Dan Slee

SOCIAL NEWTWORKING: A case study on how to use social media to promote countryside

Some things work better on social media than others.

Parking wardens and council tax collectors struggle.

Libraries, parks and countryside can work brilliantly. Why? Because people love them.

There’s several good librarians using social media. Not least the excellent @orkneylibrary.

But there isn’t many examples of good countryside and park use I’ve seen.

Until now that is.

Countryside ranger Morgan Bowers is doing some truly great things at Walsall Council. She works for the same authority as I do. But I’d be saying it whichever authority she was working for.

Morgan has set up @walsallwildlife on Twitter and tweets as an real person.

She is leading a team of volunteers recording wildlife across Walsall. I don’t get newts. But her enthusiasm for her subject I do get.

She tweets about her subject and celebrates a newt find in the same way a football supporter celebrate a 93rd minute winner.

She also talks to people. How refreshing is that?

Rather wonderfully, it works across several platforms. She has also set-up a Facebook page to share her work and also has a lively Flickr stream.

All three are really good examples on how to use each platform. Morgan isn’t alone in Walsall Council’s countryside team in using social media.

Countryside manager Kevin Clements is gradually taking a more active role with Twitter too as @countrysidekev.

Their approach is similar in many ways to @hotelalpha9, the tweeting police officer in North Yorkshire.

A personal face and real time updates that are conservational. It’s a blend that seems to work.

Often, people who work in the public sector think their day-to-day job isn’t that interesting to people.

The fact is any job that you don’t do yourself is interesting to people. And in 2011, in the public sector why not fly the flag for what you are doing?

Here’s why I think this approach works:

Twitter

A human voice helps put a human face on an organisation.

A niche Twitter stream can appeal to a cross-section of the population.

Responding and listening are good things for an organisation to do. It can drive traffic to other web pages.

It can work in real time.

Facebook

It can connect with people who use Facebook and no other network.

Because half the population are on Facebook in the UK.

It’s good to post pictures here as people can connect with a strong images

Flickr

It’s a good way to showcase images and connect with a wider community. Remember, there’s five billion images on Flickr.

It’s a good way to keep a record of images of what a project has discovered.

It can can act as a bulletin board to the group and a wider community.

It’s a good way to map the changing of the seasons in an accessible way.

There are a few things that can work in parks and countryside and it’s fascinating to watch innovation in a corner of local government that people have a real connection with.

Pic credits: (c) Morgan Bowers.

CASE STUDIES: The place of social media in the marketing mix

Traditional comms is as dead as the boozy lunch with the Town Hall reporter.

Back in the old days a few beers with the right person may have been enough.

Not in 2011 it isn’t.

Not just because that reporter may now be based in an industrial estate 20 miles away.

The changing face of communications is something I’ve blogged about before.

There’s a whole list of things a press officer needs to do.

For some nice people at LG Comms Scotland I distilled much of this thinking into a presentation.

At their seminar in Dalkeith it was good to see people realising times have changed.

There were some excellent resources posted afterwards to the Communities of Practice site – log in is required.

Here’s my presentation too.

Basically, it covers the following ground:

Basic principles – What is social media? How does it work. Some basics.
Creating your media map – to see how things have changed on your patch. So you can work out where to put your resources. Not least a cunning way to get stats from Facebook.
Some case studies – What works in Twitter, Flickr and Foursquare and Facebook.

It’s not about abandoning the traditional approach that puts print journalists first. More it’s a long overdue re-calibration.

Social media should be part of everything that we do and the last thing it should be is an obstacle.

Or a bit scary.

It should be part of everything that we do.

DIGITAL MELTDOWN: How we should all learn to switch off digital

Infobesity. Such a brilliant word for digital overload.

It’s true using the internet is like taking a cup to a fire hydrant.

Think you’ll get on top of everything?

You won’t.

So pace yourself.

Relax.

It’s dawning on me that I need to make some time to get to know a small area well.

It’s also clear to me that switching off from digital tools from time to time is vital. To recharge. To think. Heck, even to take your six-year-old to the Stoke City club shop to buy him a scarf.

Here’s two excellent pieces that made me stop and think.

In the first posted on the superbly titled Think Quarterly, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist talks of the amount of digital content. You can read the original here.

In 2010, the human race created 800 exabytes of information.

To put that into context, between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, we only created five exabytes; now we’re creating that amount every two days.

Data is like food, says Varian. “We used to be calorie poor and now the problem is obesity. We used to be data poor, now the problem is data obesity.”

For businesses that are gorging on a surfeit of information, Varian says the fix is clear. It’s the same for data as food: “You need to focus on quality. You’ll be better off with a small but carefully structured sample rather than a large sloppy sample,” he says. More locally sourced fine dining, then, less all-you-can-eat buffet.

Oliver Bukeman in The Guardian’s the SXSWi round-up brought this wake-up call to overwork:

A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers.

We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation.

But “we were not meant to operate as computers do,” Schwartz says.

“We are meant to pulse.” When it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: “We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours.”

Schwartz cites research suggesting that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking rest.

Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital culture into every aspect of daily life – and at times this week in Austin it was easy to forget this – you are not, ultimately, a computer.

CASE STUDY: Newts, an 1985 Argos catologue and more cool ways to use Flickr

Someone once said that there are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Very true. Same could be said of Flickr.

Here’s seven good ideas on Flickr that’s fired my imagination.

Flickr to celebrate a season

Yes, you can set-up a Flickr group for an area if there isn’t already one.
But how about this? A group to celebrate the changing seasons of a borough.

Dudley Council have done just that with Winter Photos of Dudley and its partner Spring Photos of Dudley.

Both are themed around the seasons and the figures themselves are quite impressive. Spring had 80 images from 80 people within three weeks of it being launched. Winter 450 from 170.

Flickr as an image library

At less than £20 a year for a Pro account, it’s staggeringly good value for money.

It can also be used as a repository for images both with a public setting and a restricted private one which limits who in your network can see them.

With a liberal re-use licence residents, media and blogs can re-use images without you having to take a phone call, dig out shots and email.

The UK Home Office are the Daddy of this.

With 390,000 page views in 10 months those are serious figures.

They post stock images and shots connected to press stories, like the pictures that show a till receipt for two rings shortly before a sham wedding. Brilliant.

Flickr as a way to celebrate

Dawn O’Brien from Wolverhampton Council is an unsung hero. Using JFDI (just flipping do it) she has done great things to celebrate parks.

ThisFlickr group We ♥ Wolverhampton: What’s your favourite place in the city? captures images that show people’s favourite places in the Midlands city.

Flickr as a way to record nature

Morgan Bowers from Walsall Council’s countryside team is doing some really great things with digital tools. Not least the group Walsall Wildlife Recorders which aims to capture images of newts and other interesting things snapped by members of the public.

The Walsall Leather Museum Flickr meet

Acting at the suggestion of a Walsall Flickr group member, the very generous Francesca Cox allowed open access to the museum on Saturday.

It’s a fabulous place and a celebration of the town’s most famous trade.
Scores of good images emerged and several photographers generously allowed shots to be re-used for marketing.

Flickr as a way to supply user generated content

English Heritage have hundreds of buildings, burial places, landmarks and other sites to look after. Bright people there have twigged that people like taking pictures of them. They link from their website to images contributed to their Flickr group set up partly for that purpose. Everyone wins in that.

An unexpected spin-off. Social bunch they are they’ve created a Flickr group for those people. Even better than that, they ask that if people post to that group it means they don’t mind seeing the images on their website and a link from that site to the original image. It’s a great way of tapping into Flickr in a way that everyone benefits from.

The Asda catologue from 1985

Okay, so this isn’t local government. But you have to simply doff your cap to someone who scans the entire Argos catalogue from a quarter of a century ago.

Clunky boombox? We got them. Pocket calculators? That’ll be £4.99, please with more than 9,000 views of that one page alone.

Inspired genius. Or the work of a twisted loner. Can’t make up my mind which.

But it shows the single minded passion some people have.

Links

WALSALL 24: Case study: 12 thoughts on tweeting what local government does in a day

Funny how an unremarkable Spring day in the West Midands can go down in history.

From 6am on March 4, an audience of 116,273 on Twitter got to hear about the Walsall 24 experiment staged by Walsall Council.

Those figures are tweetreach.com, by the way. Not mine.

Historically, this was the first time a council had tweeted a snapshot of what it was doing in real time in the UK. Quite possibly this was a world first. That’s worth a ‘woot!’ in anyone’s book.

Yet, every day local government does tens of thousands of things for its residents.

Trouble is, we rarely tell people about the bread and butter things leaving some people ignorantly thinking ‘all I get is my bins collected.’
It was this lazy myth we looked to explode with Walsall 24.

There’s a blog post one day in the brass tacks of how the event was done.

By the way, this is an idea I’m proud to have played a role in amongst quite a sizable cast.

Statistics

1,400 tweets

116,000 potential audience

10 per cent rise in @walsallcouncil audience

9 Twitter accounts used

But there’s also in the days after 12 things that struck me:

1. The tipping point has been reached. It’s not about whether or not local government should use social media it’s how.

2. The internal battle has been won. People who 12 months ago were sceptical were keen to get involved. How do we channel that?

3. It’s not about network access. In the opening minutes of Walsall 24 we tweeted on a Blackberry because the network decided it didn’t like Twitter.

4. It’s ALL about network access. ‘This is great,’ one member of staff said, ‘but I couldn’t log on to my PC to follow it.’ Opening up social media internally would have been a powerful way to tell the story to the staff.

5. This could only work through collaboration. It was a neighbourhoods officer Kate Goodall that did much of the groundwork to get people on board and head of comms Darren Caveney that secured very top level buy-in. Without this it would have looked threadbare.

6. People like being told how their council tax is spent. No matter how routine. One person said that they didn’t like the updates. That was after the event.

7. Having people in service areas savvy with social media is a good thing. Spread the joy. Don’t hog it.

8. Getting people together in a common cause makes a bigger noise. The noise made by more than a dozen is more than an individual.

9. Innovation is a good thing. It makes you look at things in a different light. In the old days something like this may have been bought in from outside. Not any more.

10. This is the future. It’s not a hypothetical theory. It’s real and it’s here.

11. Free is good. Doors opened because there was no charge to this.

12. I never knew local government had people out at dawn investigating noisey cockerels. But we do.

Blogs

Sarah Lay ‘A Day in the Life.’

Carl Haggerty ‘Even More Determined’

Adrian Short ‘#walsall24 – Whats the Point of a Tweeting Council?’

Resources

The Guardian ‘Walsall Council Live Updates.’

Walsall Council @walsallcouncil on Twitter

Walsall Council Walsall 24 diary

24 HOUR: A Twitter experiment in local government

As never before local government needs to shout what it does from the roof tops.

In a 24-hour experiment colleagues across Walsall Council on March 3 aim to do just that.

This is the first time in UK local government – and possibly the world – someone has tried something on this scale.

The target is to tweet every day tasks such as potholes, parks, litter picking, school meals and many of our 700 services.

On their own they’re routine.

When pieced together they create a vibrant snapshot of the vital work dedicated people in local government do every day.

It aims to include potholes, parks school crossing patrols, road repairs, out-of-hours care and many of the 700 services local government offers.

It aims to shine a light on dusty corners of local government.

It aims to show areas that do their jobs day in and day out without fuss.

We’ve taken as inspiration the 24-hour Twitter exercises in Greater Manchester Police and South Birmingham.

We’ve also taken inspiration from people across local government who used social media to alert people to school closures and gritting.

You can take part too by following these Twitter accounts:

Walsall Council’s Twitter stream @walsallcouncil.

There’s also more than half a dozen Twitter streams from service areas including the New Art Gallery, Walsall Museum and the Walsall Local History Centre.

It’s important to stress that this won’t just be for Twitter. It’ll be flagged up on Facebook and we’ll post pictures to Flickr too.

It’ll also be highlighted on our website with tweets curated after the event.

In 2011, there is a burning need to tell these stories.

Walsall 24 doesn’t aim to be definitive or exhaustive and not everything we do will be listed.

But this does aim to nail the urban myth that all we do is bins.

Disclaimer: I’m one of several helping organise the event but colleagues right across the council have made this happen.

Creative commons credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/erica_marshall/2096416037/sizes/m/in/photostream/

CASE STUDY: How Yammer can help local government innovate

“Yammer?” a colleague once asked, “isn’t that a Black Country word?”

Actually, no. It’s a web-based platform to allow people from the same organisation to talk to each other.

Used by 80,000 comanies as of Septrember 2010, it’s a way of sharing ideas, links to useful websites and for asking for help to crack a problem.

You need your organisation’s email address to access it so it’s a walled garden to allow discussion that cuts across directorates and teams.

The best thing of all?

It’s free.

It’s been used at Walsall Council since October last year when members of the communications team Kev Dwyer and Mel Lee came across it at the Hyperlocal Govcamp held in Walsall. Our head of communications Darren Caveney saw the value in it straight away.

In the first five months more than 600 people have signed up from around 8,000 employees.

Isn’t this just a glorified water cooler where people talk about last night’s telly?

Actually, no.

There’s a string of useful discussions.

Webteam members asking for feedback on how our website header should look like.
Transport asking what people thought of bus lanes.
A link to a Guardian Society piece on what hyperlocal blogs are.
A link to a blog written by a Cambridgeshire County Council officer on localism.
A thread on heavy imminent snow and best routes out Walsall.
A discussion on what planning pages should look like.

STATS ON HOW YAMMER IS WORKING…

We took a snapshot of 27 days of Yammer activity at Walsall Council from December 2010 and January 2011.

What we found were people busily innovating. Of the sample of 188 posts and comments:

82 per cent were work related

17 per cent were non-work.

Of the non-work posts, a third were about snow, information they’d seen in the staff e-mail Weekly Bulletin, on the intranet or were New Year greetings.

Not one was about Saturday night TV. Not one.

That compares favourably to the amount of time spent off-topic in some meetings.

Of all activity:

37 per cent were posts

63 per cent were comments.

What were the work-related topics about?

61 per cent were about proposed policy ideas.

For example, how a new operating model should look or what should happen to a new initiative should look.

Some were happy to ask for input while others were an update on what their team were working on.

22 per cent were on actual policy.

Such as an update on new sickness arrangements.

10 per cent were posting links.

A useful website, page on the council website or blog, such as a news story on how smart phones are having an impact.

0 per cent were abusive.

Not a single post on any subject was intemperate or even remotely threatening the code of conduct. That’s important to know and shoots down an early worry.

The regular cry ‘we need to be better at communicating with each other’ has never been louder.

Yammer is proving one way to do it. It won’t do it on it’s own but it is a powerful tool.

Links:

Yammer on Wikipedia.

Why Yammer failed at my organisation.

A Yammer experiment in local government.

LGC Comms Yammer thread with an account of the Kent County Council Yammer network.

HISTORY TWEET: Connecting over cornflakes with @manal in Tahrir Square

So, there I was one morning watching TV coverage of protests in Egypt.

Across the cornflakes I’m seeing a bulletin with overnight pitched battles in Tahrir Square on the news.

This square in Cairo has been the symbolic battleground. Pro-democracy protestors hold it. The President’s men want them out.

Stones, bottles get thrown to dislodge them. Snipers too but the protestors hold on by their finger tips.

Checking Twitter the hashtag #egypt is filled with news reports, pictures and messages.

One catches my eye. A man proud that he knows one of the protestors who is there on the ground.

I retweet it thinking there may be people who follow me interested.

Minutes later one of those whose name I retweeted thanks me and several others for this act.

Let’s get this straight.

One of the protestors in Tahrir Square who has been fighting for what he believes in sends me a tweet to say ‘thank you.’.

The historian in me can’t handle that.

The geek in me is amazed.

What would a tweet from the French Revolution look like? Would @marieantoinette RT Let them eat #cake…?

But this is the 21st century, baby.

Now, those protestors are not figures on a screen. I know one of their names and contact – fleetingly – has been made. It’s Manal Hassan. His Twitter name is @manal. He is from Cairo.

I know in years to come what I’m saying now will seem as naïve as the school teacher who marvels at the photograph from the Crimean War.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitpics are the first draft of history.

I see that.

I’m now just hoping for a peaceful outcome. And I’m hoping Manal is alright.

Pic: Twitpic http://twitpic.com/3whv3g

CASE STUDY: ‘I’m showing two colleagues Twitter. They say they don’t get it…’

It’s always good to show people Twitter when they don’t use it themselves.

Isn’t Twitter Stephen Fry talking about his tea? Isn’t it a load of noise? Isn’t it a waste of time?

I was sat with two people who don’t get Twitter.

Instead of explaining, I asked Twitter a question. It’s sometimes amazing the response you get.

I posted the following question:

Then several people started to chip in with what they thought.

@Mike_Rawlins posted something daft about #brewcamp. This is an event I’m looking to do with Mike and a few others.

Then @adrielhampton posted. It can amplify what matters to you. When I showed them his Twitter profile they started to get interested.

“He’s from America,” one said. “How do you know him?”

Through Twitter I told them.

“So who is Will Perrin?” they ask.

“Oh, he created the e-petition platform at 10 Downing Street. He does Talk About Local. They support hyperlocal blogs.”

I show them some hyperlocal sites they’ve not seen before.

I talk about Pits n Pots in Stoke-on-Trent and a few others.

We talked about how we could use the platform for the council.

Minutes passed.

I log back onto Twitter and there were a stack more replies waiting.

“Are they interested in anything?” one posted. “Find experts in that. Fast. Find their friends. Find themselves.”

It’s all good stuff.

Their faces change from confusion to awe.

“I’m starting to see the point now,” one said.

I show them hashtags. I show them how I can find out what’s happening at Stoke City, in local government and I show them the UK Govcamp hashtag #ukgc11.

I show them #xfactor because that’s a TV show that one likes.

I tell them that you can watch TV and get a real time running commentary on the programme you are watching via Twitter.

That gypsy wessing fly-on-the-wall programme they were talking about. I heard all that on Twitter and I hadn’t even got the telly on.

I navigate back to Twitter.

US people who specialise in emergency planning had started to contribute.

“Situational awareness, direct connectivity to public, better engagement,” one tweeted.

“Wow,” my colleague said.

One tweeter reminded me of the @savebenno campaign on Twitter.

What was that?

That was a campaign to highlight the unfair dismissal of a 2nd XI village cricket skipper.

It ended up with the team I was playing for playing a Save Benno XI.

“Wow,” my other colleague said.

“It’s starting to make sense now.”

TWELVE STEPS: Twelve lessons for using Twitter in local government

It’s now not why local government uses Twitter but how.

More than a hundred UK councils are on the micro-blogging platform.
That’s progress.

Since late 2008 we’ve been using Twitter at Walsall Council to inform and engage.

We’re fortunate our head of communications Darren Caveney and head of press and PR Kim Neville were quick to spot the potential.

More than 6,000 tweets on and there are a series of lessons we’ve learned.

In one of the first blogs I ever wrote I talked of the 27 things that work on a local government Twitter stream.

For a presentation at LG Comms in Nottingham I boiled that down to 12 key lessons.

The slides are available on slideshare (click the link above).

#12 LESSONS FOR USING TWITTER IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT

#1: Realise that the landscape has changed (and your skills need to too.) You know that a few years ago that writing a press release and booking a photo call was enough? That’s still a great skill. But you need other things too.

#2: The channels of communication have changed. In the old days there was the newspapers. Maybe the radio. Every now and then TV would show up and it would be a really big thing. They’re still there. In some cases just or not at all. It’s just that people get their news in different ways now. Remember, Facebook is the fourth biggest news site on the internet.

#3: Learn the language of the platform first (by messing about with it yourself.) When you start to use Twitter – or any other platform – you’ll notice that there is a different way of talking to people. It’s a lot more relaxed and conversational. Get to know how things work under your own name. Once you build some confidence up you’ll be up to speed on how to use it for your organisation.

#4: You can’t control the message. It’s a big one for press officers this. In the old days there may have been key messages. There’s still things you want to say. Just realise that this stuff works as a conversation. So be conversational.

#5: It’s okay to be a human voice. What works best on Twitter is a relaxed tone. It’s not about linking to an RSS feed and tweeting the first 140 characters of a press release. That’s just shouting. A police officer once told me that as a beat officer he would start conversations with people. Then he’d slip in some information he thought may be of help. That’s what Twitter does. It’s probably why many police officers are very good at it.

#6: Link. Share. Retweet. Be web 2.0. It’s okay to retweet. So long as it’s third sector or public sector. Spotted a police witness appeal on Twitter? Link to it. Charity car wash in your borough? Link. Share. Earn social capital. Be a responsible council. Share interesting content.

#7: Take the argument offline. It’s never a good idea to have a row in public. Point people to the place where they can get information that can help. Most non-trolls are fine with this.

#8: Take the re-buttal online. Is your local paper circulating via Twitter a link you have a major issue with? Have they failed to include your statement adequately? Post the statement online. Link to it. Tweet it to them – and your followers.

#9: Service areas work well on Twitter (so be prepared to share). It’s fine for comms to use it. Others can too. There’s no-one better at knowing what’s popular with libraries than librarians. So if your library want to use it, let them. Give them some pointers first.

#10: Have a simple to understand social media policy. A hundred pages won’t work. Something that fits into a screen does. Make it simple.

#11: Make sure it connects with other channels of communications. Write the press release. Send it. But also send it via your other channels too.

#12: Cut, past and send your positive feedback to off-line officers. It’s amazing how effective this is at breaking down barriers to social media. If you are doing something residents approve of they will thank you for it.

Hat tip: Nick Booth who first told us about Twitter and what it could do.

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