What was it like working in Social Media for the government?
I was working in the UK Intellectual Property Office in Newport in 2009, my role wasn’t really meant to be social media, it was more press and comms. But social media was becoming a bigger thing in the late part of the decade and the department hadn’t really explored it. I was always interested in that sort of thing, being a bit of a geek, so I took it under my job remit without really seeking permission first to set up some social accounts and to start coming up with ideas for content, finding out who the people were in different parts of government working on social to then find best practice and become a bit of a subject matter expert in social media for government. I did that for three years, over time I worked on projects with BBC Dragon’s Den, I worked briefly for 10 Downing Street. I had lots of opportunities that came my way through just getting on and doing it and not seeking permission first and seeing what the results would be and I had great success with it. I had a great stint working in government, although, the challenges of public sector budgets and bureaucracy and the slow pace of change are things I don’t miss, and something I didn’t have such a problem with when I moved into my next role with The Next Web.
We love your Geekout newsletter, there’s so much detail packed into it, how do you find the time to include so much information?
Geekout newsletter was always an idea of how I can make it possible for people to be able to keep up to date with all the latest in social media without having to follow every single tweet that I post which you sometimes lose because it’s algorithmically sorted, or just don’t have time. Putting it together in a weekly newsletter was the most obvious solution, but of course, it created more work for me. But I’m into a bit of a pattern now where throughout the week I’m tweeting all week long and sharing things to do with new tools, features, products, tips and tactics. Then I go back through it all at the end of the week and pick out the ones that are the most important or the most interesting. I use Google Docs to put them into different places that I think they should go within the newsletter, and why they’re important. Then, with my co-editor, we pull it together every Friday and go from there. In terms of my sources, I have people that DM me tip offs, I have over 200 RSS feed sources that I use, I’ve got lots of Twitter lists as well. Plenty of ways of getting information, it’s just a case of curating and collating it at the end of the week.
How do you keep up with Social Media Trends?
I use a long list of RSS feeds, I have Twitter lists on quite a comprehensively setup tweet deck, I have people that send me tip offs in email and in my private messages about things that are happening. The tech social companies, they will often make me aware of things that they’re working on or coming up with soon, as well as people, insiders, who leak information. But I just read; read lots. I share out lots of content all week long because they’re things that are interesting to me, and I read the majority of it. So I kind of naturally keep myself aware of things and on top of things by knowing that I’m sharing it all out in readiness for putting into the newsletter at the end of the week, it’s kind of ‘one helps the other’, really.
If you could change anything about Social Media, what would it be?
Now that I’ve got children – my eldest is coming up to 13 and my next is coming up to 10 years old, so they are very much starting to discover and use social media, and it’s only then you start to see the dangers and risks of it. Things that maybe didn’t worry me before about social media have started to become more of a concern. Vanity metrics around how many likes and followers you get and all the engagement stuff, I don’t think that’s a healthy thing for people to be fixated on. Certainly for brands and marketers there’s a value to those vanity metrics, but I think for younger users, and users in general, the obsession and addiction to those sorts of things aren’t necessarily healthy and don’t lead to positive outcomes for most. Young people are feeling that they need to be validated in some way by those stats on their posts, it’s concerning. So I think that the way stats are focussed on, and the way that posts are displayed, and the things that are tracked and measured and shown on the surface, I think that could be changed and made less of an important factor in social media. Access to social media and the protection of younger users is very much something I’d like to see a lot more improvement in as my kids grow up and start using these products.
Matt Navarra is a Freelance Social Media Consultant
