THREAD: Why does the government insist on pre-announcing new policy changes? A social media manager's view ...
Why does the Tory government insist on announcing all their announcements 2-3 days in advance? Let me tell you about the concept of 'social listening', but first let's start by drawing an analogy with the tech sector
You've probably heard of the term 'beta-testing' before. This is when a software developer launches an incomplete version of an app to a test audience, on the basis that it's not quite the finished product. But why release an imperfect product?
Firstly, it's an efficient, fast and cheap way of getting users to test your product for you. Instead of investing thousands of hours of work in testing your own product, you get users to do it for you in a fraction of the time - plus it's (mostly) free!
You also have the additional benefit of getting user feedback, so that you can add new features that people really want more quickly in a product update weeks rather than months down the line. Good, eh?
Now think about how government policy could follow a similar route. You could beta-test a policy change by announcing it (via anonymous sources) to the press. It doesn't matter if the policy is only 70% thought through because you know the public will make their reactions known
Think of all the thousands of tweets people made about the relaxing of lockdown rules, or schools going back, or the proposed 2-metre review. All that feedback, all those opinions, criticisms and suggestions. What if you had tools to allow you to monitor all those conversations?
What if those tools allowed you to gauge public opinion, take feedback on board and make little tweaks to the policy and the messaging in response to that? Efficient, quick and cheap!
Well, those tools already exist. We call it 'social listening'. These pick up conversations mentioning particular keywords or hashtags - how many, what topics they discuss, sentiment, lots of stuff - whether it's replying to Boris Johnson or just talking on your own profile
If that sounds a bit Big Brother, well, I suppose it is. It's all legal, as tweets are public. Social listening can't read your DMs (as they're private) or your Facebook posts (also private), but even being able to read tweets or comments on Reddit is hugely powerful already
Social listening is the new focus group. But instead of paying to get 10 people in a room to talk, you can instantly monitor millions of conversations all over the world from a laptop. And these tools aren't top-secret - they're commercially available. My company uses them
And it's all invisible to the user. Your tweets are public property. Right now, a government official could be using what you say as data, and you wouldn't know it. So when you tweet about how ridiculous policy X is, remember that Big Brother is always watching (or listening)
Social listening isn't evil in and of itself. But it *is* there. It's just that you may never have known about it ~END~
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