Making social media work for us

When it comes to the public debate on energy, there is an information war going on in social media. With traditional media no longer having a monopoly on shaping public opinion, social media has become a critical tool to interact with the public and influence their perception of renewables. It is now of such strategic importance that our industry should stop treating it as a second-rate, dispensible form of communication.

In renewables circles, the attitude towards social media is still generally one of procrastination. Too many companies are diligently setting up Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages but have little understanding of how to approach social media as a whole.
Because of the sprawling, diluted and ever-evolving nature of social networks, meaningful social-media strategies can be daunting endeavours. But who says strategy is always needed? The nature of social media is chaos, and individual engagement is its rule.
It is also worth remembering that social media will remain online and be searchable indefinitely — and that in recent years, Google has updated its algorithms to increasingly favour social content in its search results.

And let us not forget that social media is much more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. There’s also the multitude of blogs, forums and websites where individuals can publish their own opinions. Everyone is becoming a publisher with the potential to reach an audience of interested readers.

And because most people are not experts on energy issues, and do not follow the basic rules of journalistic due diligence, renewables-related social content is plagued by misinformation. The renewables sector must fight this — and it can do so without spending a single penny.

Whether we like it or not, social media has turned each employee into a potential online industry advocate. Yet, rather alarmingly, many energy organisations exercise strict editorial control over their workforce, or worse, forbid employees to engage in social media. This is not a clever move.

Employees need to be given the freedom to engage as individuals, and the freedom to respond to the factual errors or misleading information they encounter online. The social-media information battle can only be fought mano a mano.

If we do not embrace this reality quickly, our industry may wake up one day and realise that it has lost the energy debate.

Originally published on Recharge News by Jonathan Collings