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

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

A starter for ten

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

Social Media and exclusion

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

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

Keeping safe

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

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

Measuring success

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

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

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

Staff 2.0

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

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

Get involved

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

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.

@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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

The bad and ugly examples including Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, which asked people to give 10 of their Facebook friends the boot in exchange for a free burger. As a result, a quarter of a million friends found themselves dumped in favour of a meat sandwich. John observes that this kind of campaign, based on negativity, is a very risky strategy and the uproar that ensued was proof of this. The campaign was quickly pulled.

Perhaps an even uglier example is the infamous Toyota Yaris advert, Clean Getaway, which managed to offend scores of people with its sexist (and, some argued, potentially incestuous) content.

(Note: for more examples, see my list of Social Media lessons learned the hard way)

6 steps to success

We are then talked through 6 steps to a successful campaign:

1. Understand your audience

An essential first step: make sure you know your audience and understand how they consume media. Where are they? What do they consider effective, or cool? Mark shows us an example of some face-to-face street research they had done, enabling them to build up personas to better understand their target audience. He stresses that you can only get certain knowledge from that sort of engagement.

2. Confirm your objectives

What are you trying to achieve? Is it realistic? Again, research is critical, and we are shown a number of useful tools which can help in measuring social media:

• Google Trends – shows what people are searching for – especially good for filtering info by region to get a more local flavour
• Google Alerts – email updates about Google results for keywords
• Social Mention – a social media search and analysis platform for aggregating user generated content
• Alltop – top headlines from popular topics worldwide

These sorts of tools can be especially useful for researching the competition and setting realistic targets accordingly.

3. Plan the customer journey and content

Taking what you’ve learnt from your earlier research, you should then decide the main message you want to get across, and which tools are going to be most suitable. This is the step that may sound the easiest, yet is perhaps one of the most complex, and requires a broad and deep knowledge of social media platforms in relation to marketing. We have all seen obvious examples of companies stumbling into social media without any real strategy or purpose, and they are usually found out very quickly.

As an example, John looks at why we might want to use Facebook:

• Go to the audience – we know that many people are already using Facebook, so to some extent we have a captive audience.
• Viral by nature – viral campaigns are undeniably the most successful, and see users to spread the word amongst themselves. Something recommended by a friend will surely carry more weight than a traditional piece of ‘push-marketing’.
• Understood by audiences – people are familiar with Facebook and its functionality, so you’re not asking them to learn new concepts.
• Achievable - low cost and easy to set up.
• Socially connected – if we reach one person, we may then also reach their friends too. Not to mention lateral links to other platforms.

4. Touchpoint strategy

Usually the ultimate goal of a campaign is to get people to your site. There are various ways of driving people through, from feeds and widgets to online ads and mobile integration. It’s important to have a strategy, though, of how to manage and optimise these initial points of contact, or touchpoints.

Mobile devices are arguably the perfect engagement tool:

• They are portable and convenient
• They are becoming increasingly hi-tech
• Users have a very high affinity with their devices – they love to use them
• They are always present and always on
• They are ready made for the job

Mark talks us through a number of intriguing uses of mobile devices, from the Golf GTI speedometer app, the ability to take a photo of a person and have it converted to Lego, and BMW’s Expression of Joy – augmented reality technology which sees Mark driving a virtual car around his desk. These are all excellent and entertaining apps in their own right, but ultimately exist to drive people to the end goal (be it ordering some Lego or booking a test drive).

5. Continual engagement

Launch day is, of course, not the end of the story. In fact, it’s only the beginning. Continual engagement is crucial – keeping the content fresh and keeping your audience informed. And again, making something viral is a fast-track to success. John mentions another tool, Kontagent, which analyses social networks and offers a range of viral tools.

And critically, all of this needs to come full circle and deliver a compelling website, where your users will end up. Without that, all of your efforts will be for nought. A decent main website has to be part of the strategy.

6. Measure, update, measure – and so on

Finally, you’ll need to measure your ongoing success. Update and adapt. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to drop it and try something else. Don’t let any part of your strategy fall slack – work it all and make sure it is working for your audience.

Again, tools to help you measure your success include the excellent Google Analytics, which now offers integration with Facebook; Click Tale, which tracks user journeys and lets you watch movies of people browsing your site; and Twitalyzer.

10 commandments

John concluded with a mention of Augustine Fou’s 10 commandments of modern marketing:

1. Thou shalt not target customers with messages they don’t want
2. Thou shalt be truthful
3. Thou shalt respect your customers
4. Thou shalt make it easy for people to find you
5. Thou shalt be useful
6. Thou shalt make it easy for people to pass along
7. Thou shalt measure and optimize
8. Thou shalt listen to customers
9. Thou shalt remove any organizational barriers to speedy, collaborative innovation
10. Thou shalt not do brand-ing

Fou’s 10 commandments of modern marketing

Thanks again to all at Precedent for a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring morning. They run a whole programme of such seminars in various locations across the UK.

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

The project has partners from the UK, Germany, Estonia and the Republic of Ireland, as is sponsored by the European Commission. At this morning’s launch event we heard from some of the partners about the work they are already involved in, including online networks of over 100,000 young media makers in Germany (Jugendpresse Deutschland), platforms to allow young people to have frank discussions about everyday issues (Youth Net), and sites supporting citizenship and digital engagement (Young Scot).

We also saw videos and messages from key officials who were unable to attend the event. Hille Hinsberg (from the Estonian State Chancellory) spoke about the need for bigger take up of engagement opportunities in policy making, saying that all too often it takes a scandal before we are moved to discuss such issues. She praised the value that HUWY will bring to our efforts to listen to young people, finding out what they want to discuss, what their concerns are and, critically, what their solutions are.

In another video, German MEP Matthias Groote spoke about the importance of involving young people, and that the Internet is an essential tool in allowing them to participate actively and creatively. He described the huge potential which we “absolutely have to use”.

Sadly I couldn’t stay for the afternoon, which featured workshops on how young people use the Internet and how we translate engagement into change. Nevertheless, I’m excited about what the project will teach us about engaging with young people and using online platforms to review policies and effect political change.

More information

• An introduction to the HUWY project
• HUWY blog post about the launch event
• To get involved in the UK project, contact Feargal O’Kane at Queen’s University Management School, Belfast.
• For more info about the international project, contact Ella Taylor-Smith at the International Teledemocracy Centre, Edinburgh Napier University

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)