Last summer I joined the team responsible for conducting this survey, and now that the report is out I thought it good timing to reflect on the experience from both sides of the fence – as both a local gov web manager and a reviewer.

I’d been aware of the Better connected report for many years – not least because Edinburgh has achieved the maximum 4-star rating for the last 3 years. When the chance came up to join the team, I was excited by the opportunity but also wary that some might see it as “joining the dark side”. After all, the report pulls no punches when it comes to pointing out the failings of websites, and its strong emphasis on “top tasks” has generated lots of national debate.

Nevertheless I applied and, after a rigorous selection process and phone interview in August 2012, I was invited to join the team. Just days later, I found myself knee-deep in the first task – conducting a pilot of the survey on a number of sites.

The results of that pilot were top of the agenda at my first meeting with the team in September 2012 (held in Reading although the team come from far and wide). One of my initial concerns about the survey was whether it would be too subjective, leading to erratic findings depending on the reviewers’ experience (or even just their mood!) on the day. I was pleased to find everyone striving to make the questions as consistent and objective as possible, and developing specific guidance for the reviewers to follow if in any doubt, to further ensure consistency. After that meeting, I felt a lot more confident about getting stuck into my main allocation of reviews.

Goodbye social life…

Then, in October 2012, came the review itself – 6 intensive weeks of reviewing around 40 council websites, each one taking somewhere between 90 and 210 minutes (the better sites were almost always the quickest). The survey took the form of a huge spreadsheet of over 200 questions, split across several tasks which were announced by Socitm ahead of time – for example, paying a parking fine or reserving a library book. The questions take you through each task, testing various aspects of the user experience and looking out for common pitfalls.

This was seriously hard work, especially on top of a full-time day job, but also very rewarding.  Being a complete geek, I had prepared myself a lovely Google spreadsheet mapping the work I had to do each week. Seeing the spreadsheet, and accompanying progress graphs, slowly turn from red to green was one of the things that kept me going on those long, late Sunday nights!

I learnt something new on almost every site I reviewed – whether it was noting some really great content or a lovely bit of innovation, or identifying common errors or usability dead-ends. And I must honestly say that it was eye-opening how many basic mistakes were being made – typos and broken links, obscure content and puzzling navigation, meaningless acronyms and other jargon, and sometimes even factually incorrect content.

This was the biggest surprise of all. For the most part the sites weren’t too bad, with more than a few absolute gems. But time and time again I would find obvious usability issues that anyone could have spotted and fixed, let alone a web professional. Without knowing how the different sites are managed, it’s hard to point fingers at the underlying cause. Maybe a lack of internal resources, or not enough training for web publishers, or a failure to enforce standards. Impossible to tell, and certainly of no interest to the poor citizen just trying to get something done!

Being honest about the bad things

For me, this first hand experience cast the Better connected report in a new light – the findings are reflective of general trends, they’re not just seeking to grab headlines. We’re bound to see stories coming out over the coming days and weeks focusing on the failures, and as someone passionate about local government services I know how painful that can be, but the sad reality is that a large amount of sites are failing in certain areas. Of course, I’m also hopeful that we can also celebrate the good points, and I’ll blog about some of those in the near future. But by being realistic about the failures, hopefully web managers can take this opportunity to underline what they’ve probably already been saying to their management - namely that the web needs to be taken seriously and that means getting buy-in across the organisation and making sufficient resources available to make things happen.

Third-party sites

One of the common concerns I’ve heard expressed about previous Better connected reports is that much of what it tests is “out of the council’s control” because services are provided by a third party. For example, library catalogues, planning portals, leisure websites.

I discovered that the team are acutely aware of this, and in fact have been in discussions with many of the big vendors to try to get them to improve their products. But ultimately the councils are the vendors’ customers, and it’s vital that they are demanding the improvements too.

Also, it was very often the case that councils using the same third-party applications varied in success due to how they’d customised the software. For example, many websites forced users to register before they could comment on a planning application, yet other councils using the same planning software had simply turned this requirement off, vastly improving the user experience. It’s therefore clear that councils do have some (perhaps limited) ability to improve these user journeys, even when the user is taken off the main council site. I think this is a really important message to take back to those teams responsible for integrating those applications on their website.

And, of course, the main point is that the public don’t really care – they just want to get stuff done and are unlikely to be impressed by a council giving the excuse that parts of their website are weak because they are actually provided by someone else!

Re-reviews

One aspect of the Better connected annual cycle that I hadn’t known about was the robust re-review process that takes place after the main reviews are done. Any reviews which trigger certain conditions – for example, a site that appears to have got dramatically worse since last year - is subject to a re-review by two other reviewers. The team told me that they have been refining this process for years and review it every year to ensure the results are as fair and consistent as possible.

The team met again in January 2013 for two days to discuss these re-reviews – debating the scores given and making sure all was as fair as it could be. I really liked this stage – it validated the whole process and allowed us to iron out any potential blips, and also gave rise to some really good discussion and debate.

It’s also worth mentioning that the team kept in constant communication during this whole process, via email and an online collaboration space. We supported each other, shared good and bad examples, asked questions, invited second opinions and generally encouraged each other. As we were all using different devices and browsers, we could also easily ask others to double-check errors that we’d encountered, to see if they were device-specific or universal. We also used Dropbox to share files. As with all dispersed teams, this way of working is essential and it was good to be part of a team using these online tools so well.

Mobile, cookies and digital engagement

In addition to the main reviews, I was involved in a number of smaller surveys looking at specific topics. This was a good chance to put some of my professional experience to use, helping to develop the surveys to ensure our findings would be as meaningful as possible.

The mobile survey looked at how mobile-friendly the various sites were. We know that the number of people using mobile devices is continuing to boom, so it’s vital that public services make their web content universally available. Sadly we found limited evidence of this happening yet – there were a few wonderfully responsive layouts (my preferred approach if done well), some mobile sites (some good, some awfully limited) and the occasional app (very mixed in terms of usefulness and rarely well promoted). But such efforts were few and far between.

The cookies survey looked at how well the sites had implemented the requirements of the EU regulations on the use of cookies. This was generally not bad, although the range of solutions was immense with all manner of methods for handling cookies. We also found anecdotal evidence that many councils didn’t fully understand what cookies were being deployed by their site, nor what the full impact of the cookies were, which was worrying.

The digital engagement survey looked at the integration of social media and other forms of digital engagement such as the ability to register and sign-in to a site. We found lots of great use of social media, with 4 in 5 sites promoting their accounts on their homepage, although they were not always well promoted elsewhere.

Conclusions

This work was a valuable experience for me both personally and professionally. It’s vital that web teams are looking at their site from the point of view of their citizens, and the Better connected report is one of the ways of gaining an insight into how real users are experiencing your site.

If your council did well in this year’s report – well done! Pat yourselves on the back and be proud that your efforts have been acknowledged. But don’t rest on your laurels – a year is a long time on the web and citizens are becoming more and more demanding of what they expect from the web and online services.

In Edinburgh, for example, we have a rolling programme of identifying and testing our own, locally determined “top tasks” – mixing user testing and analytics to identify gaps and streamline the customer journeys. It’s great to get recognition from Socitm that we’re on the right track, and we always make an effort to disseminate the findings to managers across the council, but it’s even more important to us that we’re serving our citizens well.

If your council didn’t do so well, my advice would be to not take it too personally – look at the findings as constructive criticism and see if there are messages which might actually reinforce and support your own efforts and endeavours. Use it as a way to show your senior management teams that you need more support, more coordination, more buy-in, more resources. Go through the recommendations and cherry-pick some of the simpler amendments to deliver some quick wins. Also engage your citizens, if you haven’t already, and get them to tell you what they think. Work with them to make the improvements that will matter most to them.

There’s no such thing as a perfect council website and they also have a habit of leap-frogging each other - even a brilliant site will be defunct within a few years if not properly supported. The most important thing is to be on a journey to building something better for your residents, and if the Better connected findings can help you with that, then all those late nights will have been worthwhile.

The final meeting for this year’s cycle will be in May, when we’ll review the process and lessons learned to make improvements for next year. All feedback welcome. There’s also bound to be plenty of discussion on Twitter (hashtag is #socitmBC) and on the “Web Improvement and Usage” group on the Knowledge Hub - see you there!

The full Better connected 2013 report is only available to Socitm Insight subscribers, but anyone can access the headline results and reviewers’ comments on some of the keys areas such as housing, planning and social care.

Our competition’s winning poster design by Alix, Rowan and Kirstin of Trinity Primary

Today is Safer Internet Day 2013, which aims to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people.

Leading up to the day, I’ve been working with colleagues to develop ways to raise awareness of the issues around Internet Safety, including:

• A conference for staff featuring expert guest speakers, for which we engaged with young people for their input into the planning/participation of the event
• Resource packs on Internet Safety for Edinburgh’s schools
• A video trailer (below) to promote Safer Internet Day, as well as a short film to enter into a national UKIS competition, both created by young people in care
• A competition to encourage schools and their pupils to engage with Safer Internet Day and its slogan “connect with respect”
• Involvement with Community Learning and Development to promote Internet Safety and hold evening classes in the community

Competition winners

For the competition, we invited children and young people in Edinburgh to come up with a pledge about their rights and responsibilities for connecting safely and responsibly online. We had some great entries which were judged by representatives from the police and Edinburgh Council.

The Best Poster award went to Alix, Rowan and Kirstin of Trinity Primary. The poster, shown above and available to download here (PDF), will go out to every GP Surgery, Community Centre, Library and School in Edinburgh.

From St Mark’s RC Primary, Erin and Aimee’s inspired Internet Safety song (link to audio file) secured their prize in the Most Creative category – you’ll be singing this one to yourself for weeks!

We had a great selection of short video messages from pupils at Forthview Primary which won them the Best Video award.

Follow the day on Twitter

If you’re interested in following the discussions today on Twitter, check out the hashtag #SID2013 for the international chat and #edinSID for local tweeting from our staff event in Edinburgh.

This post originally published at http://edinburghbrightfutures.com

Despite the snow, we welcomed no less than 40 people through the doors of McDonald Road Library – with around 13 volunteering their time and expertise as “surgeons” and the rest coming along as “patients”, looking for a bit of help. The patients came from a wide range of backgrounds – from community councils and charity groups to local freelancers and even a 10 year old pupil looking for some advice about blogging!

One of our surgeons getting logged on

I spent most of the evening signing people in, making sure people were paired with the most appropriate surgeon, and pestering the library staff who were fantastic in supplying us with hot water, spoons, cups and several extra chairs.

@lockhartl and I form the welcoming committee

When I did get a chance to chat to some patients, I was able to touch on topics including:

• the benefits of a self-hosted WordPress site vs a WordPress.com site, plus some tips about what to look for from a host company
• the difference between a full Facebook account and a business account, and the limitations of the latter (as well as the problems caused by Facebook’s “one account per person” policy)
• the virtues of free online photo editors such as pixlr.com and Photoshop Express
• the use of Etsy and similar sites to easily set up a virtual shop window

We had some great feedback from those who attended, with many wanting to know when we’d be back!

@auntyemily giving some sage advice

Next surgery

We’ve now got the next date in the diary – Monday 18 February, back at McDonald Library. If you’d like to join us – either as a patient or surgeon – please sign up here so that we know you’re coming. Hopefully this time we’ll have enough chairs!

All photos on this page are courtesy of Lilly Hunter (@lillylyle) – thanks Lilly!

We’ve already got 9 fantastic surgeons volunteering their time and expertise, and we’re especially keen to pair them with any local voluntary or community organisations, local charities, clubs or societies who are interested in making the most of the web and social media.

Sign up here to either offer your services as a surgeon or to get help as a patient.

See you there!

Update: read a report from the evening

One of last year’s surgeries in progress. Photo courtesy of Tom Allan

But to fully embrace and integrate the Twitter experience, many events now display relevant tweets live on-screen, either during the breaks or, in some case, actually when people are talking. We did it at the first Tartan Tweetmeet, for example, as an easy way to keep tabs on the discussions taking place at the other venues across the country. This can be especially useful for promoting the tool to attendees who haven’t yet signed up to Twitter, to help give a flavour of how useful it can be.

Here’s some of the free tools you can use to display tweets at events:

Twitterfall

Twitterfall

This one allows you to show a constantly updating stream of tweets, as they come in. It can display several at once, and has a handy “presentation mode” which enlarges the feed and hides the superfluous options. You can do a simple search which will return any instance of that keyword, or you can search only for specific usernames or hashtags.

There’s a basic “exclude” function although this is more for filtering unrelated content, as opposed to blocking spam. This service is therefore very vulnerable to spammers picking up on a trending hashtag – exactly as happened at the recent Digital Futures conference in Shrewsbury.

You can also authorise access to your Twitter account in order to pull in your searches and lists, as well as interact with tweets in the usual ways – allowing you to quickly RT a message, DM a contact or even report a message as spam.

Tweetwally

Tweetwally

This one looks nicer than Twitter Fall and you can customise the look with themes or hand-picked colour schemes. It has some useful features such as being able to set multiple criteria for what appears – for example, only show tweets with this hashtag, tweeted by this user, mentioning this user. This is ideal if you only want to show the tweets going out from an official account.

Sadly you have to sign in via Twitter to save the stream that you’ve created – otherwise, the customisation bar stays visible at all times and takes up a lot of space. But if you do sign in, you can get a unique URL to your customised stream which makes sharing it really easy.

Visible Tweets

Visible Tweets

This one offers something quite different, and is far more attractive than the previous two, employing Flash to create nifty transitions between tweets. It only displays one at a time, and moves quite slowly, so if you’re expecting a lot of tweets you certainly won’t cover them all. This is therefore better at giving a random flavour of the tweets coming through, rather than offering a comprehensive record of everything. It also, in my experience, displays the tweets in a fairly random order – you often find a tweet appearing on screen that was actually send ages ago, which can be confusing if you’re using it to display tweets live.

Tweet Beam

Someone recommended this one and it looks promising, but I’m unable to access it because it requires Silverlight. This is an important point – if you’re planning to use one of these tools for an event, make sure you have access to kit that can handle it. Often you’ll be limited to using a venue’s own equipment, which may seriously reduce your options.

twubs

twubs

The concept behind this is that you can become the administrator of a “twub” -  community built up around a hashtag. This gives you lots of control over what goes up on the official stream, although that obviously requires constant moderation so you’ll need to have someone on board to focus on that during the event.

However, the site has several bugs and broken links, and it takes some time to get used to. Even logging in is difficult, as it appears to do nothing and you have to visit your specific “twub” to actually get access to the various account options. Sadly, then, I wouldn’t trust this enough to use during a conference.

So there’s a few options – if you know of any others, let me know by leaving a comment below, and enjoy showing off your tweets!

A social media surgery is an informal gathering of people who want to learn how to use the web to communicate, campaign or collaborate. Surgeries are deliberately relaxed. No presentations, no jargon, noone telling people what they think they should know.

socialmediasurgery.com

You can read more about how they work, and also see my report from a surgery I attended last year.

One of last year’s surgeries in progress. Photo courtesy of Tom Allan

Could you be a surgeon?

A surgeon is someone who knows enough about using social media to help someone else. Some surgeons have spent years understanding the internet. Others started learning a few months ago but want to share what they know with other community groups and active citizens.

If you think that describes you, pop along to meet other potential volunteers and find out more.

We are meeting at Spoon Cafe, Edinburgh, from 4pm on Monday 10 December. We’ve got a table booked under the name “James” and I’ll try to print off a nice poster or something so that you can easily spot us! If you’re planning to come, it would be great if you could leave a reply here or contact me through Twitter, but it’s not mandatory.

Note that this event won’t be a Social Media Surgery itself! Rather, it’s a chance for potential surgeons to come and find out more. We’ll hopefully be starting the real surgeries up again in early 2013.

I hope to see you there!

Here, then, is a review of some of the WordPress plug-ins I’ve tested. All reviews state the plug-in version so you can see if they’ve been updated since I looked at them.

Worth noting that I’m not going to comment on whether or not each plug-in actually satisfies the legislation. Many take the easier “implied consent” approach and people have differing opinions on this so I’ll leave it up to you to find the solution that best fits your needs. As always, I am not a lawyer! My focus here is on the usability and accessibility of the solutions.

UK Cookie Consent

Version 1.31 – download

This is a nice and simple one – it just adds a thin, dark line to the top of your website, simply stating that “this site uses cookies”, along with two links: one to set a cookie and remove the message, and the other to access more info. You can customise all of these, of course, and although the plug-in automatically creates a default page for more info, you can delete this and redirect users to an alternative page.

There are a couple of accessibility issues – the links come last in the tabbing order and do not change state on focus, so it’s harder for a keyboard user to use the links. I’ve contacted the developer to see if they can fix these.

UK Cookie Consent

Cookie Control

Version 1.5 – download

Civic UK’s Cookie Control plug-in is interesting because you can tailor it to obtain different types of consent, depending on how you wish to comply with the legislation – whether seeking implicit or explicit consent, or just providing info about cookies. You can customise the content and appearance of the message, which pops up in the bottom right or left of your site.

Cookie Control

One issue I noticed was that although the pop-up appears when you first arrive on a page, it’s hidden by default on subsequent pages. You have to change it from “implied” consent to “explicit” consent to change this. It also fades away after a few seconds, although you can bring it back by clicking the small icon that remains in the corner at all times – this means that it technically passes WCAG’s timing requirements, and you can increase the time that will elapse before it disappears, if you’re worried.

The pop-up does appear first in the tabbing order, which is good, but the links don’t change state on focus, so a keyboard user could easily miss the links.

Cookie Law Info

Version 1.0.2 – download

This one is interesting because you can upload the details of each of your site’s cookies and automatically generate a table of them on any page using shortcodes. This makes presenting accurate info about your cookies much easier.

The message appears in a thin box at the bottom (by default) or top of your site. You can customise everything from the text and links to the colours and fonts. You can also give it a subtle animated effect on load, helping to draw attention to it. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be an option to keep the message on the screen at all times when placed at the top – it appears inline and disappears as soon as the user scrolls down.

There’s an option to retain a “show again” tab after the user has dismissed the main message – this is a nice touch but not really necessary and just gets in the way, so you’ll probably decide to turn this off.

Cookie Law Info

By default, the “read more” link opens in a new window, but you can change this is the settings. The bar is first in the tabbing order, but the links don’t change state on focus, so a keyboard user could easily miss the links.

Cookie Compliance

Version 1.0.5 – download

This one takes a far more direct approach, presenting the user with an intrusive pop-up which they must respond to (either accepting or denying cookies) before they can access the website.

Cookie Compliance

This approach was adopted by a small number of sites early on, but quickly abandoned by most as having a serious impact on usability. Arguably this is one of the only ways to truly guarantee the informed, explicit consent of a user before a cookie is saved, but I’d consider the negative usability impact to be too great to justify this approach. Indeed, if all EU websites did this, the web would fast become a very frustrating place to be.

In terms of accessibility, luckily you can tab straight to the pop-up, but the lack of a distinct focus state, as with all the previous solutions, is an issue.

Cookie Opt-in

Version 1.2.5 – download

This one has a couple of interesting features which set it apart from other solutions.

Firstly, you can ask for permission for different types of cookies – for example, you might accept functional cookies but deny advertising cookies. This level of control is really useful, but I do have doubts about how many users will really understand the differences, even with the short explanations that the plug-in presents.

Cookie Opt In

But the other feature which I liked was that the plug-in instructions and settings constantly refer to the EU directive, reminding the site owner that it’s up to them to make sure they are compliant. For example, you can choose to make the various types of cookies automatically available until the user opts out, but the instructions clearly remind you to “remember the rules!!!”. I like this approach because it strikes a good balance and allows the site owner to decide how strict they want to be.

Unfortunately the pop-up appears last in the tabbing order, and (again!) has no change of state on focus. Also, once minimised, the button to re-open the pop-up is a rather amateurish graphic of a cookie. I certainly wouldn’t want this appearing on any of my sites, although I think you can apply different skins.

Conclusion

Just in these 5 solutions, it’s clear that there are a huge variety of approaches to complying with the directive. It’s also clear that there continues to be significant accessibility pitfalls in implementing a solution, with keyboard users particularly disadvantaged.

For now, I’ve chosen the Cookie Law Info plug-in which is relatively unobtrusive but persistent until the user dismisses the message -  a good compromise. Hopefully with a little tweaking of the CSS, I can solve the remaining accessibility issues. And with a bit of luck (and pestering), I hope the developers of these solutions will take my lead in doing the same.

What solution have you chosen, for WordPress or any other site? Are you worried about its impact on your site’s accessibility. Get in touch if you’d like me to take a look – I can offer anything from a brief summary to a full audit.

This proved popular with staff as a way to keep informed. It also provided a way for them to have their say, by leaving comments on the posts. Crucially, we invited posts from any member of staff, to get a broad view of the work across the department. In all, we had nearly 200 posts, from over 50 contributors.

Going public

We’ve been so pleased with this new way of sharing our information that we’ve decided to make the blog public. My argument for this was simple – we have nothing to hide and our service users will have a genuine interest in knowing what we’re up to.

The new blog

In that spirit, we’ve just gone live with www.edinburgh.gov.uk/brightfutures.

Before going live, we trained key staff throughout the department on publishing to the new blog. This will enable us to keep up the high volume of posts from across our services, without necessarily relying on centralised publishing (although we are retaining an editorial overview, with posts requiring central approval before going live).

We transferred all relevant posts from the old blog in order to preserve the archive that we’ve built up over the past year – this means that we’ve already got a healthy looking “tag cloud” of popular topics which people can browse.

Broad remit

The blog has a broad remit – covering all of the services we deliver to Edinburgh’s children, young people and their families. We’re a huge department with lots of stories to tell, so I’m hopeful that we won’t be short on material. We’re also going to encourage contributions from key partners, parents and carers, and young people – in fact, we’ve already featured a couple of posts written by young people themselves. This is another feature of the blog which I’m particularly excited about.

One challenge will naturally be to filter what comes in and make sure it’s of sufficient interest to the wider audience – the concept of what makes a story “blog-worthy” will take some time to take shape, and I’m hoping that honest feedback, backed up by some decent analytics, will help us identify what really ignites people’s interest.

Inviting comments

Without doubt the trickiest subject, when discussing our ambition to make the blog public, has been around comments – the ability for anyone to have their say. Of course, we’ll be pre-moderating any comments before they go live. This isn’t to censor anyone, just to make sure nothing nasty gets through. Our organisation has published an acceptable use policy for anyone wanting to contact us through social media, and we’ll be keeping the same rules for the blog. Where it will get interesting, though, is if we get legitimate negative comments. This is the tricky bit of genuine public engagement, and will certainly be a cultural shift for some, although most folk I’ve spoken to are excited by its potential.

The bigger picture

One thing we were always keen to stress to staff is that the blog is part of a much bigger picture – one of various ways in which they could get news. We have various internal and external channels of communication, and we’ll continue to strengthen the editorial processes for getting stories to the right people, via the most appropriate means.

Top blogging tips

To help people wanting to contribute, we came up with 8 top tips for writing a good blog post:

Be personal – blog posts should be written in the first person (e.g. “I think…” or “I’m pleased to announce…”) and can be informal. If you are writing on behalf of someone, say so – people can quickly pick up on writing skills and will recognise if different people are pretending to be the same person.

Be clear – use plain English, avoid jargon, and explain any terms that people may not have heard before.

Be honest – don’t avoid difficult subjects. People respect honesty and openness.

Be relevant – never leave the reader asking “so what?” – explain what your news will actually mean to them.

Be connected – link to further reading e.g. related articles or other websites.  Try to put links at the end of your post to avoid people leaving your post halfway through.

Be visual – photos and videos are a great way to grab people’s attention – whether it’s a high quality film or just a snap from a mobile phone.

Be creative – think about ways to engage your audience. Put the most important facts first and create something that people will want to read.

Be responsive – people can leave public comments on posts. If someone comments on your post, respond where appropriate. Invite comments by ending your post with something like “what do you think?” or “We’d be interested to hear your views on…”.

In the spirit of that last tip, I’m keen to hear what people think of the new blog and the thinking behind it. Are you planning something similar for your organisation? Or have you seen other examples of blogging in local government?

WordPress 3.5 is due in Dec 2012 and there’s been a call for people to submit their accessibility issues now, to hopefully get them fixed. See more here: Now is the time to raise those accessibility tickets.

9 years of the Accessify Forum

The Accessify Forum sees its 9th birthday in August.

You’ll find discussion of accessibility at all levels, from beginner to guru, and the popular “site critiques” section has helped hundreds of people improve their websites, with members offering friendly, no nonsense advice.

So whether you’re looking to learn more about accessibility, want to help others and improve on your own knowledge, or just to browse the archives, pop over and see us at www.accessifyforum.com.

Annual online accessibility conference

Finally, the 3rd annual online Accessibility Summit has been announced for September 25 2012, bringing together some of the most notable experts in the field. Individual tickets are $179.

Should you use your existing personal Facebook account for work purposes, or set up a separate professional profile?

By “work purposes” I mean acting in an official capacity, such as administering an official Facebook Page. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to assume everyone we’re talking about already has a personal Facebook account. I realise not everyone is on Facebook, but if you’re not, this isn’t such a problem (although you arguably shouldn’t be in charge of a professional Facebook presence without experience of the platform!).

Are two separate profiles better than one?

Why two profiles?

There are quite a few reasons why having separate work and personal profiles would be beneficial:

• It allows you to keep work and home life separate, so that you’re not getting emails from your work’s Page in your personal inbox at the weekend or on holiday
• It avoids the risk of accidentally posting a personal update to a work Page
• It keeps the public away from your personal profile
• If you leave your job, it’s simply a case of deleting your work account, rather than trying to unpick all of the professional associations with your personal account
• Any requirement for an employee to use a personal social media account for work purposes could be a breach of human rights

Additionally, some professions have strict guidelines about the use of social media and Facebook.

The Scottish Social Services Council states:

“Friending” or allowing a person who uses services or their carer to be your online friend or follower is not acceptable for a registered social service worker as it creates a personal relationship outside of your workplace. And it leaves both workers and people who use services open to allegations from comments they might post.

(update – the SSSC tell me that they plan to review their guidance and will be consulting on this later in the year)

Whilst the General Teaching Council for Scotland says:

only use official channels of communication e.g. GLOW and work e-mail addresses

and

firmly decline student-initiated ‘friend’ requests from pupils and do not
instigate any yourself.

Both are clear, then, that it is inappropriate to have contact with clients or pupils through personal social media accounts or e-mail. So any official use of Facebook to communicate with these groups is hampered – any official Page administrated by one or more personal accounts, linked to personal email addresses, poses a risk. And for the above professions, a serious breach of the guidance could result in disciplinary procedures and potentially being struck off their registers, ending your career.

So it seems fairly obvious – have two accounts and keep your work and home life separate.

Facebook doesn’t agree

However, having two accounts is against Facebook’s terms:

You will not create more than one personal account.

Rule 4.2 of Facebook’s terms

And, although unlikely, I know of people who have had one or both accounts suspended as a result, leaving Pages floating without an admin and clearly impacting the individual’s personal life as well as their work.

(A third option is to create a “false” identity but again it’s clearly against Facebook’s terms and I’ve heard of accounts getting shut down for this too)

This is a contradiction that seems impossible to solve, and I’m yet to find a decent compromise. Sadly the conclusion seems to be that you either break the rules somewhere, or end up not doing Facebook at all. None of these is really acceptable, and the best solution I can think of would be for Facebook to relax its rules.

What’s the answer? Are you facing the same problem? How are you getting around it? Or, if you’re just ignoring the rules, how have you justified that? Please leave a comment below and help me solve this riddle!