked out who I was referring to. And, lo and behold, the omission has been put right. Plus I got a nice email to say thanks.
I’m still not going to identify the landlord but, having chucked a brick at them, I must be as quick to give them credit for doing something about it as they were to put it right.
And to say thanks for not blasting me to another planet for saying what I did.
Getting the right target
1My friends in TAP Wales have been given the task of examining communications; essentially how effective are social landlords at communicating with their tenants.
I guess that just about every “Registered Social Landlord” (RSL – these are the housing associations and what are termed “LSVTs” which stands for Large Scale Voluntary Transfers or, in easy to understand words, the organisations which have been set up when tenants of local authorities have voted in favour of the transfer of all the local authority housing stock to an independent organisation) has a “communication strategy”.
A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a vision. It IS NOT and end in itself.
Communication is the activity of conveying information. The communication process is complete once the receiver has understood the message of the sender. Feedback is critical to effective communication between parties.
“Communication Strategy” is an over-used buzz phrase. Every organisation is told it needs one. But if, say, a landlord writes out to its tenants along the lines of “We’re reviewing our communication strategy and want you to tell us how to do it;” a lot of people will stop reading when they get to “communication strategy” because they simply don’t understand what it means and so won’t say anything for fear of being thought thick.
When you think about it, though, each one of us has our own “communication strategy”. If nothing else, each Christmas we decide who to send Christmas cards to. Now stop for a minute! I’m sure someone is now thinking that’s bad grammar and I should have said “to whom we will send Christmas cards”. And should the full stop be before or after the inverted commas? I’ll come back to that point later. But back to Christmas cards. Do you, for example, decide that if someone didn’t send you a Christmas card last year, you won’t send them one this year? Yep, that’s part of your communication strategy. You’ve sort of made a negative decision – they didn’t so I won’t so there! Or you may, on not receiving a card last year, have tried to make contact with the person from whom you were expecting a card to see if they’re OK. That’s a more positive communication strategy.
So the buzz phrase actually means something quite simple – it’s all about how we communicate and with whom. For an organisation like a landlord it’s about getting the message across. Finding out who wants to listen and what they want to know.
So why not say that, simply and clearly in the first place? Something along the lines of “We want to check that you’re getting the information you want, if it’s clear enough and if there’s a better way that we can get that information to you.” Keep the buzz-words for the board-room or at least within the office. If you have a document on your web site called “Our communication strategy”, rename it “How we get the message across” or “How we communicate with you”. Or, even better, “How we involve you in everything we do”.
One golden rule to remember is that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
You can produce all the information you want but unless the person who picks something up from their doormat wants to read it, you’re wasting your time. Too much information is worse than too little.
Then you have to be clear in what you say. Higher up, I diverted from my main theme to mention bad grammar. But, stupid errors aside, which is more important, classical grammar or getting the message across? If your audience are more likely to say, every day, “who we’re talking to” then use that language rather than “to whom we are talking”. The flowery grammar risks turning them off. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t use big words.
I’ve just skimmed through a landlord web site. On its home page there is link to “CSR Strategy”. What the heck does that mean? (On clicking the link it turns out to be “Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy” but I am none the wiser.) On its news page there is a call for input into a tenant participation strategy. It’s out of date and perhaps should be moved to a news archive page but, anyhow, the article asks questions like:
Do you agree with the themes/objectives of the strategy?
Do you have any comments about other sections of the strategy?
Do you think the actions under each theme will give us the results we hope for?
Do you have any other ideas for actions which you think should be included?
Do you think the information in these two documents will take participation forward…?
One little thing missing is a link to the strategy (or the two -?- documents) or information on how a copy may be obtained. The article does say that the strategy needs to be finalised before the end of 2011. Well it’s now 2012 and there’s no later mention of this strategy that I can find. What about feedback? Even if something’s been produced on paper, a process was started on the web site and so should also be finished there.
It does seem like someone woke up one morning and had the brilliant thought of putting something on the web site. And then stopped thinking!
And so it is with the “communication strategy”. RSLs (see above) say “we have to have one” and so resources are applied (diverted) and everyone concentrates on producing this wonderful answer to all evils. The problem is that the strategy becomes the goal. We’ve got to have one and once we do have one that’s it. It will be filed away, maybe published on our web site. We can tick a box and then forget all about it.
In my next post I’ll discuss the hows and whats of communication.
But for starters here are two questions for TAP to ask their RSL contacts:
1) Does your organisation have a communication strategy?
2) If yes, when did you last look at it?
A Matter of Semantics?
2Every blog has to start somewhere so I thought I’d start by looking at the word “regulation”.
The social housing sector in Wales is immersed in regulation. The Welsh Government has its “Regulation Team”. There is a Regulatory Board for Wales (whoever dreamt up that title must have never encountered a situation where it was necessary to explain something) and then we have the “Tenant Advisory Panel” which seeks to place tenants at the heart of regulation. We have “Housing Association Regulatory Assessments”, “Financial Judgements”, various degrees of “regulatory involvement”, assessments, self-assessments, frameworks and a plethora of inputs and outcomes. We have arguments that outcomes are not actually outcomes but statements of what we might have if we actually had outcomes.
But it seems to me that people are so confused by this overdose of jargon that they don’t actually realise they are confused. No-one wants to admit that they don’t understand and so we have different people all thinking they travel in the same direction when, in fact, they are going opposite ways.
Where else would a housing association feel able to congratulate itself on achieving the first low score in a Regulatory Assessment? For a low score is better than a high one. Are you now joining the ranks of the confused?
Members of the Tenant Advisory Panel are regularly invited to meetings to explain the new “regime” and, along with officials from the Welsh Government’s Regulation Team and officers of the Regulatory Board, attend conferences with the same aim. But if you go through the lists of names of people who attend these meetings and conferences you’ll find the same ones cropping up again and again. So why do they need to have the “regime” explained to them repeatedly by the same people? Is it, perhaps, just perhaps, because no-one actually understands the nature of the beast that has been created? Or is it because people simply don’t want to understand? Or is it because attending meetings and conferences gets them out of the office and with luck no-one will notice if they have a nap in the back row of the plenaries or play truant from the workshops and “network” in the bar (there’s always a bar somewhere at conferences).
But let’s get back to “regulation”. Just about every dictionary definition of “regulation” you will find is about oppression:
the activity of managing or exerting control over something
red tape
Successive Governments have recognised the arguments put to them that there is too much regulation and that, by its nature, regulation holds back, limits, creates difficulties. They then add more regulation to the pile. Regulation equals control! Governments love that.
The consequence is that the word “regulation” has a totally negative connotation.
But are we not in the game of improving things? Instead of regulation this and regulation that, why not have a “Housing Improvement Team” at the Welsh Government? What about a “Housing Improvement Board for Wales”?
And would it not sound a lot better to say tenants are at the heart of improving housing in Wales?
If, instead of worrying about complying with regulations, the builders of the Titanic had thought of improving, 1500 more people would have enjoyed lunch the next day!
Let’s chuck out the jargon. Stop worrying about regulatory compliance; stop ticking boxes; stop worrying about ways to measure whether the ways you are measuring something are returning accurate results and stop arguing about whether an outcome is an outcome or an input.
Unless we reach for the sky we’ll never get there.
Whether or not you agree with me, I hope my musings make you think a bit. Please feel free to comment. To make a comment, click on the post's title to open it in its own window and scroll down to the comment box at the bottom.
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