Listen Up! Tapping Social Media Channels for Better Decision-Making

Kind of a dumb title. Maybe I should have said “Read Up!” but that sounds kinda boring, don’t you think? No matter what your favorite way of saying it, taking in and processing information is more important than ever.

As a former GS-15 with a gift for planning and communications, I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms with senior decision makers. Consistent to every room I’ve been in is the fact that senior decision makers rely heavily on their staffs for situational awareness. Without the intel that their staffs provide them, they’d be quickly blinded. There are too many constituent groups and issues for any one person to keep on top of. Staffs are often act as the eyes, ears, and filters for the decision maker. That makes staffers pretty important.

Lot’s of people know this. So, they work the staffers. In the best cases, they make sure the staffers stay informed and know the truth about what’s going on. In the worst cases, they cook the books, spin the stories and reports, and leave out important details. The job of the staffer is not easy.

Unless they have an agenda of their own, staffers do their best to ensure accurate and complete information. They do things like verify stories. They collect the same story form more than one source, cultivate their trusted contacts, and take an occasional dip into source data to verify the reports they are getting. This work is time consuming.

When social media hit the scene, it opened up more channels. Instead of relying entirely on strategic trusted human sources (who sometimes had agendas of THEIR own), staffers could go directly “to the streets.” This seemed like a good way to increase situational awareness, but there were a few problems:

• Everyone has an opinion
• Not everyone is articulate
• People at “street level” often don’t have the big picture (no decision is perfect and some collateral damage is often a part of the “best” solution).
• Lot’s of comments are irrelevant or misinformed
• Separating the wheat from the chaff often took a lot of time and energy – too much for the meager situational awareness return

Few staffers made the time to develop a system for harvesting information from social media channels. With a little help from Katie Delahaye Paine and a few other authors, I gathered my own staffs and set out to turn those social media channels into useful resources for decision making.

The first thing I realized is that keeping a time stamped journal is important:

• Documenting decisions made and the dates they were made gives us one starting point. Watching the “channels” for discussion about those decisions gives us some idea of how long it takes to “penetrate” the organization.
• Documenting our marketing and outreach efforts (advertising our channels) helps us to separate reactions to out marketing from reactions to decisions being made.
• Monitoring the testimony and press releases provided by other decision makers gives us some idea of how our original message it being heard and re-broadcast. Is the original message in tact? Has it been altered?
• Counting the number of comments on a channel in a given period gives us some idea of expected volume and volume generated by our activities. At one time, we used to do something similar by measuring Congressional inquiries. Anecdotally, about 30 days after we announced something that would negatively affect our contracted integrators, we would see an uptick in Congressional inquiries. We concluded that our contractors had been using Congressional channels to apply pressure to our office whenever they didn’t like what we were doing.

Just about anything that you have going on or going out in or around your agency is a candidate for recording in your journal. As you go back through the activity generated on your social media channels, you journal will prove invaluable for correlating that activity with what your agency is doing.

Insider’s Tip #1: If you’re privy to ordinary weekly activity reports that flow up the chain of command, those can be acceptable substitutes for a journal (no point reinventing the wheel). You may need to tweak it a bit to ensure you get the information you need in the way you need it, but this may be easily accomplished through a candid chat with whomever is most responsible for that report (or the decision maker who uses it). As long as people understand the value of what you’re doing, you can usually get the a change made.

Insider Tip #2: Minutes are often generated for decision making meetings. Getting a copy of those minutes may be an acceptable way to document the decisions being made and when they were made.

The next thing I learned is that comments can be summarized and categorized.

• I (my staffs) swept our channels on a regular basis and categorized each comment as positive, negative or neutral. I should note that each channel was further sub-divided into issues – so each discussion thread was exclusively about one of our product or service lines. The judgement was subjective and prone to some variation if more than one staff member are looking at the same comments, but with a little practice and coaching, our “measurements” became pretty consistent.
• In more open-ended forums, we “bucketed” comments into subject categories. The bucketing was also subjective, but useful. For example, we found some comments were process related. Others were policy related. Still others were related to execution.

Any bucketing and categorizing should be done with supervision and coaching support – particularly in the early stages. After everyone get’s comfortable with the game plan, management can back off.

Finally, the right mix of raw data, comments, and summary information is something that I believe each organization has to decide. I tend to start with the idea that less is more in the beginning. As decision makers ask questions, be prepared to dive a little deeper as appropriate.

For example, we might report:

Traffic was up by 30% this week on issue X. Three weeks after the decision to <fill in the blank>, 60% of the comments were positive. 30% were negative and 10% were neutral. The big questions we found had to do with execution of the Z process. 40% of the people who asked questions were most interested in the threshold definition for ABC investments. The issue doesn’t seem to be of interest to the <fill in the blank> agencies yet, but the <fill in the blank> agencies are really amping up the chatter.

Whatever we pull from our social media channels will be one data point on a decision maker’s radar. They will still want verification of facts, the high level political temperature on issues, and input from trusted sources; but it’s a data point that adds value – particularly if you have a solid, repeatable methodology; and you take care to make your report as clean as possible.