#138 Determine ownership of Fedora social media responsibilities (needs documentation on our site)
Opened 4 years ago by jflory7. Modified 2 years ago

Summary

Determine what group / body in Fedora is responsible for making administrative decisions about Fedora social media accounts

Background

In #136, I asked about what group is responsible for administrative decisions of Fedora social media accounts. Currently, as I understand it, this is done on an ad-hoc basis by existing admins of the social media accounts. The Marketing team does not have administrative access to either the @fedora Twitter or @fedoracommunity Twitter except in a few cases.

It helps to understand who is responsible for these accounts when it comes to making administrative decisions. For example, in #136, I was confused by what group or body to take a request about administrating the @fedoracommunity account, even though I am a current admin.

The Marketing social networks wiki page is the best documentation we currently have about administrating these accounts.

Details

I think solidifying this in documentation somewhere will help. I suggest the Mindshare Committee to coordinate with the Marketing Team and existing social media admins to figure out responsibility and then codify this in a place that is visible to the wider Fedora community (preferably somewhere in docs.fp.o).

Outcome

  • Easier to understand how Fedora social media accounts are managed
  • Community members can understand where to bring ideas and suggestions to improving Fedora social media strategy

I agree that we need to get the social networks admins/access list updated. I haven't had time to do this and would love some help.

As for ownership - that is also an interesting question. We don't really have a large marketing group and they are trying to be strategic, aiui. @x3mboy @bcotton can you comment here? Is this something Marketing wants/should have?

Metadata Update from @bex:
- Issue priority set to: None (was: awaiting triage)

4 years ago

Well, Actually the marketing team don't own any social media account. We barely have access to the YouTube account.

As far as I know there is a "Social Media" team that own these accounts, including: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

But as it's stated in the ticket, the best docummentation we have about this is: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_social_networks

And the FAS Group: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/group/members/fedora-socialmedia

Is this something Marketing wants/should have?

Social media is a little-m marketing function, but that doesn't mean it has to be big-M marketing. Given the personnel constraints of the Fedora Marketing team, I'm not sure it's wise to assign that at this point.

By example, @x3mboy and I respond to any request of publishing on the Youtube channel (Mainly from Fedora-Join and Docs teams), this schema doesn't help to generate constant content in the social media (as expected).

IMOO, The best thing that we can do is empower the social media team looking for active contributors with active social media live.

IMOO, The best thing that we can do is empower the social media team looking for active contributors with active social media live.

+100

I am all for increasing our social media presence. I don't feel like there is a need to get permission from Mindshare to recruit contributors. Maybe I am missing the point of hte request though. @jflory7 can you pull us back on track?

Relatedly, I am worried that we are talking about hte "Social Media Team" but I am not sure that is an actual group of people. Is it one?

@bex:
Relatedly, I am worried that we are talking about hte "Social Media Team" but I am not sure that is an actual group of people. Is it one?

There is not a black-and-white answer to this question. It is a yes and no. :)

@bcotton:
Social media is a little-m marketing function, but that doesn't mean it has to be big-M marketing. Given the personnel constraints of the Fedora Marketing team, I'm not sure it's wise to assign that at this point.

@bt0dotninja:
IMOO, The best thing that we can do is empower the social media team looking for active contributors with active social media live.

@bex:
I am all for increasing our social media presence. I don't feel like there is a need to get permission from Mindshare to recruit contributors. Maybe I am missing the point of hte request though. @jflory7 can you pull us back on track?

I see the most useful first step is to delegate clear responsibility for social media to a specific group or sub-group of people. For example, this could be done in a similar way to how the Fedora Magazine is technically a subset of Fedora Marketing but is run by an independent team of people from the Marketing Team. But currently, we only document the "what" (i.e. "we have social media accounts") instead of the "who" or "how" (i.e. "How is social media managed today? How can I get something shared on social media?").

To my knowledge, the most proactive folks managing Fedora Social Media are @bproffit, @pfrields, @ryanlerch, and @jonatoni. For this conversation to be successful, I believe we need to pull in these folks as they have managed multiple accounts for a number of years and they are the people I think of when we say "social media team".

Once there is a clear delegation of responsibility, I think the next steps are to identify the following:

  1. How to better leverage our community to contribute to social media
  2. How to enable others in the community to get their news and/or relevant content shared with the social media team.

One strawman: the regional Fedora accounts (i.e. for specific countries and regions) seems to be successful but are usually limited by one or two active people running the account (high bus factor). We could set up regional accounts (e.g. Fedora EMEA, Fedora APAC, Fedora LATAM, Fedora NA, etc.) and recruit contributors to those accounts as a way of building region-specific outreach. We should find ways to meet people where they already are, and this could be one way of doing that.

That said… I think first we should focus on identifying how things are done today and establish a formal structure around Fedora Social Media instead of the ad-hoc management style of today.

Thoughts?

@jflory7 How are you measuring the success of these country specific accounts? I am not sure that building even more social media presences without a strategy is a good thing. It feels like the path to either lots of poorly maintained or duplicative accounts or audience splitting, not growing.

I don't see delegation as a pre-requisite for pulling the people you mentioned into this discussion/ticket or these items:

  1. How to better leverage our community to contribute to social media
  2. How to enable others in the community to get their news and/or relevant content shared with the social media team.

@bex:
@jflory7 How are you measuring the success of these country specific accounts?

I believe success is subjective without data. However, I looked through the available data to collect the following Twitter-specific metrics (which is also the bias of this data):

I thought it interesting that half of these accounts produced less content than their number of followers (Albania, Greece, Brazil). To me, this indicates moderate to high organic engagement. Still, all these accounts have a few hundred followers from an audience that mostly differs on culture / language.

@bex:
I am not sure that building even more social media presences without a strategy is a good thing. It feels like the path to either lots of poorly maintained or duplicative accounts or audience splitting, not growing.

To poorly maintained:

The accounts I looked at have not tweeted in a long time (ranging from 1-5 years). However, we have no qualitative feedback from the people behind these accounts. Where are they in our social media strategy?

We have medium to large communities of contributors who self-organize by region/country, judging by IRC/Telegram communities. We could better support a comprehensive, distributed social media strategy by better including the voices already in the project and provide:

  1. A platform for local outreach, and
  2. Resources/information to stay connected to what is happening in the project community.

Today, I believe the accounts are poorly maintained because they are under-resourced.

To audience splitting instead of growing:

What metric is used to distinguish growing an audience instead of splitting an audience? Is it following one central account and measuring engagement specific to that account? I believe there is potential to grow our audience if we think carefully about how to "decentralize" the social media brand.

For example, I am hesitant to divide social media accounts by Fedora Editions, teams, or SIGs. Dividing by activity isolates groups from the higher-visibility accounts where they may benefit from outreach under the unified brand of the project versus standing on their own.

On the other hand, regional/language-specific accounts could widen reach of Fedora's messaging by better focusing our message to a specific audience. A regional account might share more unique in-person opportunities or translated content by engaging a highly-specific target audience by country/language.

@bex:
I don't see delegation as a pre-requisite for pulling the people you mentioned into this discussion/ticket or these items:

  1. How to better leverage our community to contribute to social media
  2. How to enable others in the community to get their news and/or relevant content shared with the social media team.

My motivation to pull others into the conversation is from my hesitation to make decisive choices about social media as an individual. There is gate-keeping about social media access and sharing access to primary Fedora social media accounts. I acknowledge that a brand is sensitive and social media is not a great first contribution area without deeper background and understanding of the Fedora community.

After taking time to think about this, I believe more in a regional social media strategy to enable others to contribute to social media. It doesn't answer the question about better leveraging the Fedora community today to contribute to primary social media channels, but I am out of creative steam.

What do you see as a good solution or approach? Since there is gate-keeping on primary social media channels and if there is skepticism about regional/language-specific approaches, what do you see as a next step to address this?

@jflory7 I think we may disagree on their being gatekeeping on social media. I believe we need to make this more like infrastructure. Anyone can send a patch, only a few people can actually add the patch and run the playbook and even fewer have full root access.

Having a few people able to post shouldn't stop lots of people from generating content.

@bex Valid point. In this context, my view of gate-keeping for social media channels makes less sense. I agree that an "infrastructure-style" method of contributing is a better approach for primary social media accounts.

My remaining concern is how we get to a point where lots of people generate content and that content is conveniently accessible for the folks who can share/spread the content. This relates to the original desired outcomes of this ticket:

Outcomes

  • Easier to understand how Fedora social media accounts are managed
  • Community members can understand where to bring ideas and suggestions to improving Fedora social media strategy

Where ideas and suggestions can also include content.

I was thinking more in a "Fedora Magazine" style unless the social media needs a fast method, maybe we can take the best of both strategies

Building on what @bt0dotninja said, I think we need to just nominated a ticket queue or mailing list to gather the content in. We'd need to finish documenting how the accounts are managed, I started but haven't finished that. (Help desired!)

The real problem here though, imho, is content generation. Frankly, unless we can fix that or have a strategy to fix that I don't think it is worth investing serious energy in infrastructure. I'd like to have the problem of too much content being pointed at too few "maintainers/editors."

to that end, we have so far been unsuccessful in even getting calendar entries made for Mindshare funded events. I think a strategy might be to document the basics of social media and see if we can get anything. Here is a strawman:

Hosting an event or have Fedora News - get it out on our Social Media

  1. If you're hosting an event, add it to the events calendar here: <<details>>
  2. If you've got news or are hosting an event, consider writing a Fedora Magazine or Community Blog post to let the world/community know about it in advance. This can help you find collaborators, increase attendance and get you more social media love.
  3. Write the social media entries we should share. Here are some general guidelines:

    a) Find a picture if at all possible. Pictures increase engagement. If needed, use the banner that would be on the Magazine or CommBlog article. Pictures with people doing something do better than generic group shots. People in general do better than just logos or generic artwork.

    b) Write the message. A good rule of thumb is to stick to 280 characters or less. Put your Hashtags and other @-tags at the end of your message unless they fit naturally inline. Don't tag the world, try to pick a few relevant groups/tags and keep yourself under 5.

    c) Send the message to <<details>>. Note the date and UTC time we should try to send it out. We'll do our best. If your hosting an event, consider writing several messages to be used to advertise the event in advance and run during the event. We can preschedule almost anything!

  4. Hold a great event or keep on creating great content to share!

@bex Thanks for the proposal. It is also helpful to consider the on-going discussion with the Marketing Team about their purpose. In retrospect, I agree it is better to first focus on creating content before building a process for content we don't have yet.

@bex:
Hosting an event or have Fedora News - get it out on our Social Media

+1. This is good prep-work advice for event organizers. However, it only covers advance planning and does not capture the ephemeral, in-the-moment nature of social media (more below).

Documenting the proposed process could be empowering for the Marketing Team to lead. Pulling from fedora-marketing#292:

@x3mboy:
Create SOPs to help teams to organize marketing tasks

@jflory7:
I see value in creating "fork-able" resources that an Advocate could borrow to promote a Fedora presence at an event or do some outreach for bringing more people to a local event by Fedora.

The Fedora Marketing Team could document this process for Advocates / local event organizers. Today, this process is not in a visible, publicly documented place. Documenting the recommended process and then thinking critically about making it accessible is important.

For example, the Fedora D&I Team has a Fedora Women's Day resource pack for event organizers with useful info / steps for running their event. What if we did something like this for all event organizers across Fedora?

@x3mboy @bt0dotninja @bcotton Since I see the three of you most active in the Fedora Marketing Pagure, what do you all think? Your input is especially important!

@bex:
I think we need to just nominated a ticket queue or mailing list to gather the content in.
[…]
c) Send the message to <<details>>. Note the date and UTC time we should try to send it out. We'll do our best. If your hosting an event, consider writing several messages to be used to advertise the event in advance and run during the event. We can preschedule almost anything!

A social-media mailing list already exists but is not actively used. Contributing factors are it is not highly-visible nor actively promoted. However, I encourage us to be creative for collecting content. Social media content is often ephemeral and in-the-moment. Mailing lists and Pagure tickets can work in theory, but in practice aren't conducive for collecting content from organizers who are taking a picture and posting it to social media between talks, and then being pulled in another direction, like introducing a speaker, running a workshop, or following up with the pizza delivery asking where the food is. :grinning:

We could leverage Fedora Marketing IRC/Telegram since it is a more synchronous-type of communication where mailing lists/tickets are asynchronous. It is more convenient to drop a link to a tweet and ask for retweets/promotion in a Telegram group than it is to open a mobile web browser, sign into Pagure, find a repo, open a ticket, and post a link.

I also see this as being a generational issue – one size won't fit all.

After Council Approval, next step could be write down a path to get published in those social media accounts.

The council has approved. Who wants to take point on drafting our docs?

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