[...] Mission Creep | Neil Williams » Blog Archive » The NSFW presentation A cracking presentation explaining social media and online participation - great post to get going with Neil (tags: blog social media training participation) [...]

[...] rather familiar. Colleagues and I have to do the same thing all the time when selling-in social media to policy officials, training people on CMSs or explaining how to use any other web [...]

Now, I’ve seen various of these ’social media by the numbers’ presentations, and they just don’t do it for me.

The people I’m trying to convince often half-understand the terms involved, believe it’s ‘the future’ and are a mixture of embarrassed, scared, excited and confused. Some won’t believe it’s of any relevance until you put an example directly relevant to their world right in front of them.

On top of that, I just don’t believe that 39% of the audiences we work with subscribe to RSS feeds (wherever that figure comes from). And the whole trust-in-advertising vs trust-in-recommendations thing isn’t really an apples with apples comparison.

The bits of the presentation I use which work best are the screenshots with a story behind them. The examples we’ve developed, or which exist elsewhere in government. Or at a stretch examples like MyStarbucksIdea or Ford’s Social News Releases.

Maybe the numbers work for some people, but I’ve found it’s better to show, not tell.

It’s a lovely presentation. Powerful messages and looks great. The numbers do fall down with the inflated claims though. 39% using RSS feeds stuck out for me too! If you click back a couple of slides you see it is refering to “Active Internet Users” without defining what an active internet user is. Certainly not average.

I understand what you mean about showing examples Steph. Numbers are good for building business cases and confirming what you believe, but as I’ve just pointed out numbers can be misleading.

Alison - thanks for making your first ever comment on my blog! You’ll find a healthy cynicism prevails among the social media evangelists at teacamp. But broadly the points are: people are out there, talking about issues that relate to our work, so let’s listen and join in. And it’s about government speaking in a different voice, being more transparent/visible/accessible. But only where there’s a real opportunity for participants to have an impact, otherwise it’s just lip service.

Neil, thanks for posting the presentation. Glad to see it sparked an interesting dialogue! Thought I’d take a moment to clarify the source of the stats regarding RSS feeds and define “Active Internet Users” since there seems to be a healthy (and understandable) dose of skepticism about that number. First, the source of the info is the Wave 3 Universal McCann study on social media use. You can get a copy of the entire study at http://tinyurl.com/3nrmg5.

Second, here’s their verbatim explanation of the methodology used in collecting this data: “All surveys have been scripted and hosted on Universal McCann’s in-house online research system, Intuition. All surveys
are self completion and the data collected is entirely quantitative. Every market is representative of the 16-54 Active
Internet Universe. In this Wave 17,000 internet users in 29 countries were interviewed. To be included you need to be using the internet everyday or every other day.”

Any way you slice it, the numbers are pretty compelling. — And that’s precisely why I felt compelled to create this presentation. The challenges in communicating the value and momentum behind social media is very real—and so is the business case.

But not everyone is ready to hop on board. Yet.