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.

OK, now I have your attention I’ll confess that this isn’t exactly true… But I would direct people to a post of mine back in August 2009, where an associate and I proposed an idea for filtering tweets based on audience. I’m delighted that this has now come to life through Google+ Circles, but wonder if the problems I foresaw back in 2009 will still prove to be a stumbing block for Google.

I’m still getting familiar with Google+, setting up and expanding my Circles. I hope to blog more about it soon.

Image by amanky

Earlier today I met with some associates to discuss a possible idea for the upcoming Social Innovation Camp in Edinburgh. The idea had come from a colleague’s personal experience of caring for an elderly relative, and the complications in arranging basic tasks and chores ad hoc – things as simple as getting something from the corner shop or replacing a light bulb. For carers, it can be time consuming and frustrating for the individual and their carer to try to find cover or a helping hand at short notice, and so those simple tasks often end up not getting done, or being done riskily or badly.

My colleague’s idea was for a tool that carers, and the people they care for, can use to easily check if someone in their existing personal and local network of relatives, friends and neighbours can offer a bit of their time. The aim would be to reduce some of the social isolation and stress of caring and being cared for whether the people involved live together or not.

The basic concept

The carer or person being cared for creates an account online and invites their family, friends and neighbours to sign up with their contact details, creating a private, trusted network around that person. The carer, or person being cared for, can then post requests for help. They can do this on the website or via email, text message or Twitter via text message or email, a web post or tweet and the message can be distributed via these channels. When someone offers their time, a confirmation message goes to everyone. To make it easier to respond, anyone in the circle of support could contribute to a credit system so the carer, or person being cared for, can pay travel expenses and other costs.

Example 1

John’s elderly father, Ernie, is house-bound with limited mobility but still lives in his own home. John provides a lot of care and support to Ernie, but balances this with a demanding job. One morning, Ernie calls John at work to say he needs help – a local care home is holding a jumble sale that afternoon and Ernie has sorted a pile of books that he wants to donate. It means a lot to Ernie to be able to help the care home, but John has important meetings all day and can’t help him deliver the books.

John sends out a text message to his network and gets a reply shortly afterwards from one of Ernie’s neighbours, Mary, who was planning to go down to the jumble sale anyway. She agrees to pop in to see Ernie and take the books.

Example 2

Paula has a long-term illness and has good and bad days. Her sister Kay, who usually looks out for her, is abroad for the week visiting friends. One morning Kay gets a text message from Paula with some news that has really upset her. Kay desperately wants to pop home to give her sister a hug, but can’t afford to book an earlier flight home.

She posts a private message on the web, explaining that her sister could do with some company. As a result, a number of friends agree to pop in and see her. One even offers to take some flowers round to cheer Paula up, and Kay uses online credit to go halves with them on the purchase.

Update – to accompany our submission, I knocked up the following graphic using stripgenerator.com:

"Lend a Hand" in action

Like the idea?

We’d love to hear what people think of this idea – and more importantly, if anyone has a similar project or initiative, or would like to get involved. Leave a comment below to get in touch. We need to submit this idea to SICamp by Friday 20th May so time is short.

Got your own idea?

There’s already been a number of meet-ups for interested people to get together and discuss ideas, with the next Edinburgh event at the Melting Pot on Monday 16th May. Sign up now if you’re planning on popping along.

Also find out more about submitting your own idea.

Image by amanky, used under the Creative Commons license.

Motor impairments

The day had a motor impairment theme, which is typically a rather under-represented area of web accessibility. There was a bit of discussion around why this was, with the suggestion that it was due to a lack of pressure coming from those representing the needs of that audience. The excellent work of the likes of RNIB has led to a far greater understanding of the needs of visually impaired users, for example, and there is clearly a need for this to be replicated across the board.

Following a nice introduction to web accessibility from organisers Makayla Lewis (@maccymacx) and Graham Armfield (@coolfields), Makayla presented some of her findings from her research on how people with motor impairments (specifically those with Cerebral Palsy) use the web.

Perhaps the clearest message from Makayla’s presentation was how important the web, and social networking in particular, is to many users with CP – providing opportunities to interact with others far more easily. Such opportunities would have been strictly limited before the web, but accessibility issues continue to put up barriers. One telling example Makayla gives is of the user with severe impairments, who relies upon a carer to help them use FaceBook. The resulting lack of privacy is clearly far from ideal, and no doubt limits what they are comfortable doing online.

Makayla then establishes a live phone link with a person with Cerebral Palsy, who talks about the challenges she faces everyday. Problems like buttons being too small to easily click are common, and the user expressed frustration at the lack of help that websites offer. Another clear problem which many people may not think about was the issues generated when a website updates its design. The user stated that sites should really warn users before changing a site – explaining the how and why, and offering support. Finally, she suggested that the option to go back to the old version was always useful. Users with impairments will often adopt ‘coping strategies’ that will have to change when a site changes, so consideration of these users when launching a redesign is essential.

HTML5

I sacrificed a bite to eat to attend a lunchtime presentation by Martin Kliehm (@kliehm) on HTML5, which he called “Of Unicorns and Crocodiles”. It was an interesting showcase of both the problems and opportunities that will come with HTML5 – most notably, Martin suggested that accessibility was still very much a ‘bolt-on’ and that needed to change.

Crowd-sourcing web accessibility

The ‘unconference’ style of the day meant there were plenty of tough decisions about which sessions to attend, but I opted to go along to hear Dr Gail Bradbrook (@FixTheWebGail) talk about Fix The Web. The idea behind the site is to allow disabled users to easily report issues with websites. These are then picked up by a team of volunteers who will get in touch with the site owner, to report the issue and hopefully get it resolved.

I’ve signed up as a volunteer and will blog more about this exciting initiative soon.

Practical accessibility

Next, I went along to hear Karen Mardahl (@kmdk) give a few tips on practical accessibility, including captioning videos and creating accessible PDFs. I’ve written plenty on these subjects myself, and it was great to hear Karen talk about the quick-wins which are so easy to implement, yet which make such a huge difference to users.

Thanks to Makayla and all the others involved in organising the day – I hope it proved to be an inspiration to all those who attended or followed on Twitter, and I look forward to seeing the discussions continue online.

Campaign graphic

Later this week I’ll be attending a national awards ceremony, at which one of our campaigns has been nominated for an award. ** UPDATE – we won! **

Edinburgh’s 2009 Scottish Youth Parliament election campaign has already won a Bronze award in the Marketing Society’s Star Awards – the only local authority campaign to win in any category. It was also a finalist in the CIPR national awards, in the category of best campaign under £10k, and won the CIPR Local Public Services Award for Hard to Reach Communications, where the judges commented on how the “strong and effective use of social media and online marketing together with celebrity endorsement succeeded in creating a vibrant and healthy parliament and increased vote.”

It has now been shortlisted for the “Government to Citizen Communications” category of the Good Communication Awards, and I’ll be representing my organisation at the ceremony on Thursday.

The tremendous reception that the campaign has received is thanks to the enthusiasm, innovation and hard work not only of my colleagues, but also of the young people involved in the elections, and I’m proud to represent such a campaign as just one of the many people who worked to make it happen.

The following gives a flavour of the efforts, and hopefully offers some inspiration to others, especially those involved in e-participation and youth engagement.

Scottish Youth Parliament Elections in Edinburgh

The challenge

Every two years, the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP) holds elections for young people between 14 and 25 to represent the views of their peers. In Edinburgh there are 11 SYP members. In 2007, 13 candidates stood for election, just 25 votes were cast and elections were held in a single venue on one day.

For the 2009 elections there was clearly room for improvement, and an integrated campaign was launched, utilising traditional, social and web-based marketing, to try to increase awareness of the elections and boost the number of candidates and voters.

The solution

To encourage more young people to stand for election, the following was carried out:

• A dedicated page was created on the Young Edinburgh website
• Posters were distributed featuring the celebrity endorsement of local lad John Loughton, former chair of the SYP and well known to the target audience as the winner of Celebrity Big Brother Hi-jack 2008
• Briefings went to all schools asking head teachers to use in-school communication channels
• Information was posted the Council webpage and an announcement made to the local press

We received around 25 notes of interest and eventually 18 candidates stood.

One of the election posters

Next, to get more people voting, we introduced social media, setting up Facebook and Bebo pages as well as a YouTube channel.

Bebo webpage

The Facebook and Bebo pages were used for posting candidate photos, written and video manifestos, allowing people to become fans and to share with online friends.

On YouTube, we uploaded videos of the candidates outlining their manifestos, again with links back to the information pages.

A video manifesto

We also:

• Made it easier for people to vote by extending voting from a day to a week and placing ballot boxes in schools, libraries and colleges
• Updated the Young Edinburgh webpage with information on voting, with links to the social media sites
• Distributed posters with details of the SYP social media sites and how and where to vote
• Ran a radio campaign
• Placed adverts on Facebook
• Secured a feature piece in the local press and in the council’s newspaper, which goes to every household in the city

The outcome

The results were outstanding:

• 18 people stood for election
• 5019 young people voted – an increase of 19,984% from 2007!
• All 11 seats were filled – three candidates in two areas were elected unopposed
• In total, there were 2727 views of candidate videos on YouTube. The video with most number individual views amounted to 404, the lowest 107

Conclusion

Probably the most telling aspect of the campaign was how social media was used to compliment the other, more traditional, channels. Social media is rarely a solution in itself, but it is a significant addition to your arsenal and can dramatically increase your reach. The video manifestos were hugely popular, generating a lot of interest in the elections and in the democratic process.

The campaign was also testimony to the continuing trend towards utilising social networking to engage with young people. Only a few years ago, most local authorities would have discarded such an approach as too risky, too unmanageable, and too unknown. Now, there is a growing interest and understanding of the benefits of these platforms, along with a more rational and considered appreciation of the risks. Good experiences such as this one will continue to build the case for the wider adoption of such channels as a key method of engaging and informing our citizens.

I look forward to seeing how many voters turn out in 2011…

As the Guardian reports, Labour sacked Stuart MacLennan after details of a number of offensive tweets were published on a blog on the Evening Standard website.

According to the article, his tweets included jokes about slavery, references to old people as ‘coffin-dodgers’, to a woman as a ‘boot’, and were frequently peppered with strong language.

One of the politically incorrect tweets (Image from Evening Standard)

You would surely assume that such an individual would have known better, and indeed, as the Scottish Sun points out, is appears that he did:

Ironically, ranting MacLennan – a policy researcher for Labour at Holyrood – also hinted his own political hopes could be ruined by using the internet to discuss politics.

He wrote: “Iain Dale (Tory blogger) reckons the biggest gaffes will likely be made by candidates on Twitter – what are the odds it’ll be me?”

Andrew Nicoll writing in the Scottish Sun

Given his apparent awareness of the risks, it is hard to understand why this happened. Did he think they were appropriate? Did he assume no-one would see them? Did he maybe attempt to delete them after he was selected to stand? We are told that many of the tweets were published some time ago, so had he simply forgotten about them?

Whatever the case, it’s a very hard lesson for him, and a salient reminder for the rest of us that what you do with social media today can easily come back and haunt you in the future.

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.

A big year for Twitter

BBC News has a nice summary of the year on Twitter, looking at the news stories which were big on the micro-blogging platform. Twitter proved its worth by being at the heart of key events such as the Iranian election, allowing citizens to report from the scenes of protest even after other channels of communication had been cut.

Social Networking in general had a good year, with an ever-increasing expectation that companies should be using such platforms to talk to their customers. CNET has a brief look at the highs and lows for various Social Networks, focusing on how current front-runners Twitter and Facebook are evolving to stay ahead of the game.

Meanwhile, Mashable‘s Jennifer Van Grove has a look at Google’s 2009, reflecting on the search giant’s big releases and major accomplishments. It was undoubtedly a big year for the company, with the likes of Google Wave attempting to revolutionise the way we communicate and collaborate.

Back at the BBC, the technology team talk about the technology they loved in 2009, discussing many things you’ll have heard as well as a few you may not.

For those getting tired of reading, the Guardian’s Tech Weekly Team have a 40 minute podcast reviewing the year in tech, whilst Web Axe looks back at some of its best web accessibility podcasts from 2009.

The "Apple Glove"

Finally, the Register has a collection of quotes from the year as well as some of the best (of the worst) patent claims, including IBM’s bizarre noise-maker and Apple’s attempt to reinvent the glove.

Happy New Year!

Euan Semple (image via BCS)

Tonight I went along to the Informatics Forum in Edinburgh to listen to an inspiring talk by Euan Semple on how social media can make organisations more effective. I furiously scribbled reams of notes on a few scraps of paper and have reconstructed them here as best I could. Apologies to Euan if I have misquoted or misinterpreted any of his points. The talk was organised by the Edinburgh branch of the British Computer Society.

During Euan’s time at the BBC, he pioneered the use of weblogs, wikis and online forums to enable staff to work more collaboratively. Now an independent advisor on social computing, his insights help bring a clarity of thought to what is, for many, a brave new world.

Futzing around

In the mid 80s the BBC created a more corporate IT environment than it had previously had. This was quite alien to many of its employees, and lead to what Euan describes as “a lot of futzing around”. People faffed about reformatting documents and worrying about security issues, and this all meant that in many cases they actually stopped talking to each other. The concerns around security scared a lot of senior managers, and Euan recalls having to remind the Head of IT Security, who was worried about information leaving the organisation, that this was exactly what the BBC, as a broadcaster, existed to do.

Then a time came when it was clear that a lot of the creative minds within the organisation were spending a lot of time on the internet, collaborating with people from other companies, and often no longer having those same conversations with their colleagues. It was time to start bringing social media into the corporation, initially somewhat under the radar, to harness these conversations and their obvious benefits.

Euan describes his attempts to create a collection of “Cotswolds villages” – growing organically, perhaps haphazardly, but in accordance with what real people needed and wanted. Places where people wanted to be. This is in contrast to the “Milton Keynes” of most corporate systems – efficient and planned but dull, uninspiring and underused.

Digital divides

Inside the Informatics Forum

Talking about access to social media, Euans suggests that our assumptions about digital divides are not always true. A farmer in Africa, geographically isolated but network-savvy, might have more connections than an office worker sitting behind a corporate firewall. And this is becoming a serious issue for companies – Euan states he wouldn’t consider working for a organisation who blocked social media, and it’s easy to agree with that sentiment. In times past, collaboration was restrained by time (waiting for post) and location (only being able to carry out work in the office) but now information is ubiquitous and immediate, always on.

People have to take on certain amount of responsibility for this, but the potential is huge. Euan’s example of getting immediate and useful answers to questions posed on Twitter is one that many of us will recognise, but you have to feed those channels, investing time to build relationships – it can’t be a one-way thing.

Letting the innovators innovate

Euan talks about his discomfort with terms such as social media – for him they sound finite, defined and expensive, rather than the infinite and readily accessible world that is the web. But the term social media does at least serve a useful purpose – foregrounding the social bit, which is where the real value lies.

Euan admits that he doesn’t know what collaboration and innovation should look like. Somehow stuff just happens – it can’t be clinical, planned and forced, but must grow organically. And innovators must be allowed to innovate.

Back at the BBC, it took 6 or 7 years to fully embrace social media, growing slowly by advocacy, almost virally. Wikis, forums and bulletin boards were introduced slowly, and allowed people to use them in a variety of different ways. Euan admits that many employees used these platforms to talk about anything under the sun, but he argues that this didn’t matter. It was about getting the numbers up, creating enough momentum to eventually have an ecology. Another vital point was not to be seen as controlling or over-moderating the conversations. A risky strategy, and one which Euan lost much sleep over, but the community eventually matured and came to moderate itself.

One man’s taxonomy…

Euan in action - photo courtesy of queens_hall

A lot of management is about tidying things up – organising and filing things away. Same with information systems. But one man’s taxonomy is another man’s gobbledygook, and can often restrict and stifle the conversations. Euan states that it’s important to encourage noise – to let people talk about what they want. Then, users can employ tools to filter the noise – he describes RSS feeds as his fishing nets, for example.

Learning is, by its very nature, painful. But learning has also become sanitised, professionalised. Most of the truly valuable things we learn come from our peripheral vision, rather than through these formalised processes (for example, spotting useful links on Twitter). And social media is undeniably all about learning.

Euan mentions Seth Godin’s blog, where Seth talks about permission marketing vs intrusion marketing. The latter is the more traditional model – the noisy messages on TV, the eye-catching billboards, the sprawling ads in magazines. But permission marketing describes a new process where the consumer opts into the messages – they choose to receive them and actually value them. This can apply to management too – getting staff to want to receive information, rather than forcing it upon them. Again, social media presents the ideal platform to deliver this.

Trust is another huge issue to consider – we must be accountable for what we say. It takes time to build up that trust, but the rewards are huge.

Euan concludes with his four top tips:

1. Remember that it’s not about the technology. It’s about how we work and communicate. It’s about the conversation – the tools just facilitate that conversation.
2. Be passionate. Social media requires passion, drive and energy. That can’t be faked or forced.
3. Undersell. Euan worries that social media could be a victim of overhype, with people rushing into it. It’s important not to set expectations too high too soon.
4. Be patient. These things take time to bed in and the results won’t be immediate.

And finally a quote by Peter Drucker:

In a knowledge economy there are no such thing as conscripts – only volunteers

Questions

A good range of questions followed Euan’s talk, and I can’t do justice here to all the discussions which ensued. Some good points to take away from it, though, included:

• How to convince those who just don’t get it? Need to avoid sounding too clever or cocky, as this can put off new participants. And need to tackle cynicism. It’s also important to not think in terms of right and wrong, success or failure – what may appear to be a failure to one person is valuable and important to another.
• Euan compares the web to the Wild West – a potentially unruly land which needs some policing. A major driver for him has always been to strive to make this new world habitable for his children, who will undoubtedly spend much of their lives on there. And whilst it can be used for so many good purposes, it can equally be used by the bad guys.
• Some discussion around whether social networking is inherently socialist, although political restraints and cultural differences will always exist. Euan states that he hopes that social media will make it “less easy for us to be convinced to have wars” which is a wonderful perspective to have.
• Social media can democratise communities. There is, though, the risk of alienating the quieter people, as some will be naturally more adept at this form of communication than others.
• The transient nature of much of this brings about the risk that we sometimes miss the important and serious points. Also, we have to filter out much of the useless content to get to what we want.

More from Euan

• The Obvious? – Euan’s blog
• Getting started with Social Media – interview on GuruOnline
• The Prize of Pomposity – Euan’s presentation @ Lift France 09

Photo acknowledgments – first photo of Euan via the BCS Edinburgh website. Second photo of Euan originally published on Twitpic by queens_hall.

My talk started by introducing the idea of accessibility and how it applies to social media. I then spoke about CAPTCHA, and how this continues to be a significant barrier on many sites, preventing some users from even creating an account on certain sites.

I then went on to argue that if we are relying on social media sites to present content to our users, or to hold discussion and debates, then it’s our responsibility to make sure that the content is accessible. That’s where the following video kicks in (the text equivalent can be found below, after the video). Apologies for the background noise – Liz maintains that the saxophone was not added in later but was, rather, a bonus from the street of Edinburgh…

Transcript of video

If we’re putting our content on their sites, it’s our problem. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago and I wrote a brief blog post which I’d like to read from. Social media is a revolution and with all revolutions some people have been left behind. There are individuals who are at risk of exclusion – I’ve mentioned disabled individuals such as the blind and users of screen reader – but also the ‘digital divide’, where people aren’t connected to the internet and possibly even don’t want to be connected to the internet. We have to remember that these people aren’t going to be using these platforms.

It’s also an issue because it’s out of our control. We can make our own websites accessible but with other sites, for example if we wanted to create a Facebook account, we have to live with the consequences that those sites may not be as accessible as we’d want them to be.

Some of the other problems we need to be aware of. I’ve already mentioned CAPTCHA, impacting on the very first process of signing up to an account. There is also the fact that much of social media relies on dynamic web pages, rich internet applications – where pages update automatically as new content comes along. How do screen readers manage that? Do they know that the page has updated, and will they read out those updates? Evidence suggests that most new screen readers can handle some of these things but not everyone has the latest screen reading technology.

There’s also the issue of the volume of content; the pure number of videos there are out there on Youtube and so on, or the pure number of Tweets on Twitter. That makes it really hard to find content that you’re really interested in.

Probably the biggest overall accessibility concern of social media and our use of it is the fact that it is user-generated content. We don’t have any control over the content that other people are authoring to these sites. That’s the very nature of social media and, despite all of its benefits, that’s the big risk as well.

YouTube is an obvious example; anybody can put a video on YouTube but have they, for example, added captions so that deaf people can access the audio content, or audio description so that blind people know what’s going on on the screen? Probably not. We can do it – if we want to put a video onto YouTube we can make sure all of those processes are in place, but the average user may not want to or may not know how to.

So, if we’re directing people to this kind of content and saying ‘have your own discussions around that’ we need to be aware that some people may be left out of it.

So what can we do? The first thing is to put pressure on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, to tell them to make their services more accessible…

The video ends there, but I did go on to talk about the need to make sure that we are aware of any barriers that exist, making alternative arrangements where possible or directing people to more accessible versions (for example, Accessible Twitter and Easy YouTube).

As before, I’m keen to keep this discussion going so would invite any comments here. There’s also a discussion about social media accessibility over at Accessify Forum which I’d love people to contribute to.