Posts Tagged ‘engagement’

Topics for a Social Media Unconference

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Tomorrow morning, I’m heading up to Stirling for a Local Gov Social Media Unconference, kindly arranged by the Improvement Service, under the banner of the Customer First programme (enabling councils to deliver better, faster and more efficient services to a wider section of the population).

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.

Read more about the topics I plan to discuss

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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

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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.

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Final accolade for Youth Parliament elections campaign

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Our highly successful social media campaign to promote the Scottish Youth Parliament elections in 2009 has won a final accolade – this time, at our internal achievement awards ceremony, where we were highly commended for our contribution to “opportunities for all”.

Having already scooped national awards, including in the “Hard to Reach Communcations” category at the CIPR Local Public Services Awards and the “Government to Citizen” category at the Good Communications Awards, I’m proud to see the campaign get local recognition.

Award ceremony

Me and my colleagues receiving the award

Find out more about the campaign, which saw us use Facebook, Bebo and YouTube to increase nominations and voter turn-out in the 2009 Youth Parliament elections.

Onwards and upwards

The next elections will take place in March 2011, and we’re already cranking up our campaign to again include Facebook and a dedicated YouTube channel.

If you’re using social media to target “hard to reach” audiences, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch or leave a comment below…

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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

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Creating a dynamite campaign

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Today I found myself in the opulent surroundings of Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel for a breakfast seminar, run by Precedent, on creating dynamite campaigns. The following are some of my notes.

The seminar was lead by John Campbell and Mark Baillie, and John began by considering the good, the bad and the ugly. Examples of good campaigns included:

  • Coca-Cola’s 80s/90s “Can’t Beat the Feeling” adverts – a tune that many of us still recognise today and an excellent example of strong branding.
  • The University of Birmingham’s Circle of Influence campaign to raise £60 million. Astonishingly, they’ve already reached the £50m mark, combining online strategies with a more traditional print campaign.
  • Drinkaware’s drink diary, which allows you to monitor your drinking and compare with friends, adding a social element to the mix. You can even download a phone app. I couldn’t help thinking this could backfire though – imagine people using the diary to compare how much they could drink in a week and actually trying to beat each other!
  • Volkswagen’s Fun Theory website, featuring various viral videos aimed at making people change their behaviour for the better:

John notes that common factors to all of these successes were creativity and innovation.

More on creating dynamite content

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HUWY.eu – a youth participation project

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
HUWY supports young people to influence policies related to the internet

HUWY

Earlier today I went along to the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh to attend the launch of a new project aimed at getting young people talking about policies and laws which affect the Internet, to channel their ideas to the policy makers.

According to the delegate pack, the HUWY (Hub Websites for Youth Participation) project believes that young people are valuable expert stakeholders in current Internet governance issues like:

  • cyberbullying
  • child abuse and child safety
  • freedom of speech and censorship
  • privacy and phishing, security, identity, hacking, e-commerce
  • file-sharing and copyright

More about the HUWY launch event

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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

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