Molly Ringwald on children and social media

I happened on Molly Ringwald's AskMolly piece in the Guardian last week and thought it warrants a mention here. The question posed to her was the following, by a 12 year old girl:

"My teacher wants me to delete an atheist picture from social media. Should I?"

Ringwald's answer includes this very important observation:

"[The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights] contains another section about the right to privacy. It was important enough to include in this screed, yet it’s something we willingly forfeit every day through social media. This might seem hopelessly old-fashioned, but I can’t help feeling you digital natives are basically consenting to your own surveillance."

Read the whole response here.

2 "don't's" of social media

During training sessions on how to use Twitter within an organisation, I tend to emphasise these two points, both related to personality and voice on social media:

    Don't mix personal and professional

A few years ago, if you'd me that I would be writing about not mixing personal and professional social media personae, I wouldn't have believed you. I believed that what you see is what you get, and that therefore, there was no need to separate my accounts.


After using social media in a personal and professional capacity for a good few years, though, I've had a change of heart. I think there are many reasons that mixing the two personae is wrong:

• An organisation should have its own persona, voice or personality. Your voice is probably not it. Have a look at this article on "finding your brand voice" to find out what I mean.
• An organisation's social media account should be focussed and release targeted messages that will be of interest to its audience. What you had for lunch with your family doesn't form part of that.
• An off-hand or throwaway comment made from home regarding your organisation could result in things going very very wrong. Have a look here for a scary example of someone getting it very wrong professionally, just because he/she had probably forgotten to sign out of one account (professional) and into another (personal).
• Mixing personae could result in sharing "too much" online. I wrote here about what can happen when you share too much information about your organisation, even unwittingly.

Bottom line: just don't do it.

    But don't be afraid to have a voice and a personality

I know. It can be daunting establishing a social media account for your organisation. You're now speaking for the organisation. It's just you and your 10 000 followers. (I'm not helping much, am I?)

In some research I did for a journal article a few years ago about South African academic librarian bloggers, I found that in that context, blog posts often consisted of just a link to an article of interest. Bloggers were reluctant to share their opinion on a topic and therefore, blogs with a "voice and personality" were rare.

A similar thing can happen with micro-blogging on Twitter. When we're starting out, our tweets or posts tend to be tentative. We are afraid of having a voice, or of perhaps of misrepresenting our organisation, and so the only tweets we send out tend to be retweets, and the only posts are shares of others' posts.

This is fine to start with, but the aim should always be to develop a voice. The reason people will want to follow you on social media is because you have an interesting message and an engaging way of conveying it. Work on that, and you'll have no problem retaining your followers.

Three things I've learned about social media

1. Social media is immediate.

When I started with social media, it was quite a task convincing colleagues that a response didn't have to go through 12 revisions before it could be sent out. It didn't have to be seen by everyone in the organisation. And it didn't have to be word perfect, because chances are, I would edit it anyway.

Social media is about two-way communication and when someone addresses you, you should ensure that you respond, and quickly. There's nothing worse than finding an organisation on Twitter, asking them a question, and getting no response, or a worse, an "overdue" response.

A good way of ensuring that you respond quickly is to establish a good knowledge base. This can be in the form of documented FAQs and their answers that you can use as a reference when the queries start pouring in, or in the form of people who know the answers to commonly asked questions through years of experience.

2. Social media is 24/7.

According to research conducted in 2013 by World Wide Worx, the most popular time to tweet is 9-10pm. Not your usual working hours, you'll agree. Depending on your line of work, queries will come via social media at all hours of the day. Obviously, we can't all be up and working 24 hours a day, but having a policy in place that states what your response time is and sticking to it will go a long way to helping you retain your followers.

3. Managing an account requires thought and planning.

 I'll be honest: my husband thinks that the social media part of my job sounds like I do lots of nothing. It's not true, of course. Deciding to invest time in social media is not as simple as signing up for a Facebook account. Amongst other things, here are just some of the things I've done while managing social media accounts:

•  Deciding who my target audience is and whether a particular platform will reach them.
• Setting up a policy and ensuring that our organisation has a social media risk management strategy. 
• Setting up a posting schedule, to ensure that we post at the optimum time of day, and that we keep your account content "fresh". 

No, social media account management isn't playing all day. It requires thought and planning.

I'll share more lessons learned in future posts.