From Online Public Engagement: Why Social Media can’t be your only Public Engagement Tool
This selection is part of a draft chapter in the upcoming book Online Public Engagement, which is due out from Routledge Press in late 2016. This is half of a draft chapter in which I respond to a common issue: City agencies put up a Facebook page and a Twitter hashtag, and they tell me that they have “done online public engagement.”
In a previous chapter, posted here, I described how our conventional approaches to public engagement do little beyond Tell people things, and that meaningful and effective public participation requires a more active involving of the public in making decisions, approaches that I called Discussing and Deciding. This selection uses those terms, which are capitalized to remind the reader of that earlier framework. The second half of this chapter, which I will post next week, outlines an appropriate role for social media in public engagement and gives concrete tips for using social media to lay a groundwork for meaningful public engagement.
As with past posts, my goal in posting this is to get you feedback. Please bleed digital red pen as you see fit. Thanks!
Chapter 4: Social Media, Online Public Engagement, and the Important Difference
One of the continuing challenges facing online public participation is that the same conflated and overly-simplistic thinking about the different purposes of public engagement(defined in the last chapter as Tell, Ask, Discuss, Decide) that we often see in ineffective in-person efforts tend to spill over to the online sphere as well. Since local government professionals typically have not been taught methods for engaging people in a more effective and meaningful manner (hence the default to the unstructured Open House or the wide-open Town Hall meeting), it is not surprising that officials and professionals often assume that they can do public engagement online through the same social media platforms that they use to communicate with their family, share information with their constituents or follow a favorite band or actor.
While social media has transformed communications, radically decentralized the flow of information and extensively disrupted the traditional relationship between business and consumers, conventional social media platforms do not tend to enable more effective, meaningful or impactful public engagement. Rather, they tend to exacerbate the shortcomings of convention public engagement approaches — in too many cases, allowing more people to have a larger number unsatisfactory interactions with their local government and the local political process than ever before.
This chapter unpacks the attributes of social media platforms in terms of their inherent strengths and limitations when it comes to conducting useful and satisfactory public engagement. Following that analysis, the final chapter outlines several strategies for incorporating social media into an effective online public engagement platform. Starting with the following chapter, we will begin to explore strategies and tools for creating a meaningful and useful online public participation experience.
What Social Media is Good At
The power, appeal and great genius of social media platforms lies in its radical openness and its ease of access, especially as compared with the communications methods used in the mid to late 20th century. Social media platforms allow anyone to become his or her own publisher — a compelling story can easily reach thousands of eyes and ears, do that in a matter of hours, and do that at a fraction of the cost that it would have required to do that through conventional media. At the same time, members of the social media community have a heretofore unimagined power to influence and even completely change, subvert or transform the message that a person or company intended to provide[D1] : every month brings a new story of a social media campaign started by a consumer company or a controversial organization that becomes overwhelmed by opponents using the company or organization’s own social media structures (such as a hashtag or a Facebook group) to turn the effort at promotion into a powerful protest against them.
As a result, social media appears at this time to be transforming not only the way people communicate between themselves, but to be transforming the very nature of the relationship between information provider and consumer, between formerly passive audience member and the object of their attention, between individual and company, organization or government agency. Consumers now expect that a tweet including the name of a business that they have had unsatisfactory experience with will get an immediate response, and they share their frustration as far as their social media reach extends when the business does not respond quickly enough. Persons interested in an emerging news event turn to Twitter for nearly-instantaneous responses, and then castigate the mainstream media for not covering the story as quickly as they are reading in the live updates. And performers who become adept at social media outlets gain intensely loyal fandoms, who regard the artist they have never met as not only a source of entertainment, but as a close friend based on the previously unimaginable degree to which the artist can interact with at least some fans on a one-to-one basis (while being observed by thousands of others).
There are a few other dimensions of the relationship between organization and individual that are also being transformed by the prevalence of social media, with significant implications for governments and community organizations:
Power of content
In traditional marketing, factual information (case studies, how-to information, results of studies or surveys, etc.) typically played a less essential role than simpler messages that conveyed a favorable impression of the product in a quick and emotionally-compelling manner. While “branding” and emotional connection are still essential to the marketing of any product (including a city or community), businesses ranging from consumer goods to high technology find now that a critical element of their marketing strategy relies on the generation of content — a steady flow of information that can be used to feed the social media streams, since the life span of most social media posts can be measured in hours. This demand has led to the rise of a sub-specialty of marketing known as content generation — in essence, the creation of shareable information that can be used to keep the subject freshly in the minds of social media users on an ongoing basis.
Trust and Transparency
Because of the manner in which social media makes it possible to upend the traditional relationship between producer and consumer, trustworthiness becomes one of the most crucial factors of social media impact. Businesses that only share snippets of news releases tend to have much less social media impact than those that share information that isn’t directly connected to their sales, and that appears to be because the business that is only marketing itself is not perceived to “care” about its followers.[1] By the same token, public sources as varied as fast food chains and the President of the United States find that the occasional post with a personal voice, whether sincere or as a wry joke, creates more positive response than maintaining a strictly factual or neutral stance. Personable-ness and a measure of emotion appear to be among the characteristics that lead followers to believe that they can trust the source.
Maintaining trust also requires a high level of transparency: the greatest social media crises, whether corporations or government officials, can typically be traced to a perception of insufficient transparency. Failing to release information or admit fault, or only doing so in a legalistic or simply un-emphatic fashion, tends to have the effect of fueling the fire of frustration among social media participants, whose responses often frame the issue in terms of a breach of trust.
Opening door of communication, a little
As noted previously, one of the great transformations enabled by social media is the degree to which it replaces the former expectation of one-way communication (producer to consumer) with an expectation of two-way communication (the consumer being able to talk to and directly influence the producer). But while two-way communication becomes more prevalent on social media, and sometimes leads to influence on the producer, that does not happen universally. In the example of the musician above, the perception of personal relationship is created by a very small number of messages to a very small number of individuals, which then become widely shared by the recipient and some of the onlookers. For each message that receives a response in such a case, however, thousands will go unanswered, if for no other reason than the mismatch between the number of responses and the capacity of the receiver to respond to them all.
In businesses that employ social media management staff, a large number of the responses that are sent will typically consist of stock answers. As a result, the producer of social media content that generates responses faces a delicate balancing act: creating a sufficient number of responses that appear sincere and personal (and thus perpetuate the belief that one can get a personal response) and not allocating so much time or resources to social media response than it detracts from the organization’s primary purpose. Producers that lose this balance risk a backlash and loss of its audience, who may interpret its lack of what they perceive as adequate response as another breach of the social media compact.
What Social Media is Not Constructed to Do
Despite its influence, the previously-unimaginable reach that it provides at extremely low cost, and the potential to transform traditional power arrangements, social media platforms have some notable limitations when it comes to attempting to use them to achieve public engagement goals.
It should be noted that this section does not provide a criticism of social media per se. As discussed in the previous section, social media platforms do what they are intended to do, and they do that as well as possible given the limits of technology at any given time. The key issue with attempting to use social media as a primary public participation tool is not whether a certain desired or undesired interaction happens at any given time, but whether the structure of the platform that the participants are using to communicate makes it easier to provide one type of response than another.
Complexity
As noted in the section about the importance of content, the average social media post loses its ability to attract viewers after a very short time, typically a period of hours, unless it is shared repeatedly by others. This means that posts that do not achieve “viral” status (very, few few do) tend to drop out of the feeds, streams and general consciousness of readers within a very short period of time. Perhaps not coincidentally, most research also indicates that the longer an online post is in terms of the amount of time it will take to read it, the less likely readers are to start to read it, or to complete it.
These two factors indicate the challenge in addressing or building understanding of a complex issue through a social media platform. Because of the need to break content into small, easily-read items that can be understood outside of any larger context, and because the reader may or may not have seen or remember any previous elements, building meaningful understanding of complex issues while relying on social media as the primary engagement outlet becomes highly challenging.
It is not that people are not willing to consider complex issues; the nature of social media, with its constant and steady stream of information from a plethora of sources, makes it difficult to maintain the arc of information around a complex topic. As a result, although it may be possible to do some form of Informing public engagement solely relying on social media platforms (for example, listing agenda items for an upcoming meeting), there is a significant risk that the Informing conducted may be overly simplified or poorly understood — particularly in terms of the types of long-term, complex issues that must be addressed in strategic, transportation, land use and other types of community planning.
Deliberation
As noted previously, while social media platforms enable a level of response to the generators of a piece of content that was previously not possible, social media platforms are fundamentally not designed to facilitate constructive deliberation. While it is possible for people responding to a Facebook post or a Tweet to have an exchange comparable to one they might have in person — listening to and responding appropriately to each other in turn — it is also entirely possible that the respondents will ignore each other’s points, insist on their own opinions without any consideration of what anyone else is saying, resort to personal attacks or name-calling, or otherwise participate in the online version of a shouting match.
This means that Discussing-style public engagement objectives will only succeed if all of the persons who choose to participate exhibit good deliberation behavior — and it is exactly those persons who want to participate in a Discussion who may be most frustrated, and most likely to leave the process, if others do not play by those rules.
Agreement
Because social media platforms are set up to facilitate information sharing and response to that information, they tend to place emphasis on the number of responses, rather than on the commonalities or differences between the responses.
If you review the responses to a particularly heavily-commented Facebook post, for example, you will probably have a hard time identifying conclusively what the majority of people who responded agreed on or disagreed about. You may find a few clusters of comments that seem to be making similar points, or you may accidentally conclude that the majority of participants agree with a certain point because a few pithy comments stuck in your mind after you finished reviewing them. Unless you do a formal content analysis — tracking, for example, the percentage of the total comments that contain a certain set of words and a sentiment analysis of the attitude that those posts express toward those words — you may have a hard time conclusively documenting any areas of agreement.
Since few local government staff or officials have the time or the training to do such an analysis, the flood of comments is likely to provide few reliable answers to the question of what the community has agreement on. As a result, Asking a question with the purpose of engaging the public is likely to generate a cacophony of responses, through which it may be extremely difficult to discern a response that anyone can use as a reliable basis for decision-making.
Prioritizing
For the same reasons as discussed in the last section, social media platforms provide almost no basis for identifying priorities across a group of participants. Because one cannot readily and objectively sort out the issues on which the participants agree, one also cannot reliably determine where there priorities may lie — that is, whether one issue or potential solution is more or less important to the majority of participants than another. Understanding the public’s priorities typically represents the core need of the Deciding phase of public engagement, and a purely social media-based approach to public engagement will make it almost impossible to examine the tradeoffs and choices necessary to develop an understanding of priorities.
Trolling and cyber-bullying.
Although concerted trolling or cyber-bullying appears to be relatively uncommon on most public agency social media sites, a few persistent trolls can set both participant and public agency on edge and drive both away from engaging in the social media discussion at all.
Trolling, — generally defined as comments meant to demean or intimidate the initial poster and others, or comments that undercut civil discussion by resorting to repeated ad hominem attacks, insisting on inflammatory statements without supporting facts, etc. — represents one of the most well-known challenges of social media, despite the fact that most people and most agencies that use social media almost never encounter a troll. Cyber-bullying, meanwhile, is usually defined as targeted attacks meant to damage a specific individual’s reputation by insulting or slandering them, posting damaging (true or fabricated) information or pictures, trying to push the individual toward destructive behavior, etc.
Recent research into the psychology of trolling and cyber-bullying indicates that persons who participate in such behavior tend to be responding to some sense of exclusion or of being demeaned in some element of their lives, and the relatively anonymous nature of many social media interactions give these persons an opportunity to believe that they can dominate another person online in a manner similar to the humiliation that they have received in their own experience. Anecdotes resulting from recent high-profile cyber-bulling and trolling situations, such as those surrounding the Gamergate controversy in 2014–15, also appear to indicate that social media platforms can make it easier for an individual to mentally deny the humanity of an online participant with whom they disagree, and that the nature of highly unified online social groups can reinforce the perception that the target merits the attack.
True trolling and cyber-bulling appear to be less commonly directed toward public agencies than toward individuals, although no known research has been conducted to document this hypothesis at this time. Such a theory may appear reasonable, however, given the expectation of some level of real-life power inequality between individuals and public agencies (especially when the public agency has a law enforcement function). It appears that most public agencies are more likely to encounter a more general kind of negative or cynical commenting in the social media arena, comparable to the negative or cynical commenting that one might encounter in a conventional public meeting. While not always pleasant, these types of comments must be considered a legitimate part of the public participation process. Strategies for addressing these are outlined in the next section.
Cyber-bullying, and certain very aggressive types of trolling that involve threats or hate speech, are increasingly recognized as crimes comparable to in-person menacing, and are thus an appropriate matter for law enforcement to address. If you personally experience online threats, smear campaigns using falsified or altered documents or images, or other responses that make you fear for your own safety, bring the information to your local law enforcement officials immediately.
