C'mon Over Campaign on Facebook - The Northern Ireland experiment gathers pace

Can a Government Department succeed in engaging young people on Facebook? In April I discussed how the Department of Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland (DELNI) had become the first Government Department to launch a Facebook page as part of their C’mon Over Campaign, their attempt to encourage people to move to Northern Ireland to work and study.

An initial fear was that an ‘Establishment’ presence on Facebook could turn people away and DELNI could be faced with an embarrassing failure as few people would be willing to sign up as ‘Fans’ and the content on the site would be too dry to engage.

However, the early signs are that the experiment could be a success. The team at DELNI have been very proactive in putting up a diverse range of content on the site, focusing on individuals in Northern Ireland and encouraging debate. Videos of students and employees talking about their experiences together with a new ‘’Day in the Life’ feature give the site a warm feel and get the message across in a human way.

My one reservation is that the ‘Day in the Life’ feature, interviewing someone at one of Northern Ireland’s larger employers, does have a corporate sponsored feel, with the company’s logo and contact details at the bottom. Perhaps this would be more effective if it felt more independent.

What these innovations should achieve, however, is create the viral effect that Facebook is so good at delivering. Everyone who is featured in a video or blog on the page will surely tell their friends, or the page will feature in those individuals’ newsfeed. This is how the popularity of the site will grow. Already, in just over 2 months, the page can boast almost 200 fans and 3,000 hits and is attracting plenty of press coverage, including in last week’s Independent newspaper.

Fans are starting to engage on The Wall and The Discussion Board on the page and a look at the people who call themselves ‘Fans’ of Northern Ireland shows a range of people, including a lot of young people and many based across the world, not just in Northern Ireland.

Michael Gould, from DELNI, told me that this is exactly what they wanted to achieve.

“In our bid to encourage skilled workers to move to Northern Ireland, it is vital that our 'C'Mon Over' message reaches our target audience. Our decision to embrace social networking, and Facebook in particular, was based on its increasing popularity and the fact that the site has the same demographic we wish to interact with."

With a new post almost every day, it is vital that the team at DELNI keep the momentum going and what I’d like to see next is more and more content, in the form of questions, offers and content coming from the growing number of Fans of the site. This is starting to happen but is very difficult to encourage given the way Facebook operates.

It’s certainly been an encouraging start though and is beginning to turn a few heads.

Government Adopts Facebook - a Step Too Far?

I had an interesting meeting with a group of policy makers and a press officer from Northern Ireland’s Department for Employment and Learning (DELNI) last month. I have been talking to the team there for a couple of months about their pilot to become the first Government Department to have a Facebook presence.

With the creation of the new brand pages on Facebook, this creates a great opportunity for larger organisations to appeal to a key demographic group in their own backyard. The challenge, as discussed in my previous blog here, is to do this without driving away the very people you want to attract, or sit with few ‘fans’, like the friendless geek at a party.

The guys at DELNI want to attract back to Northern Ireland people who may have left in their teens to study in Scottish and English universities and who have never returned. They are also keen to encourage other people to look to Northern Ireland as a land of opportunity. They want to paint a rosy picture of the country as a place of opportunity and a lively social scene.

But is it a step too far for a Government department to expect to become popular on Facebook? There are already concerns that the way businesses, and older people, have embraced Facebook will lead to younger people finding new places to play. If we start to see The Inland Revenue, The Ministry of Defence and The Home Office in the playground, what effect will that have?

Interestingly, the age group that DELNI want to attract are older than Facebook’s original demographic, having already left university and settled into permanent employment. They are far more likely to be in their mid-20s and older.

The first challenge I put to them was how to make the page viral. If they are going to spread the word and attract fans, people need to feel proud of the association and happy to shout their involvement from the rooftops. I am delighted to see that, since we met, they have changed the name of the page from ‘Department for Employment and Learning’ to a much more simple, ‘Northern Ireland’. After all, who wants to tell their friends that they are a 'fan' of the Department for Employment and Learning?!

The next area to focus on is the content and it will be interesting to track their success in this area. The page will not thrive if the content is posted by the civil servants behind the campaign; it needs to be user driven. Facebook becomes viral when people’s friends see that they have posted content elsewhere on the site. If all of the comments and threads are posted by DELNI and not by their fans, it is merely an information portal and not a social network.

So, is this a step too far? Or an encouraging sign of Government responding to changes in communication and being creative in their approach to reaching their target market?