Dan Slee

THEIR DAY: 14 ideas to reboot your Twitter day

In the near future planning for #ourday will swing into view… a day when local government posts what it does in realtime across 24-hours.

It’s an event that is close to my heart. It is modelled in part on #walsall24 a day which I was involved with six years ago.

As an experiment, at the council I was at we posted updates to Twitter from the mundane to the significant. The aim was to create a wall of noise and in doing so told the bigger picture of what local government does.

I still remember the feeling of unique stress and, frankly, loneliness when I opened the office and fired up the PC to send the first tweet. Would this work?

Bright sparks at the Local Government Association have since picked-up the ball and run with it since to turn it into a national initiative.

Six years is a long time. I got to thinking that it is maybe time it had a bit of a re-boot. This should be much more than Twitter. It should be more than council staff talking to each other although I do recognise a real benefit to this.

What should a day of online activity look like?

It needs to tell day-to-day stories… think of how best to do this.

It needs to focus on real people.

It needs real people telling their own stories.

It needs to have people who use the service and live, work and play in your area.

It needs some employees but only if they are named.

It doesn’t need offices. Go outside the ivory tower to see what people do.

It doesn’t need to Twitter, either. It is the fifth largest UK social media channel. Use other channels. Go off-line too.

But don’t just make noise set a few targets too. Sign-up for a library. Pledge to use a park. Pledge to exercise. Whatever.

Here are 14 ideas to make it more interesting

1. A Facebook Live Q&A on the local newspaper’s Facebook page with a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum stores. There is a trove of fascinating items. It would be great to hear someone talk about them. Give people a chance to see and put stories to their heritage.

2. Video clips of real people talking about the job they do for the organisation while out actually doing it.

3. Live tweeting shadowing the contact centre posting a snap shot of the calls they recieve.

4. Get people to sign-up to something. Join a library. Make the process easy to do online. Make a target. A hundred. Five hundred. Whatever.

5. Create a Facebook quiz to ask how much people know about what their council does. Do that here.

6. Use Twitter’s Periscope app to live broadcast a Q&A with the Leader of the Council on the budget. What should they do less of? And more of?

7. Plug into an existing campaign and create some content. You need more foster carers? Live tweet what a carer does for an hour or two.

8. Celebrate your area. Encourage people to post pictures on a hashtag that celebrates their area. Instagramers may warm to this. The best pic gets hosted on the homepage. Or as part of the website’s banner image.

9. Talk to people at a library event. What brings them to this book club? What book do they recommend?

10. Go behind the obvious and get others to join in. What goes on in school during an average day? There’s a breakfast club? No way? How does that work? Schools are getting better at posting their own content. Invite them to play.

11. You have a niche job? You look after the borough’s trees? Tell us about that. Give us a tour of what to look out for. Shadow the officer if needs be.

12. Adult social care is a growing issue? What do service users look like? Heck, he looks like my Dad. He even talks like him too. Can he talk about growing up in the area? And what help he gets from the council?

13. Aggregate your content in the one place. Pull a page together where people can follow all your stuff.

14. Make it live after the day. Two thirds of Facebook live views come after the event. Can you capture and share it in a storify? A pdf? An email?

Look for the real people and create some content there. Move #ourday on a notch. You work in an amazing sector so go and share some of the amazing stuff.

Picture credit: Marco Verch / Flickr

PIC TIPS: Three ways you can be your own newspaper picture editor and use better pics online

Just last week while delivering training something struck me that had been right under my nose.

You do not need a picture editor on the internet. The thought had never occurred to me before.

A picture editor when I was a journalist was the gatekeeper who decided what image went where. They could pick a page one pic over an inside lead. Always, on the newspaper I worked on they were upright shots. Why? Because that’s the size of the hole on the page template. Always, they were people pictures. They were ‘tight, bright and upright.’ Portrait sized, with groups of smiling people with every piece of the picture busy. It’s an art.

News pictures are dying

A while back I carried out an audit for a council press office. The aim was to see what content worked across print, web, radio and TV in the city they served. The result was surprising:

Half of pictures in the print edition were news pictures. Posed with a caption. But not a single one was used by the newspaper online. Police mugshots, CCTV stills, user generated content and library images were instead used.

With that in mind, the skill should be how to source your own images to attach to content that you post or send out. Once you’d send out an image with a caption aiming at the print edition. Now, send out a stock image to aim for their Facebook page.

Yet images remain powerful. So what do you do?

Sourcing your own images

I’ve written before about the amazing compfight that searches Flickr’s six billion images. Remember to search for creative commons pictures and you have images that you can re-use. Here is a list of alternative copyright free sites but be warned. Many are not searchable.

Sourcing your own image library

Flickr isn’t nearly as cool as Instagram and hasn’t been for years. But it is an effective place to upload and tag your images. And it costs about £30 a year for a Pro account. Make them public to save yourself the hassle of finding that image and sending it on. Give them a creative commons licence to allow them to be re-used.

Sourcing residents images as user generated content

With sites like instagram growing like topsy, millions of images are posted across your area. Go onto Instagram yourself and approach people for permission to re-use an image on the website or elsewhere.

Picture credit: rpavich / Flickr

FAKE NEWS: It’s time to get serious with fake admins for your Facebook page

It seems as though the noose is tightening around Facebook pages that are run by a overlooked-until-now dodgy practice.

I’ve blogged this before but let me explain. To run a Facebook page you need a profile and you can’t have more than one. Its against the platform’s terms and conditions.

Many people in the past created a separate work profile. They did this because they wanted to keep work and play separate. Often this second account just had the word ‘work’ added to it.

How this dodgy practice works

So John Smith had his ‘John Smith’ account. He also created ‘John Smith Work’ as a way of logging onto the corporate page. Cunning, yes?

Well, not that cunning at all. Not least because it is obvious even to Inspector Clouseau that this is a second account. And before you dash-off to create thinking a John Brown account is an even safer bet don’t. But Brown, you think. That’s not my name. They’ll never guess. Actually, Facebook are really good at spotting through an algorithm accounts with few friends that just happen to be a page admin.

Why Facebook are doing this

You may have noticed but Facebook and others have been getting it in the neck for their role in ‘fake news’. Governments don’t like them. Nor do users. Accounts that are clearly fake are the first steps to tackle this. The platform have agreed to act. Fake users are first in the queue.

But you’re blue in the face

Of course, the wise people know that they need to change. They’ve even argued for the need to. Many have persuaded people that this is the best course of action.

But even then some people don’t want to change.

The common arguments are:

I don’t want people from work being my friends.

I’d rather keep work and family seperate.

I won’t add my real Facebook profile.

In the olden days, they may have had a point. But no-one can see who is the admin of a page. You don’t have to accept friend requests.

An approach: It’s time to get serious

I’ve noticed a very heated debate on the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group flagging up the issue.

Firstly, tell are admins you want your page not to break Facebook’s terms and conditions. Tell them their access may be removed without warning. This is an issue if you all have fake John Smith Work accounts. Tell people you are moving everyone to Facebook Business Manager. You’ll need a profile. It just makes the day-to-day tasks easier.

If people still say no, you may have to trim down the number of admins who are effectively posing a risk to your page. If some people don’t want to, they may just have to have ‘managing Facebook pages’ off their CV.

Go and tell the person in your organisation who is responsible for information governance of the broader issue. See what they think. They’ll agree with you.

Go and tell the emergency planning team what they think. They’ll agree with you, too.

Take these opinions, this blog and your opinion to your manager, manager’s manager and chief executive if you have to. Set out to them in writing the reasons why ‘fake’ profiles are a danger to your organisation. If you have to, list the people who have fake profiles in your organisation. List the people who don’t. Explain that you need everyone to either have a real profile or be taken off admin to the Facebook page.

You have flagged-up the risk.

You have shared the risk.

When Facebook catch you – note, not ‘if’ but ‘when’ – you have an audit trail without which you’ll be pretty exposed. Who knows. The process may even get some movement.

It sounds drastic, but it’s not as drastic as access to your corporate Facebook page being lost overnight.

Picture credit: Michael Coghlan / Flickr.

LIKE PRACTICE: How do I practice a Facebook Live without anyone seeing it?

I get it. You like the idea of Facebook Live but you just don’t like the idea of looking stupid in front of your friends. Well relax. This is for you.

The great thing about Facebook Live is that you can set the functionality so that no-one can see it. Just you can. So you can mess about and kick the tyres and no-one will see you. That has to be a good thing.

This is a trick that we include in our Skills You’ll Need for Live Video workshops (more here). But if you are looking to learn more you can do it too.

To start, pick up your device.

Step 1: Go to Facebook

Go to Facebook. You’ve seen this view a thousand times already. Tap that you want to share an update.

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Step 2: Tap Go Live

Once you’ve tapped that you want to make an update you get a list of options. Tap ‘Go Live’ as that’s what you want to do.

Step 3: Set your audience

You can pick who you are going live to. See that? That’s for friends. If you want to broadcast to your friends, that’s fine. If you want to broadcast just to yourself as practice you can adjust that. Tap ‘friends’ or whatever your audience is.

Step 4: Set your audience to ‘just me’

Then you can pick your audience. Here, I’m setting it to ‘just me’ if you just want to broadcast to yourself.

Step 5: Your audience is ‘only me’ and add a title

Nearly there. You are broadcasting to yourself. Add a title. Go on. It is good practice. Make it interesting.

Step 6: Hit live, chat and then when you are finished hit finish

Keeping up? Now is your chance to shine.

Step 7: When you finish you’ll see this

A dark screen that tells you you’ve finished. Simple?

Step 8: Publish, don’t publish

Now you’ve shot your practice you can change its status from ‘only me’ to ‘friends’, ‘public’ or other settings depending on your mood. You can also download to your device.

And that’s it.

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STUDY: ‘I saw the news today on Facebook, oh, boy’

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Beatle John Lennon once sang ‘I read the news today, oh boy.”

Had he sung it today it would have been more accurate to say: “I saw the news today, oh boy. It was on Facebook but I can’t remember which page it was on.”

The trend away from the family group gathered around the 9 o’clock news and to something else has been real for some time.

The Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford have published a useful whitepaper called ‘I Saw the News on Facebook’ where they look to map the scale of this. You can find it via here. Antonis Kalogeropoulos and Nic Newman compiled the short report.

Here are a couple of stand-out facts that comms people should be aware of.

Most news is found indirectly

People don’t go and consume the news. News comms to them from search, social media, email, mobile or from aggregators. That’s a landscape to know.

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Most don’t remember where they saw the news

Interestingly, the report said that 37 per cent of people could correctly recall where they read or saw the content through search and 47 per cent if it was social media.

The take-home for comms people

In the past, PR and comms people used to working with trusted brands such as the local newspaper and it’s rarely changed masthead. The newspaper of record was just that. A single outlet in the community it served. Now that voice is spread and often comes through Facebook.

This does raise the question for comms people of the need to be on Facebook over and above everything.

Picture credit: Mark Morton / Flickr.

POST HASTE: Your dull cheque presentation pic… what do you want to achieve?

There is a reason why I try and search for people outside my home sector.

While I love things I’m local government and the public sector you can always learn.

It’s why I follow Madeleine Sugdon on Twitter. She is third sector but she’s always on point.

Her delicious eye-roll of a post about cheque presentations is a good one. You can read it here. The post in three words?

‘Don’t do it.’

I liked it for three reasons.

It is a useful reminder of something I first heard as a junior reporter in the 1990s. It’s not a giant cheque that is of interest. It is what they did to raise it or who they will help.

News is people.

It’s also striking that 20 years on we still have to tell people to steer away from such old school things.

It’s a useful reminder that the job of a decent comms person is never done. Some battles need re-fighting over and over.

It all comes back to asking the question… ‘What is it you are trying to achieve?’

And I’d add a second one:

‘For who?’

Picture credit: Psheubj / Flickr

APPLE REMINDER: Jony Ive and what they want not what they need

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There is a point I keep coming back to over and over and over again from a blog post I wrote a while back.

It comes from a poster in Apple designer Jony Ive’s office.

“Believe in your f*cking self. Stay up all f*cking night. Work outside of your f*cking habits. Know when to f*cking speak up. F*cking collaborate. Don’t f*cking procrastinate. Get over your f*cking self. Keep f*cking learning. Form follows f*cking function. A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad f*cking ideas. Find f*cking inspiration everywhere. F*cking network. Educate your f*cking client. Trust your f*cking gut. Ask for f*cking help. Make it f*cking sustainable. Question f*cking everything. Have a f*cking concept. Learn to take some f*cking criticism. Make me f*cking care. Use f*cking spell check. Do your f*cking research. Sketch more f*cking ideas. The problem contains the f*cking solution. Think about all the f*cking possibilities.”

But especially ‘educate the f*cking client.’

This isn’t a rant at the nice people who I work with. Far from it. This is more a reminder that we need to remind people that the poster, Twitter account or press release they want isn’t maybe what they need.

Picture credit: Gotcredit.com / Flickr

PATHWAY: We are alone together

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You need good boots and a wise head to walk the Appalachian Trail. It is 2,190 miles long and cuts through the lonely American wilderness.

Almost 3,000 people walk it’s daunting dark length from end-to-end every year and from time-to-time people go missing.

Risks faced by the traveller include the American black bear, mosquitos, yellowjackets, poison ivy, biting flies and dangerous streams.

The trail is linked by camping points a day’s walk apart. Sometimes they are just clearings but they are places walkers pitch a tent, meet and swap trail stories. Knowing there is a ford ahead can make the next day safer.

Five years ago we launched commscamp on a clear blue sky excited about the power and possibility of exploring the green empty space of the internet.

This year, there was the sense that things have evolved. There was a feeling more people used the event as safety trail camp. New things to learn? Yes. But most of all a sanity check.

The world has changed and we are trying to all change with it. Fractured channels. New audiences. New demands on time. Income targets. Bad intranets. Bad comms plans. Bad managers. Not enough time. Time taken over by an emergency. Not enough budget.

Not enough regard for what we do.

There are still people looking to innovate and get good at new things. But there are less people wide-eyed at the possibility. The militant optimists from the early years have moved on. I miss them. Those that remain on the trail are quieter somehow but more determined. They know that they are still travelling through uncharted forests. Through the trees they can sometimes hear the crunch of nearby footsteps of fellow travellers. We are alone together. We know this path will take years to complete.

It’s things like Commscamp, the Public Sector Headspace Facebook group and other places that are the safe camping points to rest.

Knowing you are not alone is just as important today as it was five years ago.

Picture credit: VinceTraveller / Flickr

FIFTH LIST: 23 things and a safety net from commscamp

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A couple of days on from the 5th commscamp in Birmingham and the dust has settled a little. I’m on a train reflecting.

1. There is a need for this. The first batch of tickets went in two minutes. The second in four. That’s 70 tickets in six minutes. There isn’t a need for gimmicks. Just a room and good people.

2. This is our tribe. Someone used these words to describe the people in the room. I get that. They’re people impatient to do a better job.

3. Around three quarters of the live video session had tried live video. That’s a figure that surprised me. Last year it would have been a handful.

4. You can’t get to all the sessions you want to even when you organise the thing.

5. Cake is a force for good.

6. Kate Bentham is a force for good.

7. We are starting to be faced with the idea of talking to people in Facebook groups. But we are very nervous about using our own profiles to do this.

8. The trend in sessions seems to have evolved from tech to safety net. It is important that people have moral support. It is tough in the public sector at the moment.

9. After a major incident, you need to look after the comms team weeks and month after the event.

10. It is getting harder not easier.

11. There is still a place for print.

12. Commscamp has led to other ideas and events just like other events led to commscamp.

13. If you are not competent at video you need to be.

14. The real value of an unconference comes not on the day but in six months time.

15. The fax is more popular than the press release.

16. With live video the important thing is just to do it. You can refine and improve with experience.

17. Windows phones and blackberries don’t allow you to fully communicate.

18. Steph Gray is very quick at writing good content. An engaging post within a couple of hours.

19. Nigel Bishop takes good pictures.

20. Emma Rodgers is a good person to plan an event with.

21. Anyone can run an unconference.

22. When we started these, it felt like the war to convince people to use digital wasn’t won. Now it is. But the struggle continues against ignorance, box-ticking and bad digital just as it always has done. Are we winning? I think we are. We can look over our shoulders and see where we’ve come from. But there are battles ahead. Nirvana isn’t instant. It is hard-won.

23. The volunteers, sponsors and attendees who came and made this a success are brilliant.

24. I’m glad we tried Friday but it feels too close to the weekend and I’m not sure its the best day for the event.

The next commscamp will be in Birmingham on July 12 2018. There may be others before. You can sign-up for updates here.

FACE PALM: When is a Facebook campaign not a Facebook campaign? When it ignores people on Facebook

Almost a decade ago there was a drive to encourage people to have a say about the future of their city.

At first glance, it was bold, imaginative and ambitious with posters splashed across Birmingham. It had a catchy name. The Big City Plan.

It’s aim was to fire imaginations and to capture ideas. It had two flaws. It was written for planners and to have a say you had to send your views to one email address. All that buzz online? Ignored.

So, the Brum Bloggers group built a website with a plain English translation, captured opinion and sent them to the council themselves. Almost 300 of the 1,600 comments came from the site. Birmingham City Council managed to incorporate those comments. Eventually, the city council copied the approach which made it easier for people to make a comment and for the city council to listen.

Please speak human

Eight years on from the lessons of Big City Plan, a Facebook ad dropped into my timeline one Sunday afternoon from my local council. A good piece of targeting, I thought.

It asked me to comment on the Black Country Core Strategy. I don’t know what this means. Even after eight years in local government and being the son of a planner I don’t know what this means.

So, what would the man on the 404A guess it was? I’ve no idea.

On the site were pdfs. There is much written as to why pdfs are a bad idea. There are email addresses and a list of events. Gamely, I found a survey to comment on. But that didn’t render all that well on a mobile phone.

Please listen to people

Back on the Facebook page there was a lively debate about building houses on the green belt and a host of other things. Debate there had come alive and people were – in council speak – engaging. Or in other words, talking.

But as a resident what really got my goat was the council pages’ disclaimer half way down the thread that comments on Facebook wouldn’t be accepted. It had to be the official consultation.

Or in other words, a Facebook campaign that wouldn’t allow people to have their say on Facebook.

(Disclaimer: I worked for eight years at Walsall Council which is one of four Black Country councils behind the campaign. I have a high regard for many people who work at all four of those councils.)

Local government does a brilliant job. My council does a good job. My children go to school there. There are good parks and the roads are gritted (thank you!).

So, when I blog this, I do it with love and because I want local government to communicate better with me as someone who lives here.

Please, please, please…

So, please, have a website that speaks human.

Please call the website something more interesting than ‘core strategy.’

But above all and I really do mean this, please listen to what people say on Facebook. Particularly when your campaign is on Facebook itself.

You may need to speak truth to power on this. But fail to do this really simple step and I don’t know what you can tell people when they next tell people their council is remote and don’t care what they think.

Author Archives: Dan Slee