Stephen Hale

Question and answer

We've just completed a pilot project in collaboration with Yoosk, the question and answer social media platform. 

Details: the Foreign Secretary visited Wales. We invited questions. And he responded. Simple.

We'll evaluate the impact it had (and I'll post further thoughts here), but there are 3 things that I liked about the approach:

1. We know we can't expect our audience to always come to us. Using Yoosk allowed us to reach out beyond the people the Foreign Secretary actually met while he was in Wales, and beyond the people who would usually visit our corporate websites. 

 2. We wanted to spread the message, but target people in Wales (because that was the point of the exercise). So although we did cover it on our corporate website, video and blogs, we were able to do some quite targeted promotion by collaborating with - and embedding widgets in - some Welsh websites. 

3. It was question and answer, with the emphasis on answer. Without the answer, this would just be "Have Your Say" by another name. If nothing else, the pilot demonstrates that you can type a question into a web form, and if enough people agree that it is a valid question, the Foreign Secretary will provide an answer.

Posted at 17:14 29 October 2008 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[2]