Better #13

Hey there,

It’s grim out there in the comment sections (nice positive start lol).

Over the last few weeks I’ve had messages from half a dozen social media managers, all saying variations of ‘this is as bad as we’ve seen it’.

What are they seeing? Nasty, pathetic, ignorant, hateful and harmful comments from nasty, pathetic, ignorant, hateful and harmful people.

And good on Nelson City Council for calling out misinformation and abuse in the media last week. Because one of the frustrating things about working in the public sector is that you often can’t directly call out the nastiness and ignorance that you witness.

But I can.

I ain’t got no mayor, minister or CE to answer to, plus I have been known to speak my mind on occasion 😅

So feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or reply to this email in complete confidence. Tell me what you’re seeing, include screenshots or links to the posts, and I’ll add to my growing collection of ‘crap that people shouldn’t have to deal with’.

And then I’ll see how we can expose it for what it is 😃

Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

Tim Price has been working in digital content and channel management for more than two decades, and in that time he’s pretty much seen and done everything.

He’s worked in local, state, and federal government, progressing from content coordinator to social media manager to his current director role in the Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

In short, he really knows his stuff.

But more than that, he really cares about doing great work. What struck me in our conversation were the constant references to doing effective work that audiences enjoyed - not just sending out content because it ticks a box for someone within our organisation.

It's refreshing, honest, direct stuff, and I hope you get as much out of it as I did.

👇👇👇

Kia ora Tim, firstly, where do you work, and what do you do?
I am a Director of Content Strategy and Production at the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. I’ve worked across all levels of government in various digital and content roles.

What is social media to you?
At its core, social media is how humans connect these days. A lot of the way I do social media is through storytelling. I feel like telling stories is an innate human quality, and humans connecting with other humans is something we all strive for.

When I'm doing social media, I'm trying to create some sort of emotional connection or some human-to-human connection that people engage with. I feel like what I'm doing is not different to someone telling a story 2000 years ago, but it's the modern way of doing it. That's my perspective on social media.

So a pretty positive outlook, would you say?
Well, I think with any technology, it can be used for good or for evil. I guess working in social media you understand the science behind it, and know that what the channels want is for you to be engaged. I see my parents and how they are just being served up content that makes them enraged and angry, because the companies want them on the platform so they can sell advertising to them.

But what I really enjoy is doing stuff that's positive. I've worked for emergency services and in government and in health, so I like using it to help people in a positive way. But I understand that people do use it in a negative way.

You have consistently progressed in your career, from digital advisor to director level - how have you managed to achieve that?
The biggest thing is I've been able to adapt. I'm in my 40s now but I started my career when social media didn't really exist. You couldn't get a degree in it, there wasn't a career path into what I do, I just generally enjoyed it. So it's something I'm passionate about and enjoy, and that's one key is actually enjoying what you're doing. 

It also constantly changes, so my skill set has had to constantly adapt and change. If I go and speak in conferences, I'm one of the oldest people there. There are a lot of 20 year olds who manage social media accounts, but I feel like I have a lot of experience and my core beliefs about how this stuff works and what does well just transitions to however the technology is changing.

In social media I think probably the last couple of years has changed more than it has in the last ten, and I just have to keep learning how the algorithms change, how TikTok changed things, what content to create, what I need to do to work within the current system. 

So continual learning and adapting and updating your skills is crucial if you want to work in in this field because you can learn one thing and then it's out of date in two years - or it could happen overnight. Elon will buy Twitter, TikTok will launch, or Facebook will change something and you'll literally have to change everything you think about how you do stuff. 

As you’ve moved into leadership positions, how has your focus changed? Is it more about influencing and trying to secure resources now?
Yeah, exactly, that’s spot on. I have strong views about leadership because I find a lot of people who get into those positions of power have narcissistic traits. It can be quite cutthroat, and they're all about themselves, whereas I believe that I can get there being an empathetic leader and caring about my team and having emotional intelligence and supporting people. So that's just my views about leadership.

As you rise into those positions, there's less of you actually doing the stuff, and more trying to influence. It might be influencing the way things should be done, it might be highlighting the importance of the work the team does so you can get greater resources. I feel like with my experience I can make a good argument for things like social media and video. 

Is it disappointing that we still have to make these arguments in 2024?

I'm giving this talk in June about ‘what is the modern communications team?’, because I feel like in government a lot of communications teams are very old school, probably like it was 20 years ago. If you think of the way people consume information now, if they're constantly consuming TikToks and short videos, then shouldn’t our communications reflect that? If so, then we need different skills. We don't need someone who films for TV, we need people who can make modern video that's super quick and engaging and gets the message across. 

I think in communications, you need to adapt, and governments are very slow to change and adapt. One thing I'm very good at is pushing the boundaries and pushing for change to try and keep up with things that are changing in the world.

What’s changed the most over your time working in social media?

I think young people have changed the most [laughs]. Because young people have grown up with technology and phones, I think there's quite a divide between generations.

When I worked at Ambulance Victoria with paramedics it was notoriously hard to communicate with them. They would work a 16-18-hour shift and be out driving on the road. They wouldn't see their manager, they didn't log onto computers, they didn't check emails - the internal comms function was very hard to make work. And so we introduced this thing where basically they would have an app on their phone to communicate with each other.

All the grads were young people, all used to using their phone talking to people and sending messages on apps. But for me to make that change, I had to talk to managers who weren’t as comfortable using their phone and apps. So I was trying to make a change for the way young people used communication, but I had to convince all these older people, the managers, who were like, ‘what is this thing? This is a risk, I don't want to do it’. And it just kind of highlighted for me the change in the way people consume information, where they get information, how they use comms, how they use social media.

When I grew up the internet didn't exist. You couldn't get a mobile phone, you had to go to a phone box if you wanted to call home [laughs]. It was a very different time. Now if you're a 20-year-old, you’ve grown up with all that technology and you’re used to it.

Everyone now is extremely plugged in as well, right? They are constantly consuming content and information, second screening etc. What does that mean for communicating today?
The hardest thing right now is to get someone's attention, and get it fully. You have to really engage people right at the beginning, or they’ll just keep flicking through to the next thing. And then once you've got their attention, to keep it is super hard because people are used to just micro-consuming or doing three things at once.

I notice it in myself, the way I interact with stuff. There's like 20,000 shows streaming, and if I'm not into a show in the first 10 minutes then I’m out [laughs]. Whereas back when I grew up, you had limited options, there was no cable, we had five TV stations and whatever was on that was all you could watch. So you could grab people's attention way easier.

What are government social teams doing well? And not so well?

A bit of a backstory because I never thought I'd be working in government comms. How I got into this stuff was I created a website for Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff, and it became really popular and they reached out to me because they really liked it. I did a lot of stuff with hip hop and rappers so I wouldn't say I’m your typical government person who's done a degree in comms and worked in a government comms team [laughs].

Because of that, I generally am not a fan of most government communication. It’s often not very engaging, so I'm a bit of a skeptic for this stuff, because I don't think government does a good job of engaging with the community.

Generally I find people go through the path of least resistance. It’s easy to get a graphic designer or if you have Canva to create some tile, and you write some text and you put it on your government account and no one looks at it. Most people would never look at that. So I'm all about creating something engaging - it might be a story, or a video, or an animation or some piece of comms that is actually engaging for someone so they'll stop and they'll look and they'll see it.

Often government comms are very internally focused and people get very happy that something internally has been approved, and they don't even care whether it's successful or not, or whether people have seen it. It's all just like, ‘Oh, we’ve done it, or we did it for the CEO and they're happy and everyone's happy’. But nobody looks at it.

It's often comms officers who write something for the website, a news story or a media release, and they just put it out on social and they don't care. But the social media algorithms do care.

Where are the social media advisors in all this?
Often it's got nothing to do with the social media person, they know what is good social media and what they should be doing. But they're often in structures where the systems are in place to stop people from doing engaging work. The level of clearance you have to get is ridiculous. I've done really good things that I haven't even been able to get out because people are like, ‘Oh, that's too much of a risk. I'm not sure about that’.

So a lot of it's often not the social media team, it's often more about what kind of influence they have, do people listen to their advice, have they built relationships with people where they will listen to their advice? A lot of it's about talking to people and explaining why you need to do things a certain way to get good results, what works, what doesn’t, and feeding it back as evidence to the decision maker.

People in social media often go two ways. They'll come into a role and they’ll know what they need to do, then they’ll find it really hard and they will either get frustrated and just leave because they can’t do what they’re supposed to do. Or they'll just accept what it is and they'll put out rubbish.

In my current role, I started a community of practice with all the social media people from federal government, and a lot of the issues we discuss are what you and I are talking about now. We try and tackle as a group some of the problems we all face, and to raise our profile and get into leadership positions and fight for the importance of what we do.

It can be really tough dealing with negativity online. How do you deal with that side of social?
I don't think people talk enough about the negativity. During Covid, I was in Melbourne, the most locked-down city in the world, and it was basically my job every day to read negative stuff, and I still feel like I've got sort of PTSD [laughs]. I am empathetic but I absorb what people are saying, and the people who make all these comments or write all these things, they don't realise that there's a person at the other end actually reading it. If you're absorbing that stuff all the time in your job it really has an effect on your mental health.

Personally, I know when I need some space, to have a break or whatever. But the younger people who might be in a customer service team or at a council and they're reading all these comments - you really have to be aware of the effect it's having on them.

I know some of my friends who work in emergency services, they can see some really bad things, so there needs to be some support in place and we need to highlight that this does have serious impacts on people's mental health. I think it's a really important topic that people need to talk about more.

Quick 6 with Tim Price…

1. Strategy or tactics?
Strategy first.

2. Favourite platform?

TikTok – its algorithm is very democratic.

3. Least favourite platform?
Snapchat – never was a fan.

4. One public sector account to follow?
CSIRO.
 
5. One non-public sector account to follow?
Golden State Warriors – I like the way NBA teams do their social media.

6. Something you wish you’d known earlier in your career?

You can influence from any position.

That’s it for this edition. Thanks for reading.

As always, please consider sharing this newsletter with someone you think might get value from it.

And if you’re still reading, below is a link to my brand spanking new article - you’re the first to see it 😎

See you in two weeks for more tips on how to get a little bit Better 👋