Gordon Brown made a speech earlier today on Building Britain’s Digital Future.
I am not going to get stuck in to every point that was made, Mike Butcher and Twankers UK will be handling that side of things! Instead, I would like to pick up on one area – How they measure their current social media activity?
Towards the end of the speech, Brown says,
“Each week I record a podcast and use twitter most days. Number10.gov.uk carries out daily conversations with more than 1.7 million followers. There have been almost 2 million views of our images on flickr and 4.3 million views of our films and videos on YouTube.”
Its great measuring eyeballs, fans, followers and views but we can do better than that now…so lets see what the affects of the their didgital activity is. Do people interact with them or are the government simply using the tools as another vehicle for spin? I am not expecting Gordon to be at the forefront of social media measurement and I am glad they have learnt the names of some of the tools and have gone a step further than measuring HITS (How Idiots Track Success) but let’s see if they actually understand how to measure success?
I would like to think they are going a bit deeper with their social media measurement metrics. Here’s a few ways they could take the metrics used in the above soundbite and add a layer of depth into them to give a more realistic yardstick on how effective their digital communications are:
“Number10.gov.uk carries out daily conversations with more than 1.7 million followers”
How many comments have been made on the site? How many actions have taken place on the site to qualify a ‘conversation’? What constitutes a ‘follower’?
“There have been almost 2 million views of our images on flickr”
How many comments have been made? How many users have uploaded their own images?
“and 4.3 million views of our films and videos on YouTube”
What are the comments saying? Are they positive? Has the sentiment changed? How many subscribers do they have ?
Just looking at eyeballs isn’t giving anyone a true reflection of success and while the web metrics might seem impressive, social media has moved the goalposts from how the display industry has valued activity. If the Government want to know how effective their outreach programs are, they need to drive actions, otherwise they are going to seem less effective than a man playing the piano on Chat Roulette!
