NASA is the Authority on Social Media??
According to a study done by George Washington University, the leading organization when it comes to social media is… as you can guess from the title NASA. The article, written by the Washington Post, can be viewed here. In the study, the top five organizations rated were all non-profit seeking groups.
What did they all have in common, well that brings us to the lesson learned. What makes them the best at social media? They don’t say in the article, but I am going to assert that it is because they were all groups that had something interesting to talk about and were not trying to sell anything to the public. People are not very interested in engaging as much with companies, who try to tell us that they are not trying to sell you anything, they just want to open a dialogue. I think that people see through that messaging.
A professor of mine at UBC Sauder, Paul Cubbon was asking us in class the other day, why would someone be interested in the Telus social media campaign, why would someone sign on to their Facebook group? He was not trying to pick on Telus, he was trying to point out that their needs to be a good reason other than buying the Telus products. Their needs to be a good reason to talk to these companies.
NASA and the others on the list have these advantages. They are Government funded, so their idea to engage people in a social media campaign are obviously to get support from the population so that NASA continues to be supported, but on the other hand this is not direct selling in the same way that companies do it. Also, NASA has really cool stuff that they do and people want to talk about it. In the article the head of social media for NASA said that they just started this campaign, so they must be getting a great response very quickly and easily. This signifies to me that it is an easy sell.
So what can companies learn from this? I am not entirely sure, it definitely re-inforces what most of the experts are saying about social media in that it has to be a dialogue and not a sales pitch. I think that the key lesson might be to give up control of your social media to the public so that they coordinate and add most of the content and make sure there is interesting content for your intended viewer so that they are compelled to add this content.
Jason Collis