Risk of change vs Fear of change

What makes a fantastic organic social media strategy?

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about…that and how long I can last before putting the heating on now the sun has set on summer (what summer?!).

Honestly, I wrestle with it a lot because the nature of the beast is one day you post content that you’ve grafted over, really planned, posted at the correct time of day, blah, blah, blah. And it sinks without a trace (or even a like…).

Then you post a meme about the weather and it flies. That's life eh!

But I’ve tried to reflect on this as I was asked to speak at a conference by the kind folk at Orlo (our social CMS providers) about the risk vs reward of driving change for the better.

Watch | My presentation Risk of change vs Fear of change in full

It came as we’re finishing work on our social media strategy and thoughts of what benefits having a plan brings to your channels over just going with what works day-to-day.

It’s taken around a year to pull the strategy together almost from square one.?

You might think ‘jeez that’s a long time’ but you know, we have to do other work at the same time…

But also we had a lot to unpick and reimagine.

We lacked an authentic style of content. We had a tone of voice that sounded like the first 3 pars of a press release. We relied on our media agenda to set our social agenda. There was a culture of ‘just push things out on social’ to tick a box. And had a lack of evaluation and honesty about what worked and didn’t work.

So where do you start?? We were fortunate to bring in help from comms2point0’s Darren Caveney who gave us an opportunity to externally audit our social channels.

Let’s face it, if you’re on the pit wall you’re too close to the action. It ranked our channels and gave an honest assessment of where we were.

There were honestly some bad points but also good points where we’d maybe been too harsh on ourselves too.

Alongside this, we arranged a visit to see the digital team at the Ministry of Justice to explore their operation in the heart of the Whitehall juggernaut.

Gaining their perspective was invaluable in seeing how a large digital team interacts within an organisation.

Establishing content planning groups, content calendars and channel managers has been helpful for us and were among the key takeaways from the visit.

We worked up a golden thread that links all our messaging on social along with content pillars designed to organise our channels better.

We love being part of the West Midlands (it’s in the name after all!) so why not shout about it more?

I was a journalist in a former life, and for me, people stories are what I love.

Yet how often, amid the multi-million-pound announcements, do we talk to the people they actually support.

So that is a key focus for us now.

Finally we have made a start in looking at how you tell news in an engaging way.

I was one of those wedded to the notion of evening newspapers sold from the local newsagents or sellers in the street (I know I don’t look that old, right!).

But those days are long gone.

Instead, you find news in mere seconds via links shared in WhatsApp groups, pictures posted in a Facebook group, Instagram stories from your favourite footballer or TikTokers dissecting the latest news topic.

And we weren’t part of that.

So now we’ve set out on a new way of doing things.

The implementation is as important as drafting the strategy in the first place.

Sticking to your guns when things don’t work or expectations are dashed.?

But for all the planning and strategising you can do at the end of the day that post about the weather will still fly and that video you’ve edited for 3 days may still sink.

So what makes a fantastic social strategy??

Having a set of plans that you stick to, taking responsibility if they don’t work and being honest enough to make that meme work for you.?

Guess I’ll tell you in 12 months or so how we're getting on.