Social Media Campaigns

                        

                                                 John Samuel

I.          What is a campaign?

A campaign is a planned and organised set of communicative and social actions, within a definite span of time, to influence a set of people/public/decision makers to convince them to support a certain cause/ initiative/goal/ or specific objective. The nature and character of campaigns will be influenced by the social, cultural and political context in which a campaign is launched. In designing a campaign, there has to be clarity of purpose, audience, messages and modes of communication.

Principles matter

The most important aspect of a social media campaign is a clear and shared understanding of the ethical principles that inform the campaign. For example, peace, justice, non-violence, integrity, protecting environment, human dignity, social responsibility, and equity are all core values that will have implications for the strategic use of social media for inter-religious dialogue or for peace initiative.

It is often a shared sense of core ethical principles that help dialogue between those who belong to different religious traditions or beliefs.

Elements of a campaign

A good campaign will have the following aspects:

1)  A clearly defined goal(what do you want to achieve?)

2)  Target of campaign and communication( whom do you want to influence?)

3)  A clear idea about key messages (what do you want others to hear)

4)  Framing the message( How do you convey your message in a way others want to listen)

5)  Choice of appropriate medium( Social media /mass media/ alternate media)

6)  Strategic knowledge-action networking( who are the your allies/fence-sitters/opponents)

7)  Communication strategies( information becomes powerful when one knows how to make strategic use of information)

8)  Consistent and focused messaging ( don’t lose focus or get distracted from the goal)

9)  Winning over strategic people/organisations to speak for your campaign (when others begin to speak your message, you are winning)

10)        Monitoring the effectiveness of the campaign( outreach and quality of messaging)

11)        Reorient the communication strategies if required.

II.         Social Media Campaign

Social media channels /options( Facebook, Twitter,  Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine etc.) are interactive communication platforms that would help to communicate real time messages/images/videos instantly all across the world. Social media can be local as well as global; social media can communicate to a whole range of actors across the globe based on the purpose of communication and the character of message.
Social media campaigns are planned and organised interactive communication strategies for influencing a set of actors for a particular cause/initiatives/ objectives, primarily making use of the social media channels.

Social media campaign can also help to get traction in the mass/earned media channels.

Hence, a multi-pronged trans-media strategy can be effective to use both social media to get tractions of mass media as well. Social media campaigns become effective when there is a complementarity between social media campaign and other communicative and social action. Social media campaign can often amplify and help to reach out to a larger audience on real-time basis. Social media campaigns become effective when they are supported by a portal or webpage or a blog as the words and images in social media have a ‘fleeting’ character.

Three key aspects of an effective social media campaign:

1)  Timing

2)  Framing

3)  Targeting

a)  The timing of social media campaign is crucial for the success. The choice of time will have to be carefully chosen depending on the purpose, target audience and opportunities.

b)  Framing:The most important aspect in messaging is the ‘framing’. The same message can be ‘framed’ in number of ways. A strategic ‘framing’ (for example using photos, small videos, positive messaging) help others to listen to your voice. ‘Framing’ is the art of managing your message in way that others want to hear or see. Framing helps to avoid ‘self-righteousness / aggressive modes of communications and make communication into an art of making others to listen your voice/message.

c)   Different strokes for different folks.  Communication strategies may have to be customized for different target groups and choice of the social media channel can vary depending on the strategic audience.

Strategies to remember

a)  Social media is not one- way traffic: The significance of social media is in its interactive character over time and space. Hence, it is important to manage discontent/disagreement/haters/trolls etc. in a subtle way. You are not alone in social media. Social media often is like a cacophony; many millions of people chatting, discussing, communicating multiple messages at the same-time. Hence, it is important to manage to get your target audience and manage multiple distractions on the social media

b)  Build an active social media profile:Social mediaspace is an interactive communicative space primarily used by people. It is the ‘human-touch’ that makes social media unique.  Hence, building credibility within social media requires a consistent engagement and an active social media presence to build an active social media profile. An active social media profile is built over a period of time and by building credibility through interesting and informative posts and images.  Effective and active social media profile helps to build a community of online friends and supporters in the social media. Such a positive profile and active support/friends base often help to fast-track social media campaigns.

c)  Art of Hash-tags: Hash-tags are strategic labeling to attract more people to your campaign message. Hash-tags are certainly important for twitter and Facebook communications.

d) Language matters:It is important to choose the language, depending on your target audience. While English is useful to reach out to an international audience, it may not be effective to reach out to your particular constituency. There is a wide range of more than hundred languages used in social media. Hence, depending on the context, one or more languages will have to be chosen based on the target group and those whom you want to influence.

e)  Have something to say and know how to say it:It is not only the choice of language but also the choice of words and tone matter in social media communication. Social media campaign is to communicate to convince, convince to change and change to commit to your cause. Hence, the tone and content of the communication will have to be to win over maximum number of people for your cause. Hence, the use of language will have to be appealing and good enough to make others listen to you.

f)   ABC of social media communications: Accurate, brief and clear in your communications.  

g)  Images inspire: A photo or short video (3minutes) can be more effective than a thousand words.  A strategic communication requires multiple modes of communication and ensures that communication is catchy, informative as well as appealing to a larger audience. Well-designed posters, small videos and excellent photos can often go a long way to reach out to lots of people. Infographics can help too.

h)  Real Network works:  Social media communication requires an art of orchestrating your real –life networks.  As social media will have lots of noises, it is often difficult to get your voice heard. This requires a strategy of working in tandem with a group of thirty or hundred or more people who would ‘like’ your posts, re-tweet or share you’re your Facebook posts.  Usually people use ‘Whats app’ groups to coordinate their posts in twitter or Facebook. This ensures that as soon as you post something, the same messages get re-tweeted or shared by so many people and post in to so many groups that your message will reach the target groups. This orchestrating strategy helps to get your voice ‘amplified’ and heard in the midst of competing messages.

i)   Consistent engagement and constant monitoring:  Social media is about instant communications. This requires consistent engagement as social media is all about people and engaging with them in a strategic way to win over their support. In a campaign page or campaign group, your opponents or those who disagree with you can manipulate communicative space and turn it around. Hence, consistent engagement and constant monitoring is a must in social media campaign.

III.       Dialogues for Peace

Dialogical communication involves sharing, listening and understanding multiple perspectives to enhance our own perspectives and perception. The purpose of a dialogue is to understand multiple perspectives and also discover the areas of convergence. A shared sense of ethical principles and values can facilitate the process of dialogues

Dialogues require a sense of empathy and an ability to understand different dimensions of a position or perspective and an ability to find areas of convergence depending on the topic of the discussions. While dialogues are relatively easy in a secret Facebook groups, dialogues can be problematic in open-public groups as there could be many who may intervene in a discussions and begin to distract the discussions or troll. Hence, it is important to moderate discussions in open groups and begin to manage those who distract the discussions or trolls (by deleting message or even blocking those who are primarily there to distract)

One of the major challenges for those who use social media for inter-religious dialogue or peace is the high prevalence of negative images and negative stereotypes. Hence, it is important to identify positive stories and positive images that help to build a positive image and positive examples for inter-religious cooperation and dialogues.

While social media can facilitate dialogue across the different geography, virtual dialogues become effective when they lead to real actions on the ground or inspiring more dialogical action.

Effective dialogues require active moderation and working across networks to steer the dialogue to a desired action/objectives.

One of the challenges of social media is the fleeting words and images. Hence, it will be also useful to use websites and blogs to coordinate the discussions and take the dialogue or campaign forward.

Social media campaigns and communications help when there is real communicative space beyond the virtual communication and when virtual communication gets transformed in to real commitment and communicative space. This multi-prong approach of making use of multiple communicative spaces to inspire real action is what makes social media campaigning and communication relevant.

John Samuel

Jsadoor@gmail.com