How do you spread knowledge across an organisation? Write something? Read something? Or you could do what Buckinghamshire County Council do and meet up to share social media knowledge.
by Andy Holmes
So what do you do if you don’t know everything about a subject?
Spend hours researching it and reading as many books as possible?
Or gather a group of people together to share that knowledge?
We live in a fast food culture, everything has to be done yesterday, so there’s less time for the research side and more time for the sharing of knowledge, and that’s what we’ve done in Buckinghamshire with our social media.
In April 2011 I nervously sent our first corporate tweet, now we have more than 3,100 followers and across the organisation more than thirty social media channels with a rapidly expanding group of people including social media in their day to day working life.
At one point, the list of channels we had threatened to run wild, at that stage I was tasked with bringing them all together and decided to launch our quarterly Social Media Knowledge Sharing Forums.
A simple but effective premise, get everyone together every few months to share success stories and find solutions to their problems and from my point of view as someone who has become one of our social media leads, it’s been a great opportunity to gen up on the latest trends in an ever changing medium.
Very quickly amongst our group, potential social media champions have emerged who are likely to be at the heart of what we do in the future. Pleasingly one of those champions is from our Youth Service which means we’ve been able to try and answer the $64 billion dollar question of how to talk to teenagers on social media, something we’re looking to improve.
Personally I’m not a fan of meetings, but in this case it’s definitely been a step forward for us in Buckinghamshire and I’d recommend it. I’d never claim it’s an original idea, and in some ways it takes us back to a simpler time when people actually talked instead of hiding behind the computer screen.
But the combination of the endangered species that is conversation and the future of engagement has certainly been effective for us. Perhaps if you’re thinking of doing this in your organisation then you could pop along and join us sometime? You’d be most welcome and you might just learn something, I do every time.
Andy Holmes is Communications Officer - Social Media and Video at Buckinghamshire County Council.
