- Have any questions?
- 02 9247 6000
- media@commsroom.co
- Have any questions?
- 02 9247 6000
- media@commsroom.co
Menu
Today, Kate Davies, Head of Communications and Corporate Strategy at Lake Macquarie City Council, joined Comms Room to share how she and her organisation keeps up with the fast-paced digital world.
Kate goes to discuss staying on top of misinformation, the importance of quick and effective responses on social media and engaging effectively beyond being social.
Read along and be a better communications professional by the end of this article!
Local government is a large and diverse industry. At Lake Macquarie City Council, we recognise that strong and effective communication with our community delivers a range of benefits, including strengthening relationships, generating support and participation, and improving community awareness of our projects, activities and services. We also utilise two-way conversation on social media to correct misinformation and educate our community.
Through our website, social media and e-newsletters, we provide high-quality, relevant, user-based content that appropriately reflect the organisation’s branding, values and objectives to create engagement and loyalty from our audience.
Social media is a great opportunity to showcase the eclectic 100+ services and facilities managed by the industry. Collectively at Council, we have 80,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. In the last 12 months, we had an increase of 10,000 followers – and as a result we continually need to monitor and evaluate our approach as the social media landscape evolves.
Successful social media accounts result in increased web traffic referrals, increased followers across all platforms and accounts, and higher quality engagement with new and existing followers. When we’re communicating with our community, we are mindful we are not dealing with one group of people, but rather a complex and diverse range of audiences. The challenge with communicating in a complex, dynamic and crowded environment is to cut through in a clear and simple way using rich media, calls-to-action and links.
Most organisations use social media for brand awareness and information sharing, however in 2018, Lake Macquarie City Council started the ongoing journey to use it as a key customer service tool.
For us as a service provider to 214,000 residents, it gives us another opportunity to listen to what people are saying about us. Using it as an active listening tool, we opened another window into improving areas of our Council while reinforcing aspects that already resonated with people.
Modern consumers expect organisations to provide fast, seamless and personalised service regardless of whether they connect on social media, on the company website or in person.
When a customer reaches out on social media with a complex issue, organisations should enable seamless escalation without requiring the customer to enter details several times, repeat the issue or start from the beginning on another channel. Our communications team has developed dedicated support within our customer service team to ensure most social interactions stay on-channel, even if they have to move over to Messenger, at least they are being kept within meta platforms.
We all know social media isn’t an exact science.
It doesn’t work the same for every business or industry.
At Council, we base our content on three core pillars of informing, engaging and entertaining. We aim for a balance and tweak our social media schedule where we can to achieve this balance. We are likely to do more inform posts on Twitter and be more entertaining on Instagram based on the audiences.
Our followers like to be engaged, they want to be entertained and they want to conduct business with us. They also expect to be informed with responses sent in a timely manner.
We ensure that all Council’s social media accounts are continually checked during business hours. We aim that all requests for service or information be acknowledged and/or responded to within one business day of the post being made. Where this is not possible an interim response is provided and will be kept up to date throughout the process. We’re here for our community, helping them understand what the Council does for them daily, keeping them informed and working meaningfully together to help shape the city’s future.
Most Council’s communications teams are trying to do it all with the tools that they have. This means staff often wear a few hats or operate a few systems that unfortunately don’t integrate well and don’t all talk to each other – which often means we resort to traditional options such as trusty excel (not that there’s anything wrong with spreadsheet!).
Customer insight tools are amazing – it’s just finding more time to monitor, evaluate and then act to respond to what the community is telling you, beyond emails or social comments on your own channels.
Read also: Keeping up with supply chain comms ft. Elyse Glenn of Schneider Electric (commsroom.co)
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
