The challenge of doing digital properly

Doing digital ‘properly’ can be a hard sell to hard-pressed teams who just want to be able to report large numbers to time-poor managers. Often the pressure to ‘make noise’ on social media can mean the real objective of getting people to change their opinions or do something differently, can get lost. This objective is easier keep hold off when you’re trying to to convince people to buy your widget rather than your competitor’s. If you’ve achieved a like for a novelty photo of your widget, you’ve had a small success. If you manage to get your target audience to question their choice of widget provider, move to your brand of widget and wax lyrical about how your widget is the widget to end all widgets, you’ve won. Problem is, that in government, we don’t sell widgets, we provide services like renewing your passport or paying your taxes. Services that the UK citizen can’t radically overhaul every time they experience poor service…

Which is why Tim and I jumped at the chance to speak about our work at UK Government Teacamp. Digital outreach is a slippery term and our team at BIS has been working hard to challenge the preconceptions that digital outreach is ‘just tweeting’ and gathering as many followers as possible for corporate social media accounts.

We both shared some of our successes as well as our failures and tried to be as honest as possible about the challenges of taking this approach. How gaining the trust of skeptical audiences takes time and can’t be rushed. How being creative doesn’t mean chasing fads or that latest channel or content form. It’s vital to be credible to your audience and sometimes that means putting in a lot of time and effort learning about what they like and what they find patronising. That’s not to say experimentation isn’t important, but if you get something wrong, you need to learn from it and think about explaining your reasoning to the audience.

True digital outreach that delivers mutually valuable relationships is a long process but many people don’t ever get beyond broadcasting their latest announcement and creating hashtags. If you really want to influence your audiences you have to understand how people behave online. That means becoming one of them by joining in conversations, being helpful when there is no return to you or your brand, learning what matters to them and respecting their ways of doing things. Outreach involves a lot of listening but just as important is the evaluation. Being able to show how you’ve worked with a group to move their opinion from hostile to open to your point of view, is worth more than a billion impressions. It’s through the evaluation of your digital activity that you really learn whether or not you’re doing digital outreach. If you’re only reporting large numbers and making recommendations to grow those numbers further, you’re probably only scratching the surface.