One of the hardest aspects of coming to terms with the changes that social media are bringing to our working environment, particularly for public sector communicators, is exercising the sort of judgement that ensures the tools are deployed appropriately and support the overall communications and business objectives.
While in Australia this week, I came across a pretty good example of a social media application that seemed to successfully deliver on these objectives, in terms of using an innovative approach to target a specific audience, inviting their participation, and engaging with them.
Pimp our Ads was a competition run by the New South Wales government’s Roads and Traffic Authority. The competition was explained on the website this way:
PIMP OUR ADS is an online competition open to NSW residents aged 16 to 30 years to design road safety posters aimed at younger drivers. All the tools you need to design a great road safety poster are provided on the website – participants select from a gallery of images, fonts, colours and graphics.
Entries can be about anything to do with road safety, such as speeding, drink driving, pedestrian behaviour and driver fatigue.
When I first came across the project, via this negative story in the Sydney Morning Herald, I was prepared to be underwhelmed or dismissive of the project. But once I found the competition website (the SMH published the wrong URL), I was impressed.
The social marketers at the RTA have taken the concept of user generated content (also called ‘consumer generated content’) and built a campaign that is more than just crowdsourcing, it actually engages the target demographic: young males 16-25 (those most at risk on the roads).
Essentially, people visit the site, use the preselected tools to create a poster and save it to a gallery. Visitors to the site can vote on the posters, or email them to friends. The top 10 most popular posters were included in the final round of judging, and the top entries won prizes ranging from a car to laptops and MP3 players.
This is a clever application at several levels. It includes a viral marketing element, it engages the target group by getting them to think hard about messages relevant to them (and their networks), and the rating function leverages behaviours from social networks.
The idea could have been extended in one important way: allowing comments on the entries would have made for a much richer experience – and captured some useful qualitative insights into the responses to the entries that the rating system alone could not.
A couple of other minor points. The website is all Flash, which probably seemed like a ‘cool idea’ but is really hopelessly dated, unnecessary and inaccessible. A cleaner, more user-friendly site could have been achieved with simple HTML and some artfully applied AJAX.
Using the .com domain also struck me as a poor choice. Undoubtedly, the decision was made because the government domain (in this case, .gov.au) is perceived as a ‘turn-off’ to youth. My take would be that the concept and the prizes would be more than sufficient to drive traffic to the site (heh), and by not using the government domain the RTA missed an opportunity to build the reputation of this namespace. It may also be related to the sponsors logos on the bottom of the site…
In any event, it looks to be a successful campaign and one that, from the New Zealand perspective, is an interesting case study of deploying social media tools in the public sector.
