Hi. My name is Ben Friedman. During the Trump administration, I had the privilege of serving as the deputy assistant secretary of state for digital strategy within the US Department of State’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs. First of all, congratulations on being part of this program. I consider my time working as a political appointee as one of the most challenging, formative, and impactful roles in my career.

The actions that the American people entrust a newly elected president to deliver are not possible without the placement of thousands of competent, dedicated individuals as political appointees across dozens of agencies. That is why I believe so strongly in the importance of initiatives like this one to ensure the principles and policies of a presidential platform can be effectively implemented starting on day 1. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.

This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands. My goal today is to offer you a unique firsthand perspective on how to most effectively use social media to advance policy as an administration official. While at the state department, I led the largest internal reorganization at that agency in the last 2 decades. Combining the domestic and international digital media departments to create a global organization made up of over 120 full time staffers and many more contractors operating across 5 continents.

In my final year leading this new organization, we achieved more digital and social media engagement and reach than the previous 13 years combined and grew multiple key social media accounts by several million followers. This was not by luck, chance, or a few viral posts. It was the culmination of a multifaceted strategic overhaul of the approach and systems for content production approval and distribution. This conversation is going to cover 3 distinct chapters. 1st, recommendations for operating effectively within a government agency.

2nd, building your toolkit for managing social media output. And third, principles to guide your content creation process. Let’s get started. Welcome to the administration. You’re not in Kansas anymore.

Whether you’re coming from the hill, a campaign, or the private sector working within a government agency is a whole new ballgame. You will be presented with unfamiliar challenges and there’ll be a learning curve as you try to understand the culture and processes not just of the US government but of your specific agency and organization. Since every agency is different, I will just touch on some best practices for how to empower your team assuming that similar to my experience, a significant portion of your social media and communications operation will be staffed by civil servants. In my case, it was a 100%. If coming from a political role, you’ve had the privilege of working alongside a highly motivated team with deep political alignment and a sense of urgency.

Your new team probably doesn’t have the same politics as you. Possibly even the opposite. Social media management isn’t a new adventure to them or a stepping stone to something else. They’ve been doing it as a full time job for potentially many years and may have strong feelings about what they perceive as the right way to do things in that building. Some of which may clash with your own perspective.

1st, find and empower your allies in the civil service. Do not let complicaters and naysayers poison the well. People like to give government employees a bad rap. In some cases that may be deserved, but I found that similar to most large organizations there’s a bell curve of individual quality. There are some people with low competence and motivation, a lot of average folks and also some people with really exceptional motivation and ability.

A key to your success will be to identify smart motivated civil servants who are eager to support your work and limiting the influence and involvement of those who are going to hurt morale or be a drag on the quality or volume of output. There are qualified individuals who understand that the role of civil service is to support the elected administration and will be eager to execute the mission. I was fortunate to come across some of them. When I did, I elevated their position to maximize their impact and prevent others who might not have brought that same energy to the table from interfering with their efforts. Your time to the administration will go quickly.

So, make sure to choose your battles and do not let personnel issues distract you from your core mission. 2nd, convey your policy priorities internally. A constant refrain that I would hear from leadership is that agency staff refused to push priority messaging. The assumption was that individuals at the agency did not agree with the policies and thus were obstructing them. This may have been true in some cases.

What I personally found while managing a team of over 100 civil service communicators was that often policy priorities were not well understood. When you are coming from a campaign, committee, or Hill office, it’s fair to assume that your colleagues know the policy priorities inside out and are experienced in articulating them in part because their own personal beliefs match these policies. Don’t assume that your staff has articulated these policies before. If you wish to deploy the manpower at your disposal, you need to not only train them on the policies, the what, the how, and the why, but also keep them up to date on how policies are changing and adapting through the use of externally shareable talking points, quotes, and other approved messaging material. Every policy vertical that is a priority for your office should have documents that are accessible to the entire team and updated regularly with messaging that is approved for external use.

This will not only allow you to move faster, but also assure clarity for all those tasks to support your efforts. 3rd, get continual feedback. I recommend the SWOT method. Upon joining state, I walked into a department where morale was low. Teams were not equipped to succeed on many levels and as a result, they were making mistakes and producing low quality work.

To have a well oiled machine, you need to know what the problems are and why they are there before you can fix them or at least decide if they should be addressed. Everyone will find their own best approach but a sincere effort to build lines of communication from leadership to staff and staff up to leadership will pay dividends. Three tools that I found to be very beneficial were 1 on ones, which I held weekly with each of my 4 office directors and my senior advisor. SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and an end of week email to staff highlighting key priorities, accomplishments, and some positive shout outs. I used the SWOT analysis for my monthly meetings with each of the digital offices.

A template was distributed to each office for every individual to complete from their point of view. I reviewed them and then we held an office wide meeting where every staffer presented their responses and we discussed them as a team. As feedback was addressed the number of items in the weaknesses and threats buckets went down. This might have been an intense approach but it worked well for a large organization going through significant changes. Overall, these efforts helped identify problems that prevented the team from maximizing their potential, communicate priorities from leadership, and built trust among what started out as a highly skeptical group of personnel.

1. Get support and buy in from your leadership. The government is a very hierarchical organization. Personnel at the very bottom have little ability to approve or change anything. The further up you go in the ranks the more power someone has to just simply say, yes let’s do it.

The most effective tool against bureaucratic pushback is to have the support of political appointees higher up in the ladder. At the State Department, I found that civil servants were very adamant, often infuriatingly so, on operating within the hierarchy. They believed they knew exactly what you could do or could not do or have them do based on your rank. The more that it is known that you work on behalf of and are trusted and empowered by those in positions above you with the absolute ace card being a mandate from the White House, the easier it will be to get things done. When things get difficult having leadership being willing to step in often just in the form of replying to an email to have your back, will remove a ton of friction that can otherwise stand in your way.

Now, I’m going to walk through the toolkit that I recommend for producing social media as an administration official. If you’re currently part of a well run social media operation very few of these recommendations will be a surprise, but I believe that you will find them to be of even greater value while working as an appointee. 1, your approval process. Document your team’s approval process in detail. Keep it as lean as possible so as to not slow down or complicate getting content out the door.

Everyone in the organization should have a copy and confirm their understanding. It should also be formally approved in writing by your leadership. When you get the inevitable who approved this email from someone very high up, you will thank me. 2, style guide. The White House will create and make available a White House style guide, but creating a separate style guide for your agency as we did at state will be incredibly valuable.

If you’re not familiar with style guides, they contain everything from the fonts to the color palettes, logos, and icons that are most commonly used by your organization and guidelines for how to use them. This is one of the most valuable tools for making sure your content is visually consistent. Anyone who is new to the team or supporting your team will also be better equipped to produce on brand materials. 3, template your creatives. One of my initiatives at the state department was a full branding overhaul for everything digital.

The rebrand impacted all platforms and content we touched. You can even see the day that it was implemented if you scroll to the right place in the state department Twitter feed. The grid goes from looking like every single post was produced by a different person working for a different organization, a total lack of consistency or cohesion to an incredibly aligned and purposeful visual aesthetic that not only looks good but was designed to be more effective at communicating messages on social media. I selected a tiger team of internal designers as well as an external specialist we hired from the campaign world to build several dozen social media graphic templates that aligned with our style guide and fit almost every possible messaging use case we had. We also created a set of social media video templates all square with captions and with a thumbnail for the first frame.

All very important social media content best practices that were not currently being deployed at the department. With this robust guide the social media team was able to task graphic design personnel by telling them which template to use and then providing them new copy and images to apply. This revolutionized speed and consistency of our social media output. Your goal is to maximize the output and impact of your social media, not reinvent the wheel with every post. 4.

A content calendar. You can easily create a content calendar even in Google sheets but that does not mean it is not an essential resource. You need to plan ahead ideally as far as possible. I would make sure that your content calendar is actually populated a year out with any well established events, anniversaries, or holidays. If you’re gonna do a Christmas post that should already be on your content calendar on January 1st.

That way at the beginning of each month, you can pre task all of the creative effort that will be necessary to create routine posts for the coming weeks. The content calendar will also help with the planning for policy driven messaging and campaigns and help you visualize the balance and the volume of which topics you will cover and what types of media you will use. As you may know, if you’ve worked in social media or content before it’s very hard to do high production value work last minute. If you actually want to do justice to a particular policy campaign, you might need several weeks to produce the videos, graphics, landing pages, etc. And get them approved.

I absolutely hate fire drills and a social media team that is constantly working last minute is constantly putting out low quality content and constantly missing opportunities. Once you get into a last minute posture it becomes very hard to catch up. On the subject of planning, be wary of scheduling posts. At State, we actually had a no schedule post policy. You should do what’s best for your team, but in a fast moving news cycle you do not want to accidentally put out content that is outdated or tone deaf based on events that have taken place since the scheduling was set.

Number 5, collaboration tools. When I got to the state department all the communication into and within the social team took place through an Outlook email listserv that forwarded to the email addresses of everyone on the team. It was a terrifying fire hose of emails, but that was the way they’d been operating for over a decade. When you came on duty you would sort through a massive inbox of emails to figure out what requests had been made of the office, what communication had taken place across the office, and what approvals had been requested or received by the office to external teams. It was a horrible system.

We got everybody on to Slack for communicating across the social team and with the creative teams. Google Drive for shared documents including our internal wiki, and Trello for tracking the social media content creation and approval process. While there were complaints when these platforms were first introduced I tell you with all sincerity that if I would have removed them when I left at the end of the administration the team would have burnt down the building in protest. That’s how important these tools became. If there are other systems that you prefer like Airtable or Asana or something new, feel free to deploy the stack that makes the most sense for you.

But again, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel and there are a handful of tools that are already used by pretty much every social media team in politics and the private sector. Number 6. Pre and post publication checklist. This is especially beneficial if you have a team pulling the trigger on each post, but also helpful as a way to slow down and hold yourself accountable if you’re the one with that privilege. At some point the national media decided that any sort of error in a social media post is worthy of its own breaking news story.

So you need to protect yourself and your team from mistakes. This was our protocol. Check the handles, check the links, proofread for spelling and grammar 3 times, and then publish. Then, click the handles on the live posts, click the links on the live post, and reread the spelling and grammar 3 more times. Number 7, reporting.

If your goal is to improve every week then you and your team need to know what success looks like. Select the metrics that resonate the most with you and your team whether that might be reach, engagements, output, or others and set goals. Design a simple report that the team can pull every week to compare the metrics to your goals as well as to the performance over previous weeks. My preference has always been to have a weekly meeting to review this report so that everyone is well informed and can share ideas for improvements. Now, part 3.

This will be the last part of the conversation and we’re gonna talk about messaging best practices. Social media platforms and best practices for them are constantly evolving and changing. So, I’m gonna share some high level concepts that I think ring true despite the platform or the content. The first is to message for the medium. What works well on X, formerly Twitter, is gonna be different in many ways from what works well on YouTube or Instagram.

The same can be said in comparing any 2 mediums. Pay attention to how users, including yourself, engage with each of these platforms and make sure to differentiate your formatting and style to maximize impact. Think about what image and video aspect ratios will best fit the screen. If users are watching with the sound off, are there captions to convey the message visually? Competitive advantage.

Online media is a battlefield. There are millions of individuals and organizations competing for your audience’s attention. You’re going toe to toe with the biggest athletes, musicians and celebrities in the world. Not to mention the well staffed social media operations of newsrooms and major brands. You might have only been thinking about your political rivals.

A key to standing out and building your audience is to understand your competitive advantages in the attention game. What information or access do you have that differentiates your account from everyone else? No one has better access to your leadership than you do. No one has better access behind the scenes within your agency and no one should be able to know the breaking news around your policies and actions before your team. Leverage these areas and others in order to make your accounts indispensable for those who want to be in the know.

Next, test and iterate. Don’t get complacent with your content. Think strategically about what large or small differences could have a big impact on how audiences engage with your accounts. Implement these different approaches and pay attention. Track their performance and aim to continually move your work in the direction that brings you the most reach and engagement.

Next, keep your eyes on the horizon. An effective digital communicator is a curious one. No doubt you’re already always on your phone. Pay attention to which accounts whether they’re in your sphere or an entirely different one are building audiences and shaping narratives. How can you learn from these accounts and bring those best practices back to the platforms that you manage?

I like to keep a short list of accounts that I think are operating at the highest level and continually assessing what tactics that work for them could apply to the accounts in my own portfolio. Make it brag worthy. When I started at the state department, I told all the career staff teams that I wanted them to make content that they will obnoxiously show off to their friends and family after work. Most people laughed because the idea that the content that they produced would be something they would actually want to share personally never crossed their mind. I think this is a good test of whether your team is operating at the highest level.

You wanna make content that stands out and that you’re proud of showing off even to audiences who aren’t interested in or agree with the policy. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, do no harm. The truth is that any one social media post is not likely to individually make a significant or even measurable advancement of your policy objectives. It could happen but generally it’s going to be the accumulation of a critical mass not only on social media but through press conferences, speeches, surrogates, and real world action. But one bad social media post can easily drive the news cycle with at best a distraction and at worst potentially even a poison pill.

I know it’s not fair. On a similar note, there is a tendency for young staffers to think that being good at social media means having a lot of followers personally and shooting out viral posts. If you’re joining the administration to increase your follower count, you’re the wrong person for the job. You are delivering the message but you’re often not the messenger. The president is a messenger.

The cabinet secretaries are messengers. The spokesperson is a messenger. It’s very possible for an off message or offensive post from a junior staffer with even a small following to capture far more media attention than the accounts and content that your team is working so hard to amplify every day. Thank you so much for taking the time today to have this conversation about operating effectively within a government agency, learning about a toolkit that you can use for your social media team, as well as discussing some best practice principles for effectively advancing policies on social media. I want to give a special thanks to project 2025 for allowing me to come and share some of the lessons learned from my time in the administration and I want to wish you all the best of luck in your future.

Hopefully within a presidential administration and hope that you can use these lessons in order to achieve your goals and to help move policy forward.