What are we doing with social media v0.2? #BarcelonaSprint 2019
Summing up some conversations with @josh, @guyiac, @xurizaemon, @roshani (apologies if I forgot others) around social media. I'm calling this v0.2 as it follows on from discussions with Josh, @daniella, @RoseLanigan at Amsterdam Sprint that fed into this Wiki: https://lab.civicrm.org/marketing/social-media & this issue: #1.
I feel this subject takes up quite a bit of time/attention so am writing a (sorry, long) issue to try and reduce the amount of time this topic ultimately takes up.
Why this issue came up?
Before the summit Josh asked me to 'do social media' at the summit. As a Twitter addict I couldn't come up with a good excuse not to. I posted an initial photo and message on FB and TW as it began, then attempted on the first day to sum up sessions with a photo and summary. I made a mistake in one Tweet and it needed deleting (only Josh had permissions) - for all I know there are other mistakes. The summit is interactive, and paying to be here, I obvbiously prioritised my experience so by the end of Saturday's summit there was very little tweeting happening. Indeed, it struck me that tweets could be seen as statements that reflected a CiviCRM brand position, but which might not reflect the community's position. Indeed, as the two days established, while there's incredible cohesions, consensus and cooperation across the community here, getting it to agree to define anything singular is hard. So that got me thinking..
How we could better do Twitter (suggestion)
- People are already Tweeting nice stuff with photos about Civi, for e.g. @wmortada - but because of Buffer's limits on RT powers in-app, Civi RTs almost nothing. (I did install a buffer plugin to my browser on my old laptop but then I changed machine). So why are we not focussed on amplifying voices from the community instead?
- "official tweets" with the CiviCRM trademarked logo reflect/represent the community as much as anything. So maybe they should be drafted in advance, and collaborated on by those who care.
- the development of a social media personality - replying to questions and queries (perhaps even with the user handle of whoever wrote it) - is another - or potentially parallel - approach
But what about other networks?
When we checked Facebook today to see if anyone had reacted and consider if this same approach could work on other platforms, we saw it had a reach of 12 people, one like and a spam comment/obfuscated link to a porn site.
So other than wondering where you submit issues on the Facebook bugs {cough} - it seems like something isn't working.
What did others say?
I'll maybe let people present this directly in the comments, but it was suggested that:
- we should just shut down some/all social media accounts as it's both an official endorsement of platforms some/many of us have issues with, and even ignoring this we don't have volunteer resources to fill the gaps to do the job well.
- others felt that doing this would disregard the charities who depend on these platforms, and the people who like them and get benefit from them.
- there was also the argument that taking the accounts down could let someone else squat the accounts.
- why not leave old and more toxic platforms and embrace either newer or more idealogically-aligned platforms. We could live-stream sessions, or even just a non-audio feed/Twitch/Stream/etc of everyone working at the Sprint to give a sense of what these spaces are like to those considering coming to one.
Was there a conclusion?
Like previous discussions in Amsterdam and Bampton around this similar themese emerged. Some of this stuff impact more people and can't be decided by so small a group (not least a live-stream of the sprint). It also takes quite a bit of discussion bandwidth so I'm personally sympathetic to scaling back what we do and doing that better rather than setting goals to do more that we fail to achieve.
Guy pointed out we could lock down the FB to prevent spam comments. He offered to become an admin, and was made one by me - which I only realised later happened without any from of process but happened in the main sprint room in the presence of @josh so it felt fine.
I did later wondered if it would be helpful to have a standard process and agreement for onboarding social media volunteers. Not a long document - just something itterative on the wiki here covering the 'contract' or 'responsibility' of what the community expects of anyone taking on that role (and maybe with input from core about the legal obligations - privacy/libel/etc). Indeed if we move to RTing on Twitter more than messages - should there be limits on how much anyone is RTed?
Get to the point, is there a proposal?
Firstly, (limited and concise :) feedback on this would be good, especially from anyone who fed into the discussion so far - or indeed who has been long waiting to share their feelings on this. Then there are really three suggestions:
- for any CiviCRM branded public message - tweets/FB/etc updates that dont't have an author name or user handle underneath it to be drafted through an open process (I'd suggest Etherpad - but other systems could work).
- to shift more to ampliciation of existing comments/tweets/posts/etc.
- to have super simple guidelines for what is expected - both by core (legal) and community - by any social admins.
There's also a wider stretch goal of figuring out the broader strategy (should we stop being apolitical in our use of social media platforms? ie to use platforms that are also open source / non-profit / etc?) but don't anticipate answering that at this summit/sprint, so am keeping it well clear of the above discussion.