The gathering of over 40 practitioners heard from Ann Moffat and Amanda Waugh from the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC), who last year published guidelines for social service workers and their employers on the appropriate use of social media.

We heard about the risks and pitfalls of using social media, with some sobering examples of people being removed from the SSSC register for inappropriate behaviour on the web. See their website for recent hearings and decisions. Examples included:

• a nursery manager who made derogatory and racist comments on her personal blog about children and parents at her nursery
• a care worker who befriended an ex-client’s mother on Facebook and was later seen in online photos drinking large amounts of alcohol with the ex-client (who had a history of alcohol abuse)
• a social worker who was filmed being drunk and disorderly in a shop – the video was posted to YouTube by a bystander

We also heard, though, about the opportunities that social media presents, with some great examples of using it for collaboration and engagement, as a tool for knowledge management, and as a fast and effective communications platform.

The SSSC is keen to hear from social work staff with their thoughts on the guidelines. They were keen to stress that they can’t tell people exactly what or what not to do – every situation is unique and the most important thing is that staff feel confident in using these sites appropriately.

Graphic courtesy of the Edinburgh Local Practitioner Forum.

We've come a long way already

How far we’ve come. Not that long ago, many of us felt like we faced an insurmountable brick wall. Social media remained a black art in so many organisations – misunderstood and distrusted.

Since then, we’ve seen huge advances in the awareness of the true power of social media, with global events like the Arab Spring making it impossible to ignore. Uptake continues to boom, with my own organisation seeing award-winning campaigns go from strength to strength; national tweetathons attracting lots of attention; and a huge internal effort to develop a strategic way forward.

We’ve done much “talking and planning”. We’ve even seen plenty of “doing and learning”. I’d say that we’re now in a strong position to take it to the next level – to start “refining and perfecting”.

However, as the floodgates open, we need to be careful that unbridled enthusiasm doesn’t lead to sloppy delivery. And experience tells me that one platform in particular will continue to cause headaches for those of us charged with maintaining some order in this chaotic online frontier.

I’m talking, of course, about Facebook.

Common Facebook fallacies

Despite all my enthusiasm and optimism around the potential of social media, I still shudder whenever someone approaches me asking how they can get a Facebook page. Fundamentally, they are asking the wrong question. Facebook is just a tool – it is one possible answer to the wider question of how we might improve communication and engagement with our service users. And often, Facebook turns out not to be the answer.

Take, for example, the Primary School Facebook page I saw recently, aimed at promoting sport. Sounds like a nice idea, doesn’t it? Well, not when you remember that Facebook’s terms state that you have to be 13 to register. Suddenly, a nice idea turns into a potential disaster, where a school is seen to be actively encouraging its pupils to register on age-inappropriate websites.

(And by coincidence, the Guardian has today reported that teachers have been warned about befriending pupils on Facebook. This would seem pretty obvious to me, but the sobering examples given in the article prove otherwise.)

The problem is that Facebook seems so ubiquitous that many assume they should be on there. For large brands, that may be true – if just to protect yourself from cyber-imposters.

(That said, though, I was bemused to see an advert this Christmas for a popular cold remedy brand which proudly announced “we’re now on Facebook”. Really? Why on earth would anyone want to follow a page about a cold remedy? What sort of person would be proud to annouce to their friends that they are an ongoing fan of such a product? And what sort of information are they hoping to glean from following such a page? The only thing I can think of would be advice on how to avoid getting a cold, which would surely dent sales!)

For smaller entities, though, Facebook may not be the right answer at all, and can easily cause more harm than good. Some of the main mistakes we’re seeing include:

Using Facebook to just broadcast, rather than to start a conversation

Allowing people to leave comments on a Facebook page is risky. It opens you up to criticism and even abuse. It means you’ll have to constantly monitor things and have a process in place for dealing with comments. You may find that people come to expect a response to questions posted on there, sapping even more staff time.

Many people think they’ve found the perfect solution – simply disable comments. But in doing so, you’re taking the “social” out of “social media” and, arguably, completely missing the point.

Failing to understand how Facebook works

Facebook’s settings remain a mystery to many, yet so much can go wrong if you don’t get these right. Privacy can be easily compromised. For example, many people believe that it’s impossible to publicly track who “likes” a page. That’s because it doesn’t, by default, show up on the page itself. But the info is there for all to see – just set up a custom Like Box to see what I mean.

With two clicks, I'm able to see who "liked" the aforementioned cold remedy. Strange people.

Apply this ability to a fairly specific Facebook page (such as for a local school or youth group) and you can start to see the inherent risks of getting privacy wrong.

Not measuring success

Many of the proposals I get from people wanting to set up a Facebook page refer to “followers” and “page views” as the way in which they will measure success. Yes, these are reasonable indicators for exposure, but that’s only part of the picture. They don’t really tell you much about engagement or conversion. Are those page views actually helping you to achieve your goals?

Of course, this is an impossible question to answer if you haven’t set any goals. Which again begs the question – why? Why do you want to be on Facebook – what are you trying to achieve?

Underestimating the invisible cost

When people talk about social media as “free”, I’m quick to put them right. A social media presence requires a huge investment of time and effort to be successful (and even that’s no guarantee). And whilst staff are doing that, they’re not doing other things. It’s not a reason to not do it, but it’s a damn good reason to think long and hard about it first.

Simply being bad at it

Producing a constant stream of engaging, interesting content is actually quite a skill. I’m certainly no expert at it. But huge expectations are being placed upon relative novices, who are suddenly being asked to do the job of a communications expert on top of their day job. And in truth, many of them are getting it wrong. They’re probably not doing anything horribly, scandalously wrong – they’re just not doing it that well. Dull, predictable or irrelevant updates; barren attempts to start a conversation; misjudged efforts to sound trendy or youthful – all of these pitfalls plague the many Facebook pages I’ve come across, and only really serve to damage the reputation of the associated brand.

Time to get it right

Of course, most of the above would apply to any social media platform, and we have a long way to go to tackle these challenges. But for all the half-baked efforts we see, there are also plenty of great examples of people doing social media really well – genuinely innovating and redefining the boundaries of success.

We’re undoubtable seeing a continuing increase in the uptake of social media. What remains to be seen, however, is whether we’ll also see a notable increase in the quality of those efforts.

Footsteps photo courtesy of MollaAliod – licenced under Creative Commons

Simply leave a comment below or contact me via Twitter at @prettysimple. You’re welcome to remain anonymous, of course, but leaving contact details would enable me to follow up your comments and find out more about the problems you’ve had.

The Tartan TweetMeet will take place on Wednesday 22 February at a number of venues across Scotland, and will allow like-minded individuals to meet and share ideas. There will also be a chance for members of the public to get involved by tweeting questions and suggestions, hopefully leading to some valuable new opportunities for engagement.

Explaining the concept on the event’s website, organiser Carolyne Mitchell (@Cal444) lists the rules for the day:

• They have to be free.
• No business cards allowed.
• There must be a hashtag.
• Come with an open mind and be prepared to share ideas.
• Most of all have fun and make connections

Anyone interested in the event is invited to register to allow organisers to get an idea of numbers. We’re currently exploring suitable venues here in Edinburgh and welcome any suggestions.

You can follow the event at #tartanTM. I look forward to meeting some of you there!

Name labels

Feel free to download and use this label

Download as a printable sheet of labels (designed for Lyreco Multipurpose Labels, 14 per sheet).

The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) is hoping to repeat the success of its Make It Local programme in England, which saw the creation of three new services based on data held by Councils and other organisations.

Organisations have until 31 January 2012 to submit an application for Make It Local Scotland.

An invitation to collaborate in Edinburgh

The City of Edinburgh Council has put out a call for local organisations and developers to get in touch and help develop a proposal, and I’d urge anyone with an idea or experience of building great services around data to get involved. There’s already been some exciting thoughts around a “green/environmental” theme but we’re keen to gather as many ideas as possible – both for this and to also help inform future developments.

The day will bring together people from local authorities across Scotland who are using social media (or at least thinking about it) to offer better customer choice and engagement, improve access to services, and reduce costs.

Being an unconference, delegates are expected to bring their own suggestions for topics to shape the agenda on the day. People then vote with their feet and gravitate towards the discussions that interest them most. The emphasis is on collaboration – everyone will have the chance to contribute and share.

A starter for ten

I’m sure everyone will be bursting with ideas, but I thought I’d get some of my own thoughts down here, as a bit of a starter for ten.

Social Media and exclusion

How do we ensure that our use of social media doesn’t exclude anyone? The most obvious risk is around accessibility – i.e. potential barriers to accessing online content encountered by certain users due to various factors such as vision impairment. I’ve blogged about this before, but still have more questions than answers.

Also, what about those who are unable to (or choose not to) access these channels? How do we ensure that the opportunities afforded by social media are still available to all?

Keeping safe

In my organisation, we conduct risk assessments for any new social media proposal. This allows us to take a step back and look at it from every angle, often spotting risks that weren’t immediately obvious. Some may call it dull, but it’s actually crucial to protect both our staff and the public.

One issue, though, is that the rules are constantly changing. Facebook seems to be forever tweaking their Privacy settings, for example, and this means we need to constantly re-assess whether what we’re doing is still safe.

Measuring success

One of the hardest questions to answer about social media seems to be “what does success look like?”. It’s also pretty fundamental – without knowing if we’re being successful, how can we improve what we’re doing (or know when we should maybe stop and try something else)?

We’ve already had some great success stories. Our Scottish Youth Parliament campaign has won several awards and the figures speak for themselves. But it’s not always that easy to say when something has been a success.

This is especially important because social media, despite what many people think, is not free. There may be no cost to set up an account, but the effort required to make it a success can easily mount up. It’s therefore easy to see why some managers might expect to see evidence of a return on that investment of time.

Staff 2.0

As we increase our use of (and by logical extension, our dependence on) social media, how do we ensure that our staff have the relevant skills and enthusiasm to do this kind of work properly. It’s probably not in anyone’s job description, and there’s very little formal training available. The challenge, then, is to find practical and sustainable ways of upskilling our workforce so that we are not relying on the limited few for whom this is all second nature.

Part of this might also mean increasingly bringing social media into our own working practices. Internal blogs are a good example of introducing people to Web 2.0 gently – offering the ability for staff to comment but not making contribution essential. I know that some organisations have really embraced internal social media, and the benefits are compelling, with reports of better collaboration, avoided duplication and the most wonderful serendipities.

Get involved

I look forward to discussing these and many more issues, and hopefully coming away with lots of ideas to take back to my organisation. If you’re going, I’ll see you there. If not, feel free to submit your thoughts or suggestions via a comment below or on Twitter. The hashtag for the event is #smuncon – I plan to live-tweet if at all possible.

Early this morning, pursuing a personal vice nurtured since childhood, I bounded along to the local branch of a well known national video game retailer, planning to grab myself a copy of a newly released and hotly anticipated game. On arrival, I was shocked to discover that the price tag on the game was a whopping £5 more than advertised on their own online store – a 14% mark-up. On principle, I left empty handed.

Luckily, I have the luxury of going home tonight and browsing for a better deal online. But what about those who can’t shop online? They would be stuck with paying the premium rate.

I got to work and didn’t think any more about it, until I read the excellent and profound article on the BBC Ouch blog – Martha Lane Fox talking about the case for getting more disabled people online.

“We know now that if you are online, even from a low income household, you save £200 a year, net, of the computer and internet connection.”

“Direct debits, switching energy deals, searching around for deals; you are massively disadvantaged economically now, if you are not online.”

Martha Lane Fox, UK digital champion

There are so many arguments for helping people to get online (many of which were explored at the recent GovCamp Scotland, which culminated in the signing of a digital participation charter for Scotland). Whilst many of the impacts can be hard to measure (though arguably far more profound), it’s good to see some cold hard figures that underline the economic imperative of helping people get online.

Couple that with the main story behind Martha Lane Fox’s article – that over 4.25 million disabled people in the UK are not online (worryingly, over half of the 8.43 million of all UK residents not online), and you can really start to perceive the impact of digital exclusion.

In the same article, Nigel Lewis from AbilityNet suggested why he thought so many disabled people remained disconnected:

“Often it’s because it is not accessible to them. Either they can’t engage with and use the standard computer out of the box, and so it needs adapting in some way, or the online services, the websites, are not accessible with their adaptive technology.”

Nigel Lewi, CEO of AbilityNet

One of the major messages in the aforementioned charter for Scotland was that we all have a part to play: friends and neighbours helping to support people to log on; tech companies helping to make the necessary devices readily available to those who need it; telecomms companies working with communities to improve connectivity; online providers making their products and services truly accessible; and local and central government pushing the digital agenda across all sectors.

I have no doubt that every reader of this post will fit into one or more of the above categories. I’d therefore urge everyone to take a moment to reinforce that message in their own minds – it won’t truly be the World Wide Web until everyone is online.

The campaign has scooped the award for “best use of social media by a public sector organisation”, as well as being shortlisted for “best use of social media by a non profit/charity organisation”, at the Some Comms Awards 2011 in Manchester last week. It also bagged the “Grand Prix” award, singling it out as the “best of the best” of all the entries.

Some of the things we introduced or improved for 2011 included:

YouTube videos of the candidates’ manifestos on a dedicated YouTube channel embedded on the elections page of the Council website, along with text versions. YouTube was also used earlier on in the campaign, to help generate interest amongst potential candidates.

SYP candidates presented their manifestos on YouTube

An interactive map of polling stations, including a “find your nearest” postcode search. This made it very easy for potential voters to find out where they could vote in over 50 different locations across the city.

An interactive map of polling stations

A strongly branded presence both online and offline, to catch the eye and imagination of young voters.

Strong branding played a vital role

A Facebook page for posting candidate photos and written and video manifestos, allowing people to become fans and to share with online friends. There was also a competition to win an iPod if people became a fan of the page, and even a QR code linking to the page for use on related printed material.

A Facebook page pulling everything together

Huge success

In 2009, 18 candidates stood for 11 seats and 5019 young people voted.
The 2011 objectives were to:

1. increase the number of candidates to 24.
2.  increase the number of voters by 50%.
3. ensure number of candidates is more than one in all constituencies to guarantee competitive election

These were ambitious targets, as the 2009 campaign had already seen an unprecedented increase in the number of voters. However, the 2011 results spoke for themselves:

1. Initially had 31 registered candidates of which 26 stood for election, equalling a 44% increase.
2. Voting more than doubled from the previous election with 10,228 young people voting – a 104% increase.
3. Each constituency had three or more candidates with one boasting seven.

Team effort

As with the 2009 campaign, this was a real team effort, with colleagues from across the Council and our partner, Stevenson College Edinburgh, pulling together the various strands of the campaign. And of course the young people themselves played the most vital role, working so hard and bringing so much enthusiasm to the process.

It’s another good example of the power of social media to reach out to audiences, to empower citizens and to excite interest in important issues.

a new contest to promote the development of IT applications designed to improve the lives of those with disabilities and people that are older, to help them get more actively involved in society.

How Was School Today?

Dr Nava Tintarev has been doing some fascinating work on a speech generating device aimed at enabling children with complex communication needs to simply and easily tell their parents about their day.

Coming out of the University of Dundee’s School of Computing, How Was School Today takes information already logged about the child’s planned activities, combining it with automatically acquired data such as location, and finally providing a simple narration tool for the child to edit and personalise the story.

Access 4 All

Gary McFarlane spoke about Access4All – an app that helps disabled people find Blue Badge parking spaces and get other relevant local information such as wheelchair access to local businesses. It’s a great example of how location-aware mobile devices can deliver huge benefits.

A particularly interesting feature was Customer Assist – offering the ability to send out a message to particpating service stations or car parks, to let them know you are on the way and could do with some assistance when you arrive.

Such a feature would certainly need a lot of front-loading to establish a critical-mass of participating services, but it’s a compelling example of how technology could help people get real world help, when and where they need it.

Go Genie

Alison Smith, of Pesky People, talked about Go Genie – a crowd-sourced database of accessibility information for various cultural venues across the UK. It’s an attempt to fill in some of the gaps around accessibility information (for example, does that theatre have wheelchair access?) and appeals to people to help “make access more open”.

With over 35,000 venues already added, and the ability for users to contribute more, the site clearly has a lot of potential.

What Can is That?

Anthony Ashbrook of Mobile Acuity spoke about their prototype app “What Can is That?” – a simple idea using some fairly advanced image recognition software to help blind users scan and identify their food and drinks packages around the house.

Again, a great example of using powerful technology which has become readily available in most modern smartphones, marrying available hardware (a camera) with the right software (in this case, their patented image recognition technology) to solve a simple problem.

CereProc Voices

Finally, Matthew Aylett of Cereproc gave us a demo of some of the voices they’ve been working on, and talked about their innovative voice creation system aimed at recreating the voices of people who have lost them due to illness. Try out the demo on their website to hear their very own “Heather” with a very effective Scottish accent.

Matthew was interested in hearing from anyone who might have a use for such voice technology in a mobile context – potentially breathing new life into the more artifical vocals often associated with speech synthesisers, such as the one used by Stephen Hawking (who, apparently, feels so attached to that voice that he has declined various offers to upgrade to something more ‘human’).

After the presentations, there was a good opportunity to chat with people from various fields – from a student working on a more automated method for patients with heart complaints to log their daily activity for more effective treatment; to a lady who told me about a research project in Dundee to develop a BSL avatar which could dramatically reduce the cost of providing content in that format. Sadly my notes from the event found their way into the washing machine, so if anyone knows more about that project I’d love to hear from them.

For anyone thinking about entering the Vodafone Smart Accessibility Awards, the deadline is 15 October. Good luck!

I was reminded of this sentiment again recently at a web accessibility talk. Someone made the point that one of the reasons why web accessibility has become so vital is that it is fast becoming the main or only way of transacting with some organisations. Gone are the days when websites were a gimmick, a luxury, an add-on. They now act as the beating heart of many large organisations.

But a few recent conversations have had me worried about where local government websites might be heading, in the light of increasing budget pressures, and one project in particular has brought this to a head.

Cutting back

One UK local authority have taken some drastic steps recently in pruning their web presence, dumping hundreds of pages and documents, and concentrating almost exclusively on the ‘top tasks’ of their citizens.

There are some interesting stats behind this move. Apparently, 85% of their traffic came to just 200 pages of the 4000 previously on their site. Of the 4,500 documents on the site, none of them related to their top 20 tasks.

The solution (it would seem) was to bin the bulk of these pages and documents – happier customers, and a huge saving in everyone’s time and effort.

And what’s more, SOCITM (who produce the highly influential Better Connected annual survey of local authority websites) have suggested that they support this approach – less is more and top tasks are key.

The design of the website should be focused on top tasks. No longer should organisations aim for the most comprehensive website possible. Less is better!

SOCITM

Now, I’m certainly an advocate of keeping things simple. I am continually negotiating with colleagues to trim their pages, get rid of complex or meaningless jargon and, ultimately, get to the point. This is a vital element of offering useful online content.

But getting rid of swathes of pages and documents completely, just because they’re not seen as ‘top tasks’?

Trimming the long tail

What about the minority groups with niche interests or needs? What about that parent who wants to see the policy behind a decision that impacts on their child? Or the partner organisation looking for materials to support their work? Or the disabled person needing to find out about a service?

I’m not being overly dramatic with that last one. I did a search of the site in question. Just two results for “blind” – on Blue Badge permits and voting. When I searched for “deaf”, it returned nothing. Clearly, services for these groups are not deemed to be top tasks.

And many other authorities appear to be buying into this idea. On the online Communities of Practice a lengthy debate is still raging (log-in required) about SOCITM’s new emphasis on top tasks. One contributor, supporting the idea of stripping things back, said:

…if only 0.03% of our customers are interested, what’s the point?

Well, if those 0.03% were looking for information on reporting a concern about a child’s welfare (thankfully not a top task), I think I can see the point.

One-stop shops

Although I cringe at the term, I think it is appropriate for local government websites to aspire to be “one-stop shops”. The information need not even be on the site itself – linking out to related sites and content is fine.

Fair enough, let’s not deceive ourselves – people don’t come to local government sites to browse around and see what we have to offer. They go to the search engine of their choice and find it that way. Indeed, that was an argument the local authority in question used themselves, to argue against A-Zs. But if you’ve stripped back your content so much that the word “deaf” doesn’t even appear once on your site, I would argue that you can expect to start slipping down the SERPs pretty quickly.

Cold hard cash

And finally, worryingly, the goal of saving money was cited as another key driver for making this particular site so streamlined, as well as for all but scrapping their model of devolved web publishing and bringing it mostly to a central point of control.

Now is not the time to be cutting back our websites – quite the opposite. We’re seeing huge cuts in print and comms budgets meaning less posters, leaflets, adverts and other means of getting information to people. We’re seeing a huge rise in the request for information, informally or through time-consuming FOI requests. We’re seeing the public increasingly demand corporate accountability and openness. We’re seeing web or mobile web access hitting unprecedented new heights, empowering more and more citizens to reach out and grab the information that they need, when they need it.

By all means do customer research, find out what your users want the most and make it easier for them to find it. Use analytics to get the balance right. Test, test and test again to get closer to perfection. But don’t assume that less is always more. For that small minority who needed that rarely visited page, which stats suggest is all but useless, less could mean an awful lot less.

</rant>