Regulator hosts experts on growing strength of social media

The unprecedented growth of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as a communication platform has completely transformed mass communication, to the extent that it has instigated political reforms in a number of countries in recent years. People are better connected, news travels faster and organisations have had to remodel their marketing and communications strategies to keep up the pace with the opportunities brought about by social media applications.

Social media is important across the board, for both private industry as well as public institutions, an issue addressed during two, back-to-back seminars organised recently by the Malta Communications Authority. The seminars were targeted at public institutions and the private sector respectively and were delivered by two key experts on the subject, Antoine Mallia and John Shewell.

Antoine Mallia is currently the Information and Communication Officer at the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, European Commission and is responsible for driving the overall social media strategy of the Directorate. He also brought with him a wealth of experience in the private sector, sharing is experiences, challenges and lessons learnt in the integration of social media applications in information campaigns and the role social media had in the success of such initiatives. Antoine focused his discussion on the use of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

John Shewell is the Founding Director of Colab, a UK-based consulting agency which specialises in the application of social media as part of a wider integrated-marketing effort to encourage behaviour change and reputation management. John highlighted the importance of the involvement of all staff across the organisation in social media strategies and shared his experience in overcoming financial cut-backs and bringing organisations closer to the public. John also touched upon the importance of monitoring social media channels and highlighted a number of tools and strategies in this regard.

These seminars were the first in a series to be organised by the Authority and are aimed at providing opportunities for discussion on ICT related topics and the sharing of experiences so that every organisation has the opportunity to capitalise on the opportunities available to them through a wide range of ICT applications.