Re: Promoting our core applications

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com> wrote:
...
>>  * you get a consistent voice across messages
>
> Having a sensible publishing policy can do the same thing for consistency,
> just as we have for code commits.

That doesn't sound like a good fit for us, to be honest. Even if you
could get such a guide written, how would you make sure that everyone
follows it? You'd need someone in an active editorial role, and you'd
need contributors who are able to consistently interpret the policy.

Social media management is not as complicated as all that. I am talking about a common sense policy which shouldn't need an editor checking over it as long as people know what they are doing in the first place. Things like: check before posting, don't publish personal opinions as GNOME, only link to relevant articles and updates etc.

>>  * the channel owner can schedule activity, to ensure regular posting,
>> as well as coherence of the channel as a whole
>
> To be fair, I think we've established that this is not how things have been
> happening.

It's not hard to do. When I ran the Twitter feed, this is exactly how I did it.

Is there a single person who is ready, willing and able to manage the social media pages in the way you're suggesting right now? That seems not to be the case. 

>>  * it avoids errors, since one person has an overview of what has been
>> posted (so you don't get multiple people posting the same message, for
>> example)
>
>  If a manager doesn't know how to check something has not already been
> published before posting then they probably are in the wrong role, to be
> honest.

It's not reasonable to expect people to check for previous posts
*every* time they want to post something themselves. It's just not
going to happen.

Personally, I do not find it hard to tell if something has already been published recently. If a publication was not that recent, then I can't see the harm in retweeting it anyway but on balance I reckon that is more reasonable than it would be for us to expect one person to alone manage each social media account, especially where the current managers are openly asking for help managing the workload involved because they seem to feel it's too much.

And this is my main point - the more people you have posting to a
channel, the more overhead you have, and the more opportunities you
have for errors to occur.

This is not my experience of co-managing social media accounts.

 

>>  * because someone is maintaining the channel, they are able to reply
>> to questions and discussion
>
> What happens when people don't know who that person is or can't get hold of
> them?

Why would that be a problem?

Because humans can lead unpredictable lives and can sometimes have to disappear for periods of time, sometimes without letting anyone know.

 

We can document who is responsible for
each channel, and members of the Engagement Team should know and be
able to put someone in touch with a channel owner.

We should be doing either way, yeah.  

I'm not suggesting that we can't spread the load, or have people
working together on the media channels, by the way. That's actually
what I was hoping would happen when we recently assigned individuals
to the channels - that they would become our social media team. All
I'm trying to say is that we should have named maintainers for the
channels, and we should avoid random people posting without
communicating with those maintainers.

OK then, well it seems like we may actually agree, since I don't think anyone is suggesting random people start posting.

Magdalen