The Tartan TweetMeet will take place on Wednesday 22 February at a number of venues across Scotland, and will allow like-minded individuals to meet and share ideas. There will also be a chance for members of the public to get involved by tweeting questions and suggestions, hopefully leading to some valuable new opportunities for engagement.

Explaining the concept on the event’s website, organiser Carolyne Mitchell (@Cal444) lists the rules for the day:

• They have to be free.
• No business cards allowed.
• There must be a hashtag.
• Come with an open mind and be prepared to share ideas.
• Most of all have fun and make connections

Anyone interested in the event is invited to register to allow organisers to get an idea of numbers. We’re currently exploring suitable venues here in Edinburgh and welcome any suggestions.

You can follow the event at #tartanTM. I look forward to meeting some of you there!

Name labels

Feel free to download and use this label

Download as a printable sheet of labels (designed for Lyreco Multipurpose Labels, 14 per sheet).

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.

Last night I finally managed to get along to one of the Edinbuzz Social Media Surgeries, this time at Leith’s McDonald Road Library. The event was buzzing, with around 8 ‘surgeons’ and easily as many ‘patients’.

Although this was my first such surgery, I’ve done various similar things in the past, from running drop-in computing workshops in public libraries to full-on adult education courses, so I was prepared for the challenges that the evening might have presented.

As it turned out, the event ran very smoothly, ably orchestrated by organiser @tomallan.

WordPress for beginners and feeding Twitter

I spent the bulk of the session with Kerry, a PR person who was hoping to start blogging for a local arts initiative. We chatted about the various factors – including issues of budget and technical ability – before settling on WordPress as a good place to start. With that, we headed over to wordpress.com and within a few minutes, Kerry was blogging.

Once that was conquered, we just had enough time to pop over to Twitter, where Kerry had already set up an account and started to follow people. The main problem was that she didn’t really see ‘the point’, and on inspection of her account I could see why – she had never actually tweeted. Again, within a few minutes we’d posted a mention and a retweet, and my advice was for her to go away and feed her account as much as possible. Only by doing that, I said, would other people actually have reason to follow her back – and that would be when the conversations could start.

I hope Kerry went away with a lot more confidence than she arrived with. She was undoubtably keen and, I suspect, just needed someone to tell her she was doing the right things, pressing the right buttons, and that, crucially, she wasn’t going to break anything. Hopefully she will also take this all back to her own volunteer work, to help them maximise their use of these channels.

I found the session personally very rewarding – being a wonderful chance to extol the virtues of these wonderful tools and rave about how I (in all truth) have found the likes of Twitter to be life-changing. I was delighted to see such enthusiasm from all who attended, and I hope the surgeries will continue, in one form or another, for a long time to come.

@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.

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.

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.

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!

The Brizzly logo

Today I signed up for Brizzly, a new web-based client for Twitter which offers a very similar user interface to Twitter itself, but with lots of the added functionality which most of us have come to use on a daily basis. It recently featured as one of LifeHack’s 5 best Twitter Clients (alongside TweetDeck, Seesmic, Tweetie and DestroyTwitter), so I was keen to give it a spin.

Registering

Firstly it’s worth noting that you need an invite code to sign up for the service at the moment. However, these are pretty easy to come by as once you’re signed up you can publicly tweet a code which ten more people can then use to sign up. Try doing a Twitter Search for “brizzly” and you’re bound to find one easily enough.

You then need to create a username and password, providing an email address. This is your Brizzly log-in, which is separate to your Twitter account credentials (presumably to allow the multiple account handling).

First impressions

At first glance the interface is quite simplistic and very similar to Twitter – with the central stream of updates and trending topics to the right. Anyone coming over from the Twitter site should have no problem finding their way around the basics here. Looking closer, though, you’ll find a wealth of additional features.

Features

Easy Retweeting

As well as Twitter’s ubiquitous commands to Reply or Favourite other tweets, Brizzly also gives you quick access to the equally essential ReTweet function. Sadly these features suffer the same accessibility issues as Twitter itself, in that you can’t navigate to those options without a mouse (i.e. you can’t tab to them). This means that certain users will need to keep using alternatives such as Accessible Twitter for the time-being, which is a shame.

Explanation of a Trending Topic on Brizzly

Trends explained

The next obvious addition is the function to view, and add to, explanations of Trending Topics. Click on ‘Why?’ next to each topic and it’ll expand to give you a brief explanation of the term. You can then perform a search of that term. This is a really lovely feature which adds tremendous value to the Trending Topics (which I previously tended to ignore).

Draft tweets

The ability to save draft tweets is an interesting one – on the one hand I’m not convinced that, given the limited length of tweets, this will save a lot of time. On the other, I have sometimes been in a position where I’ve tapped out a tweet then decided to postpone it for one reason or another. Saving it as a draft is a simple way of doing that, so it could prove to be a useful addition.

Groups

You can also create a number of groups, allowing you to lump together people that you follow according to themes. This could be really handy if you have a problem keeping your personal and professional streams separate, for example. You can only have up to 5 groups at the moment which is probably not enough for anyone really wanting to take advantage of this feature but that limit may increase over time.

Mute

A killer feature for me is the ability to ‘mute’ people who you are following – temporarily hiding their updates from your stream. I often find that I’d like to tune out of certain people’s updates, just for a little while (for example, if they’re live-tweeting an event which I’m not interested in) so this will no doubt come in handy.

Multiple accounts

Another crucial feature is the ability to manage multiple accounts and access them easily via small icons near the top of the screen. Again, limited to 5 accounts just now but hopefully that will increase. Unfortunately you can’t view streams from multiple accounts on one page – you have to click between accounts, essentially loading each one afresh which takes a few more seconds.

Other features

Other features include hosted image uploading, automatic image and video display and automated URL shortening (and it apparently also resolves shortened URLs from other people’s tweets so you can see the full URL, although this doesn’t seem to work all the time).

Brizzly also notifies you of new DMs via a little IM-style alert box, as well as alerting you to other new content (such as mentions) via a small blue dot. Again, though, this didn’t seem 100% reliable.

Conclusion

There are a few issues evident from using the service for a day. One annoying aspect is that the updating of your stream, in order to see new updates, is manual (as with Twitter – you get a prompt to refresh the page). It would have been much nicer if the updates dropped in automatically.

(Edit: 14th Oct) I was also initially frustrated that you couldn’t seem to easily access your follower/following lists, but posting this concern on Twitter quickly attracted a response from Chris Wetherell, co-founder of Brizzly, telling me:

@prettysimple It’s a little hidden in Brizzly. You can click ‘Profile’ on the left-hand side and then click ‘followers’ or ‘following’.

So 10 out of 10 for customer service!

Overall the interface seemed a bit clunky, although the features that it offers sets it well above the standard Twitter interface. I’ll be very interested to see how this service develops over the coming months, especially if it eventually offers integration with other social media platforms such as Facebook. No doubt many of the wrinkles I mention here will get ironed out too, and if they also put some effort into making the interface fully accessible they could be onto a winner.