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

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.

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!

@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.

The following are some of the thoughts I’ve had. I welcome comments, for or against any of these. I also asked the Twittersphere for thoughts and have thrown in some of the resulting ideas from that too.

And of course, for some organisations these ideas won’t be so radical. If you’re already employing some of the ideas mentioned here, I’d love to hear from you.

As always, these are my own personal reflections. They are not endorsed by, nor will they necessarily be adopted by, my employer.

1. Make it public

My organisation is UK local government. We are subject to the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, and have a duty to publish (or at least provide on request) certain information that we hold.

Why not, therefore, make our Intranet public? It would greatly reduce the necessity for FOI requests, because most of our policies, procedures and data would be freely available. It would also mean the council would be seen as being open, honest and responsible.

Equally, it would prevent staff thinking that the Intranet is ‘a safe place’ to store inappropriate or irrelevant information, and would most likely result in an increase in quality and currency.

The natural extension to that is to do away with an “intranet” altogether and incorporate such info into your public website or some form of extranet (thanks to @lelil for that suggestion, and for the link to @CarlHaggerty‘s post on the death of the local authority intranet).

2. Forget about structure

When it comes to Intranets and information architecture, there are no right answers. Our staff are hugely diverse in their roles, technical abilities and interests – we can’t possibly cater for them all equally. Any attempt to impose a rigid structure is fruitless – people will still get lost.

Also, people are more likely to use site search nowadays, and if you get that right, why even bother with wasting days or weeks trying to construct the perfect site structure? Intelligent search, with comprehensive tagging of content (crowd-sourced so that users can suggest additional tags to aid future searches), should make locating content a breeze – no need for endless drilling down into subcategories or mind-bending lateral thinking to try to guess where someone might have put something. Tags are ideal because they permit an infinitely customisable taxonomy.

3. Embrace Web 2.0

Like many organisations, mine is still quite nervous about Web 2.0. But the benefits are clear and we can no longer afford to ignore this important tool for discussion, collaboration and sharing. As @JaneOD points out – Intranets are often only “one-way” communication. Far better to allow staff to upload their own content (including videos etc) and share their experiences.

So why not embrace Web 2.0 and reap the rewards of a hyper-connected workforce? It needn’t cost the earth – many of the most popular technologies are free. And if you integrate these systems into your Intranet, you’ll get a far higher take-up which will boost the usefulness of the tools even further. I’d love to see our organisation use something like Present.ly or Yammer (corporate versions of Twitter) so that staff can quickly report what they’re doing and see what others are up to – there’s often a great deal of duplication of effort in large organisations and this could help put the right people in touch with each other.

Introduce blogs and forums to get people talking more, and make it easy for people to view and contribute. Utilise ‘people directories’ to help people identify the right people for the job, as well as to nurture greater social interaction. Encourage people to post their interests and areas of expertise, to further facilitate collaboration.

4. Crowdsource

Permit staff to comment on posts or pages to capitalise on their knowledge and experience. Additionally, if a page is wrong or out of date, users can use this function to quickly report this and get it fixed.

Going even further, why not make the entire Intranet a Wiki? You could always lock down areas that really shouldn’t be changed (legal info, for instance) but for everything else, let your staff build the Intranet that they want. This was actually a thought that senior managers in my own department had themselves, and I know that it’s been suggested many times before (thanks to @whitingx for the link to an article exploring the use of wikis for an intranet).

5. Get tough

A proposal by James Robertson of Step Two Designs suggests that Intranets are all too often an after-thought – somewhere where you simply archive documents that you’ve already sent out via email anyway. This devalues the Intranet, perpetuates the bad practice of sending out documents en masse, and leads people to think that important info will be emailed so they need not bother ever checking the Intranet.

The solution, he suggests, is to refuse to publish information to an Intranet if it has already gone out via another method. For me, this could look like sour grapes on the part of the webteam, and is likely to be taken in the wrong light for that reason, but it does hint at a real problem around how Intranets are often a second thought.

I do like the idea of getting tough with those who still haven’t bought into the Intranet as a key business tool. Organisations invest large amounts of time and money in developing Intranets, and failure to use them properly results in huge inefficiencies. We can no longer allow those who don’t get it to prevent it from being a success.

Being tough should extend to the content itself, too. Dump anything out of date, and impose strict policies to ensure nothing goes stale. Cut out the middle man – if something’s not right, go to the senior managers who have overall responsibility for the content.

And don’t let internal politics or egos take hold of the reins either.

If you have other ideas for how to radicalise Intranets, do leave a message below.

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.

Disclaimer: I had no direct involvement in this – on the night I followed these channels as a local resident and any comments are my own personal views.

Twitter map

Perhaps the most visually impressive part of the coverage was the Twitter map, a Google Maps mash-up which displayed the latest geo-tagged tweet for each of the 5 constituencies. A relatively simple effect, but one which gave a very relevant, localised slant to the proceedings.

Edinburgh's Election Twitter Map

Twitter updates

Powering this was, of course, the Council’s own Twitter account (@Edinburgh_CC) which was used throughout the evening to tweet both localised, geo-tagged updates, as well as more general information and links to the blog referred to below.

For me, the people behind this did two things particularly well when using Twitter. Firstly, they managed expectations by posting the following statement on the website:

We’re sorry that we can’t enter into any real-time discussions about what we’re doing, but we will be keeping an eye on the feedback on Twitter to see what people think and what we can learn from the experience.

City of Edinburgh Council Elections page

This was a really important, preemptive move which meant that hopefully not too many people were trying to start a conversation with the team and ending up being disappointed.

However, early on in the evening they did respond to one tweet, relating to the use of geo-tags, so I thought I’d send them a quick question too:

@Edinburgh_CC Is it just the two counts?

@prettysimple

To which, sure enough, they replied:

@prettysimple two counts; five constituencies – blog post on the count process coming soon

@Edinburgh_CC

This is a great demonstration of the power of Web 2.0 – the immediacy of response married with high availability and reach make Twitter and its ilk potentially ideal platforms for speaking to your customers and citizens, and can deliver a positive experience not only to the individual concerned, but also to anyone else who happens to be watching (I intentionally asked a question that I thought others may be wondering too).

Blog

The Council’s emergency and news blog was used to great effect to post updates throughout the evening, not just on the results, but also on the process itself, including:

• A nice collection of stats, including the number of registered voters, polling places and postal votes. These were posted at a time when the updates had ran a little dry, thus keeping the interest of those following the progress
• A step by step guide to the count process, giving details of how each stage works, from the first and second count and the adjudication of doubtful papers, through to the final declaration
• A useful who’s who, listing the roles of the key players on the night
• A statement on the timing of the results from the Returning Officer

Flickr

An official snap from the count (copyright City of Edinburgh Council)

Finally, a handful of images were also uploaded to the Council’s Flickr photostream, providing citizens with a glimpse of the controlled chaos.

This added a wonderfully human touch to the process, and I’d have liked to have seen more photos (in the end there were only about 20). But it again shows great potential. One of the more appealing elements of count night is the very British scene of people pitching in and working together, often against the odds, and this kind of coverage does a great job of capturing that.

All in all, a triumph for Web 2.0 advocates and hopefully a continuation of what we’re seeing across the UK – a long-lasting, relevant and fruitful use of social media tools to engage and involve citizens and position them at the heart of everything we’re doing.

In doing so, I was surprised by the variety of approaches taken by these best-practice sites. I had hoped for some clear trends and design methodologies, but instead found some striking differences. Of course, the presentation of the homepage is only a small part of the story on any website, and given that many users will come in via search engines (and thus possibly never even see your homepage), any analysis should be proportional.

Nevertheless, visual comparison of the 11 4-star websites does offer up some useful inspiration and the similarities have plenty to tell us.

Note: screenshots taken in March 2010

On this page:

• The 4 star websites
  • Allerdale Borough Council
  • Brent Council
  • Buckinghamshire County Council
  • Cambridgeshire County Council
  • East Sussex County Council
  • Exeter City Council
  • Newcastle upon Tyne City Council
  • Oxfordshire County Council
  • Salford City Council
  • South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council
  • Worthing Borough Council
• Similarities
• Surprises

The 4 star websites

Allerdale Borough Council

www.allerdale.gov.uk

Brent Council

www.brent.gov.uk

Also see the comments below for a link to Brent’s upcoming, minimal version.

Buckinghamshite County Council

www.buckscc.gov.uk

Cambridgeshire County Council

www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk

East Sussex County Council

www.eastsussex.gov.uk

Exeter City Council

www.exeter.gov.uk

Newcastle upon Tyne City Council

www.newcastle.gov.uk

Oxfordshire County Council

www.oxfordshire.gov.uk

Salford City Council

www.salford.gov.uk

South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council

www.southtyneside.info

Worthing Borough Council

www.worthing.gov.uk

Similarities

• 7 of the sites had clear links to RSS feeds
• All had links to latest news
• 9 of the sites put the main categories on the right-hand side
• Most had localisation features – often via a postcode search or similar

Surprises

• The length of the homepages was a surprise, with some stretching to three screens long (with a 800px high viewport).
• Many of the pages appeared quite text-heavy.

Is there anything else you think is notable about these screenshots? Do you have a favourite? Let me know via the Comments section below…

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

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?

Great expectations

More and more organisations are accepting the fact that the web in general, and social media especially, continues to present challenges to how they interact with their customers. Nowadays you can email a company and have a reasonable expectation of a timely response within hours or days, rather than the weeks or months that postal correspondence might take. For any companies who don’t take email seriously, they risk appearing unprofessional, rude and behind the times. On several occasions I’ve emailed small companies, via their website, to enquire about a service or product. Usually I find that if I haven’t heard back within a week or two, I’m not going to hear back at all. And 99% of the time, that’s the last they’ll hear of me and my money too.

Social media have not only made it easier to interact with companies, they have also made it far less formal – even more so than email. This should be seen as a tremendous opportunity for engaging in discussions with your customers, and given that their expectations are already being raised by the companies who are ahead of the game, it’s fast becoming an essential part of your customer service strategy.

Global soap-boxes

One thing that social media have enabled the general public to do, more than any other technology before, is to reach a potentially vast number of other people. The tools of mass communication are now open to us all, usually for free, and this is without doubt a revolution. But, for an organisation, this brings about the significant risk of reputation damage. Social media provide every online citizen with access to a potentially global soap box, from which they can broadcast their thoughts and opinions to the world. And if their message strikes a chord with others, this can soon escalate into a cacophony of discontent.

Heads in the sand?

Without doubt the worst thing an organisation can do, when a barrage of complaints and concerns are being vociferously cast about the Web 2.0 world, is to ignore them.

Long gone are the days when companies could sit back and relax in the knowledge that no one person could make enough noise to cause any real concern – where only the hackneyed threat of “going to the press” might cause the PR team to break into a sweat. The individual no longer needs the press to get his or her message out there, and the general public has proven itself to have a healthy appetite for what the individual has to say.

How to engage?

Having discounted option 1, which is to do nothing, we must therefore work out how to tackle option 2 – doing something.

A key element here is the issue of monitoring - making sure we hear about the conversations that are taking place. There are some easy ways of going about this – setting up Google Alerts is a good start. You can also do basic searches (either across the entire web or site-specific, e.g. searching Twitter for your company name). Taking it further, you might even want to engage the help of a monitoring service such as Radian6. This subject probably warrants a blog post of its own, so I’ll leave that for another day.

Once you’ve located a conversation, though, you then need to find an appropriate way to engage with it.

A good example is Alastair Smith’s (of Newcastle CC) case study of Facebook engagement – how he got involved in an anti-council Facebook group and managed to turn around some of the negative sentiment. Although this is a great story, it does show the critical requirement for people who know what they’re doing, and who are familiar with the platforms they intend to use. Not all organisations will be lucky enough to have staff with such skills, especially as many of these platforms are, relatively speaking, very new.

Complaints handling

For any major organisation, consideration needs to be given to the more formal aspects of complaint handling. Most of us will have procedures in place for how we handle phone calls, emails and letters. But these are far simpler channels, in most cases one-to-one. What if someone sends a message to our Twitter account? Or comments on a blog post? Who deals with that, and how?

For a public organisation such as mine, this question is crucial. What if someone sent our corporate Twitter account a Direct Message expressing concern for the well-being of a child? Could we respond to that quickly and appropriately? What if we didn’t?

This is possibly a question that has already been partially answered. A citizen can reasonably expect to be able to email a council via their website and get a response, so presumably a structure will already be in place to handle such correspondence. This might be simply farming all enquiries out to a centralised customer service centre for response, for example, and a similar approach seems logical with social media correspondence.

However, because of the open nature of social media, it may also be prudent for customer service staff to work evermore closely with communications professionals, to ensure consistent and appropriate dialogues.

Customer service – more than just complaints

Of course, customer service is about more than just handling complaints. I recently thought it would be really useful, for example, to be able to contact my library service via their Twitter account in order to make suggestions for new titles that I’d like them to consider buying. I sent them a message to that effect:

@TalesOfOneCity Do you accept library stock recommendations via Twitter? If so, please consider getting Design Meets Disability by G Pullin.

And heard back the very next day:

@prettysimple thanks – I’ll pass your request on to our stock selection team!

Great customer service! In many ways, such requests could be handled in exactly the same way as a complaint – by passing it on to the relevant individual. But making this type of added service known to the general public could mean an unmanageable barrage of requests clogging up the system. Also, my experience of working in libraries tells me that pretty soon, people could start using the service to request renewals, reservations and all sorts of general information, which again would be unmanageable and would divert people away from the ‘self-serve’ routes which libraries now rely on.

For this reason, it’s important to establish boundaries of reasonable service, beyond which we should probably not venture at this stage. Setting users expectations higher than we can deliver is a significant risk, and indeed one that should be part of the discussions when we think about engaging in social media in the first place.

Further reading

• Embracing the impact of Social Media on Customer Care
• Engaging your community (PDF)

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.

Auto-play = poor usability

When I asked about whether the auto-play was necessary, I was told that it was to ensure that people watched the videos, which contained important content. I would guess that people are far more likely to recoil at the auto-play and close the page than they are to happily watch the video, which then has an impact on them accessing the other text content on the page. Also, users may consider this a breach of website etiquette, making them likely to distrust the entire website as an ‘unknown quantity’.

In general, people don’t like anything unexpected being forced upon them. You could argue that in some instances you can give the user due warning (for example, via link text which states that the video will start automatically) and in certain contexts it is probably more acceptable (offering a link to a YouTube page, for example, means that anyone who follows that link has clearly decided to view that video). But neither of these apply in this instance – the main link text stated that it was to ‘information’ on the subject.

Auto-play = poor accessibility

As mentioned above, auto-play can conflict with screen reader software. For this reason it is specifically addressed in the internationally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), which has the following to say:

If any audio on a Web page plays automatically for more than 3 seconds, either a mechanism is available to pause or stop the audio, or a mechanism is available to control audio volume independently from the overall system volume level. (Level A)

WCAG 2.0. Success Criteria 1.4.2 – Audio Control

The ability to turn off the audio is therefore considered to be a sufficient compromise when using auto-play, although the recommendation is that the control be made available at the top:

The intent of this technique is to allow a user to turn off sounds that start automatically when a page loads. The control to turn off the sounds should be located near the beginning of the page to allow the control to be easily and quickly discovered by users.

Technique G170: Providing a control near the beginning of the Web page that turns off sounds that play automatically

However, WCAG 2.0 does still give the following warning:

Playing audio automatically when landing on a page may affect a screen reader user’s ability to find the mechanism to stop it because they navigate by listening and automatically started sounds might interfere with that navigation. Therefore, we discourage the practice of automatically starting sounds (especially if they last more than 3 seconds), and encourage that the sound be started by an action initiated by the user after they reach the page, rather than requiring that the sound be stopped by an action of the user after they land on the page.

Understanding Success Criteria 1.4.2

It’s interesting to note that in the example I’m referring to, where my organisation has embedded a WMV in the page using Windows Media Player, I found myself unable to tab into the player using FireFox. Even when you can tab into the player, you have 36 links to tab past before you get to it. This means that we fail this criteria as a result, as non-mouse users will not be able to stop the video easily, if at all.

Given that the content of the video was considered so important that we apparently needed to force it onto people using auto-play, we’re seriously letting down those users who won’t be able to access that content properly.

Client preference vs user preference

This is a great example of the preferences of the content provider conflicting with the needs and preferences of the content consumer. These sorts of conflicts come up many times when developing sites (perhaps the most common is the request to open external links in new windows). Almost always, the arguments benefit the client, rather than the user. And whilst you may force a few more people to view your video, or stay on your site, or view something the way you want them to – ultimately you are harming your relationship with that user and, more often than not, they’ll be gone before those end credits roll…

Cybersquatting 1.0

Cybersquatting traditionally refers to the practice of:

registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else

Wikipedia article on Cybersquatting

This practice has been around for over a decade and many countries now have specific legislation against it. But with the increase of Social Media platforms, which allow you to choose a username which then dictates the URL of your account’s public profile (for example, www.twitter.com/prettysimple) the potential for a new kind of Cybersquatting is born.

Cybersquatting 2.0

In Ken Fischer’s sobering post on Gov 2.0 Spoofing, he suggests that there is a significant risk of individuals posing as officials:

…all it takes is one person believing one source is the voice of a government and acting on it to cause at the least embarassement (sic) and at the worse some harm.

Ken Fischer – Gov 2.0 Spoofing is here

Fischer recommends a simple technique to allow users to authenticate an account by following a reciprocal link to an official government and back again. But this could be considered onerous and it is likely that many users will not bother. As with most security issues, the onus has to be on the content owner.

The risks of Cybersquatting in a Web 2.0 world

Brand dilution

My own organisation has had cause for concern recently when an unofficial Twitter account surfaced. Luckily this appears to have been set up by a well-meaning employee, rather than a prankster or potential cybersquatter, and is now directing people to the official account. But this still presents the problem of watering down our message and causing confusion amongst citizens who wish to follow us. We now have an official one, in addition to the unofficial one.

Trust

Most Social Media relies heavily on building up trust with those who follow you. Any compromise of that trust through a proliferation of illegitimate accounts will stunt the success of genuine engagement and potentially damage the brand. If it becomes hard to prove authenticity without laborious methods, users may easily be scared off.

Hard to integrate

With traditional cybersquatting, once you’d taken control of a domain which was found to be illegally cybersquatting it was easy to integrate that domain into your estate (e.g. by setting up a re-direct). But with many of the Social Media platforms, this isn’t the case. Twitter, for example, does not allow you to merge accounts. So the unofficial account that I mentioned earlier will either continue to exist (and continue to dilute the brand) or cease to exist and lose the 50+ followers that it has already built up. Either way, the unofficial account got the better username (EdinburghCC, as opposed to Edinburgh_CC for the official one) and there’s no obvious way of rescuing that.

Criminal intent

Worse-case scenarios see situations where citizens think they are engaging with officials, and therefore surrender personal information which could be seriously misused.

Naming conventions

Looking at this list of Council Twitter accounts, I’m surprised by the lack of naming conventions. Most seem to have adopted the approach of councilname followed by CC or DC etc. But there’s no overriding consensus, and many have used far different names (for example, Sunderland (@Sunderland_UK), Southampton (@citycouncil09) and Croydon (@yourcroydon). There is therefore huge potential there for cybersquatters to set up shop, and we have very few options for closing the loopholes (unlike with standard web domains, where in the public sector registration of gov.uk Second Level Domains is restricted, or in the private sector where you would develop a brand protection strategy to mitigate against domain fraud by purchasing vulnerable domains).

Conclusion

Most heavy users of Social Media sites have probably come across instances of name-squatting – or at least cases of mistaken identity. There have been many high-profile stories involving people posing as celebrities, and even the great Tim Berners-Lee will find a shock in store if he ever wants to start Tweeting – someone has taken @timbernerslee and claims to be holding it for him (at what price, we wonder?).

It’s clear that organisations need to be aware of this issue, whether or not they are using the platforms themselves. It is their responsibility to protect their brand, as well as to protect their customers from fraudulent accounts. For public sector organisations this is perhaps even more crucial, and there is a clear need for stronger guidance and policy. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take a serious incident to get more people thinking about the issue.

Edit: Twitter have now introduced Account Verification.

Further reading

• Social Media Squatting – top sites to think about
• List of UK Council Twitter accounts
• How to handle Name-Squatting on Twitter et al
• …and the brilliantly titled Sydney Morning Herald article: All that Twitters is not gold: enter the squatters