Posts Tagged ‘council’

Getting social media right (or, how NOT to do Facebook)

Monday, January 23rd, 2012
Footsteps in sand

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.
Read more about getting Facebook right

Social Media awards for revamped youth parliament campaign

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Last year we won a number of accolades for our use of social media to promote the 2009 Scottish Youth Parliament elections. I blogged at the time that we would be ramping up our efforts for the 2011 elections campaign, and I’m delighted to say we’ve won further recognition for that work.

Elections banner saying "Make Your Vote Count!"

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.

Read more about the campaign and what we did

ScotGovCamp 2011 tickets now available

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

Scot Gov Camp
We’ve updated the ScotGovCamp website with a few more details of the 2011 event, and I’m pleased to say that booking is now open. The event takes place on Saturday 24th September in Aberdeen.

GovCamps are self organised unconferences for people that work in and around government. They’re free; have no set, pre-defined agenda; focus on attendee participation; integrate with online stuff and are relentlessly positive, constructive and creative. GovCamps enable folk interested in developing innovation and technology in government to come together in an informal setting to share their ideas. And eat pizza.

There will be two different strands to this year’s event:

  • Discussion sessions – the more traditional ‘unconference’ style sessions and presentations
  • Hackday – hacking sessions for those who want less of the chat and more making stuff!

We’d love to repeat the success of last year, so sign up and I’ll see you there!

Walsall Council in round the clock Tweet experiment

Friday, March 4th, 2011

Walsall Council have just wrapped up a round the clock Twitter marathon, during which time they tweeted about their services and the various things happening in the area.

@walsallcouncil posted over 1400 updates throughout a 24 hour period using the hashtag #walsall24, and tweets ranged from updates from the early morning CCTV team, the work of street cleaners, information about road closures and much more.

The Guardian reported on the event – with some interesting reflections at the half way point based on comments they had recieved through their site. Reactions were mixed, with some people questioning the value of the experiment and the use of Twitter.

However, no one could fault the attention that the experiment got (the BBC also picked up the story), and there is no doubt that awareness of what the council does would have been boosted as a result – as David Higgerson writes about when referring to the “no one understands what we do” dilemma.

The debate about the value of such an approach, or the media used, will no doubt rage on, but this is a fascinating case study of how social media can be used to open up an organisation and help it to better engage with its customers – to reinforce lines of communication and be seen as a transparent, proactive agency.

For a nice final visual, Dan Slee has set up an interesting Wordle which highlights some of the more common words that were used during the session.

5 radical approaches to Intranets

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

We’re currently redeveloping our staff Intranet, and as part of this exercise I’ve been trying to radicalise my own thinking about what we want our Intranet to do – to challenge some of the assumptions and hopefully hit upon some better ways of doing things.

See my 5 radical approaches to Intranets

Election Count 2.0 in Edinburgh

Friday, May 7th, 2010
Election map showing Twitter updates

Twitter Election Map

Over the past year or two there has been a palpable surge of interest in using Web 2.0 in the public sector, and in most cases that’s a very positive thing. The added value that such platforms can bring to the services we deliver is obvious, opening new channels of outreach and improving engagement and involvement.

During last night’s election count, the City of Edinburgh Council were putting Web 2.0 to marvellous use by keeping citizens bang up to date with progress of the count taking place over at Meadowbank Stadium.

The following is a summary of what the council did on the night.

More about Election Count 2.0 in Edinburgh

Better Connected 2010 – comparing the 4 star homepages

Monday, April 26th, 2010

As we’re currently considering designs for our organisation’s new website homepage, I thought it would be interesting to bring together all of the 11 local authority websites which were awarded the full 4 stars by SOCITM’s Better Connected 2010 report.

View homepage screenshots from the top 11 councils

Joining the conversation – handling complaints via Social Media

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

A colleague recently raised the issue of how we handle complaints that come in via social media, and this got me thinking about the impact of these channels on how we deliver customer service in general. It’s a massive topic, with an awful lot of angles to consider, so here are just a few thoughts.

To start, though, I thought I’d have a quick look at what people were tweeting about in relation to my organisation (LinkedIn has a handy feature called Company Buzz which makes this easier). As expected, the results were not great.

Some recent feedback on Twitter

Some recent feedback on Twitter

You can immediately see why this subject is an important one, especially if the individuals posting such comments have a lot of followers (as the recent Dooce vs Maytag story proved). But do these individuals expect the Council to respond? And if so, what should we be doing?

My thoughts on handling complaints via social media

Auto-play: a usability and accessibility failure

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

My organisation recently published a number of videos on the public website (EDIT – have removed the link as the videos have been taken off now). Those videos started automatically as soon as the page loaded. The problems with this are:

  1. Automatically playing audio on a webpage is usually an action which the user will not expect. It is therefore, at the very least, an irritation, especially if the user is in an environment where this is not appropriate.
  2. At worst, though, the audio may conflict with other audio that the user is already listening to. That might be music, or perhaps another video. But far worse, it could be a blind user’s screen reader software, and the resulting conflict would make it very hard to browse that page to pause the video or mute the sound.

More about why autoplay is bad for usability and accessibility

Cybersquatting 2.0 – protecting your name in Social Media

Monday, June 8th, 2009

The rise and rise of Social Networking Sites has brought about new risks to an organisation’s online brand, but whilst my last post explored Web 2.0 mistakes which organisation could make themselves, another type of risk is what others may do with your brand if you don’t get there first, through Social Media Cybersquatting. The risks of cybersquatters in a Web 2.0 world