“When you grow up and leave school,” my headteacher Mr Stanley told me as a nine-year-old, “you’ll be using computers and you’ll have to learn how to write code.”
This was 1981. This was Leasowes Junior School, Stafford. Not Palo Alto, California. Of course he was half right but he did show me for the first time the amazing possibility computers have.
How did he do it? He showed me how to make my name march across a TV screen by writing a computer programme. My mate Nigel Adams was in the same class (he’s extreme right in the back row of this picture. I’m two to his left). He has gone onto do great things with computers in Queensland. I never wrote code again. But Mr Stanley was bang on about using computers every day at work.
A while back I heard this inspirational teacher still teaches at the school as a volunteer. Remembering his prophetic words I found myself idly tracing my life’s digital timeline. I found I could largely measure my life not in coffee spoons but the technology and the computer games and the people I played them with. That surprised me. I’m not a geek. I know them but I’m not really one.
Looking back pretty much every year I could recall something that caught my imagination. Looking at the list I’m struck by two things. The amount of games I played and the people I played them with.
My son is seven and has a laptop. I was 33 before this happens.
My learning curve started with a pocket calculator. It’s still going on.
Why is messing about important?
Because looking back the things I’ve played at and messed about with helped me learn. And what other way are Carlisle Utd going to win back-to-back European Cups?
‘Playing is learning by stealth’ is a line from the Media Snackers book ‘Zen At The Heart of Social Media.’ I rather like that.
Here’s how I learned by stealth.
16 dates from my digital timeline
1980 – Learn how to write SHELL OIL on a pocket calculator.
1981 – Nigel Adams gets a ZX 81. Mr Stanley tells us we’ll all need computers and we’ll all need to code.
1983 – Start Walton High School in Stafford. We have 10 computers amongst 900 pupils.
1986 – Play lots of Gauntlet on the BBC Micro with Mark Alden, David Bell and Ali MacCulloch.
1990 – Start University. Play lots of Kick Off 2 on the Amiga.
1994 – Play LOTS of Sega golf against Steven Pink.
1996 – Use a computer at my first journalism job.
1997 – Get a mobile phone free with something.
1999 – E-mail arrives at the Express & Star. At one screen out of 14.
2001 – Get the internet at work. Discover the Oatcake messageboard. A forum for Stoke City supporters.
2004 – Get my first computer. And the internet.
2005 – Goodbye wife. I’m playing Champ Manager for three months to lead Carlisle United to back-to-back European Cups.
2008 – Discover the social web. Join Twitter.
2009 – Go to localgovcamp in Birmingham. It changes how I think and do. Start blogging.
2010 – Help arrange a digital unconference. Do interesting things using the internet to communicate with people to explain, listen and learn.
2011 – Do interesting things to make local government communicate better using the web. Buy my son a laptop. Son beats me at Skylanders battle mode on the Wii. Feel a bit proud.
Get three things right in local government you may well be laughing: school closures, bin collections and gritting.
Those three horseman of the winter apocalypse can wreak havoc with lives.
Communicate them well and you are winning a big part of the battle.
Back in 2009, a handful of councils started to tweet when they were going out to treat the roads. Why? Because at 3am when there’s two shift workers and a drunk you need to shout about it.
Those pioneering early grit tweets opened-up a door and showed how real time information – and stories – is worth while.
By 2010 the idea had spread, thanks in part through SOCITM’s Twitter Gritter report which hailed best practice. I blogged a case study on it here.
By 2011, digital innovation looks to have taken another step forward with #wmgrit. This is a hashtag but so much more. A Cover It Live pulls Twitter Gritter tweets from eight West Midlands Councils – Birmingham, Walsall, Dudley, Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Solihull – as well as the Highways Agency which treats motorways.
The eight councils are looking to embed it in their websites and the embed code has been released for others to use.
Why does this work? Because often a journey in the West Midlands can start in one area and go through others. Travel from Telford to Dudley and you can pass through five council areas in less than 30 miles. Bigger areas like Northumberland probably don’t need this.
Giving simple real time information is a brilliant way to make life a little easier for motorists, shout alerts and lets not forget remind people what local government does for them.
Who is the brains behind this? Much kudos to the digitally-savvy Birmingham City Council press officer Geoff Coleman who has developed this idea. Geoff – who is @colebagski on Twitter – hatched the plan and got people on board.
The man is brilliant. It’s people like Geoff and his militant optimism and his spirit of innovation that makes local government such an inspiring place to work and I’ll look forward the case study Geoff writes.
Okay, so should we start to think of a world without local newspapers?
Or at any rate a place where local newspapers are no longer the only show in town?
Go to Cannock in Staffordshire and you’re closer than you think.
Gone or retreated in the past four years are the Rugeley Post, Cannock Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury.
Another of them, The Chase Post, closed this week as 45 jobs were cut from Midlands titles.
As a young man I spent some time on work experience on the Post learning the ropes.
Mike Lockley, its editor on closure, was in charge when I was there and recently celebrated 25-years at the helm.
A dynamo of a man powered by his love of a news story he was capable of a generosity of spirit to those looking to find a start in the industry. A generation of staff and work experience people have him to thank. Me included.
So do the school children who saw pink custard back on the menu after some Mike Lockley-fired Chase Post campaigning.
I have him to thank for my first front page by-line. A piece on a Cannock musician whose speculative letter to Reggie Kray resulted in an offer of money from the gangland kingpin and an offer of unspecified ‘help.’
“I was a bit worried when Reggie Kray wrote to me and offered me money,” the musician told me.
“What if he wanted a favour doing? And have you seen his writing?”
He was right. The note handed me looked like it had been written by a left handed 10-year-old and was signed chillingly ‘Your friend, Reggie Kray.’
Of course, Reggie only became ‘gangland kingpin’ in the stumbling copy that Mike re-wrote. My version was far more boring. But the cutting helped get me a job.
In a piece written a few days before closure was announced Mike celebrated 25 years in charge by writing that ‘a town without a newspaper is a town without a heart.’
So what of the future of news?
The excellent Dave Briggs, who does things with the web in local government, once rolled his eyes at me on this subject.
“The thing is Dan,” he said. “There really is nothing in life as boring as the future of news debate.”
In a sense he’s right.
Because out in the real world it’s not really an issue.
Why?
Because people are finding their own ways of getting news whether its from across the web, Facebook, Twitter or a hyperlocal blog.
Think of the now dead Football Final. As a kid the paper shop was full of blokes at 5.30pm waiting for the Pink to be delivered because they’d missed James Alexander Gordon read the final scores on Grandstand on BBC1.
If football scores have been sorted then what of news?
I’m not sure there is a golden bullet answer. As Alastair Campbell told the Express & Star which still circulates in Cannock, the news agenda today is far more fractured.
Hyperlocal blogs like Connect Cannock are part of the future, there’s no doubt about that.
So are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn streams targeted at micro audiences around a library, a piece of open space or a service area.
So, what does this mean for local government comms teams?
Once again, the need to think about what you are doing and how much resource you point at the web.
Ex-journalists have often been hired in local government press offices because they know how to write and package information for newspapers.
Many of them are changing with the changing landscape.
But as the social web grows how long is it before a blogger gets hired by a local government comms team for their ability to communicate using WordPress, Facebook and Cover It Live?
Like it or not the public sector can’t say it’s truly got social media until it’s got Facebook right.
Right now it hasn’t. All too often it’s a tumbleweed corporate page shovelling out press releases and a handful of brave people following. Often it’s nothing at all.
That’s as social as standing outside the Town Hall waiting for someone to emerge from a window with a megaphone and then disappear. Now hear this? I’d rather not, if it’s all the same.
Facebook is 800 million users and 29 million of them live in the UK.
The case for whether or not the public sector needs to use social media has been won long ago. The question is not ‘if’ but ‘how.’
Since Facebook is the largest social media platform and, as the presentation cliche goes, if it were a country it would be the fourth largest in the world.
But the fact is most people just don’t want to ‘like’ the institution. It can be seen as social suicide. But if you provide interesting, targeted, social timely content they may. A page for a specific library may work. And yes, you can follow the excellent Coventry City Council route an de-brand your page so the barrier is as low as possible as a session at Hyper WM in Warwick heard directly from Ali Hook.
For instant followers, a crisis really works. The Queensland Police Facebook page saw numbers rocket when flooding struck the state.
But as Ben Proctor in the same session said:
“For me the reluctance of people to “Like” your Council’s web page is a signal that they don’t have a real relationship with your Council. Broadly Facebook is what people use to manage their real life relationships. I don’t think the solution to this is to be found within the Facebook environment.”
It’s an interesting point worth reflecting on. You can read his full round-up of Hyper WM here.
Should we pack up and go home?
Absolutely not.
I’ve written about things local government can do elsewhere. But what you do on your page is actually a really small part of the Facebook landscape. You’ve got 500 residents signed up to your corporate page? Fantastic. Think of it in terms of people coming to your meetings it’s huge. But in a borough of 300,000 they not even one per cent of it’s population.
If you believe that your reputation is what people are saying about you in the local paper, on the radio or online then this is a question you’re going to have to face.
The conclusion is actually simple. You need to go out to the big wide world and start to talking to people on Facebook itself. Not on your corporate page but actually on Facebook itself. On the Facebook group that has been set up as a protest but is actually shouting into a void.
You need to get out of the comparable safety of the corporate Facebook page.
That’s a deeply profound step to take.
So, how do we go out onto the wilds of Facebook?
1. You can don a tin hat and go on with your own profile. But that opens the whole grey area of personal and work profile and whether or not last summer’s holiday snaps from Magaluf really create that professional air.
2. You can create a work profile. Or rather you can’t. Facebook’s terms and conditions don’t allow you to and you run the risk of having the profile and maybe any page it may administer taking down.
3. You can use Facebook as your page. If you’re an admin you have the option to use Facebook as your page to comment on other pages. That’s a brilliant piece of functionality that I just never knew existed until the excellent Ben Proctor pointed it out to me.
4. And be sensible. You’re really unlikely to have a cogent debate on cultural diversity on a far right website populated by trolls. But the single issue pressure group that’s shouting about an issue the council may not be aware of is crying out to be listened to. The Citizenship Foundation’s Michael Grimes’ one page blogger engagement guide for organisations is just as important here as it is for bloggers themselves.
But has anyone actually done this?
Case studies are thin on the ground. Al Smith’s blog on how he engaged with the regulars of the Cooperage pub on Facebook using his own profile is a good starting point. You can read it here.
Far less well known is an example of Sussex Police venturing onto Facebook to talk to worried residents who joined the ‘Make Our Streets Safer Again in Bognor Regis’ Facebook group. Julia Burns, a Sussex Police communications officer, presented what she learned at a Local Government Improvement and Delivery event in Coventry a while back.
In a nutshell, a Facebook group was launched by disaffected residents worried about their streets with more than 2,000 joining in three days. Advice from Julia was to engage on Facebook using a frontline officer’s profile. After overcoming some trepidation, fear and nervousness an officer did just that and got a positive response. The site’s admin became engaged offline with the police and her voice, and those of her group, started to get an audience.
This very necessary step all points yet again for the need for this to be properly resourced. Maybe, that means re-calibrating what you are doing as a comms team or as an organisation.
It’s temptingly lazy but wrong to think residents pictures can fill the hole left by dwindling budgets.
A couple of things have made me think.
First, basking in the afterglow of a successful project a debate started.
We’ve worked with residents to turn an empty shop window in Walsall town centre into an information point brightened up by shots from the Walsall Flickr group.
It’s a brilliantly simple idea that came from Flickr photographer Lee Jordan. I’ve written about it here and you can read Lee’s blog on it too.
Lee and others were fine about having their work used and showcased.
In response to my venturing a repeat in a different scheme one Flickr member on Twitter wrote:
“Local council have just requested use of some of my pics on Flickr for a printed guide, for a credit and linkback. I declined. Any thoughts? On one hand it may be good publicity, on the other it devalues photography. What do others think…?”
After an online debate I deliberately stepped back from, other residents talked about the benefits of photo sharing. The member changed heart and threw his hat into the ring.
Thirdly, blogger Pete Ashton invited his council to ‘f*** you’ (literally) after they once again asked to use pictures for free. This came after a shot of his which he got £50 for was used without his knowledge for a major national cultural campaign that wasn’t fully explained when he was first approached.
Fourthly, when I post an image to Flickr these days I always add a liberal creative commons image so they can be re-used as long as there is a credit and a link. I’m forever using and linking to cc images on this blog so it seems churlish not to share. So long as you are not a commercial enterprise. You can read more about creative commons here.
So, there are four views. For my money each if those are just as valid.
Why FOUR answers and they’re all right?
Because everyone’s approach is deeply personal. That’s why.
There’s no such thing as one size fits all.
Are crowd sources images a cure all for cut budgets?
No.
Don’t think that Flickr is a sweet shop full of free images that’ll solve your slashed photographic budget.
Don’t think you can wander along to Google images, right click, save and Bob’s your Uncle. Don’t ever do that.
There’s still a place for commissioned freelance photography for marketing and press shots. Not least because photographic staff on newspapers are being laid off.
There’s a place for stock photography websites such as istock.
There’s a place for searching The Commons on Flickr where scores of museums and institutions have added millions of images that can be re-used by anyone. NASA, The Smithsonian and the US Library of Congress stand out.
There’s a place too – if residents are agreeable – for their images to be used by local government. Just so long they are not taken for granted and the shots are treated with the same reverence as a very delicate vase or a signed first edition you’re borrowing for a while.
That’s why I’m not desperately keen on the approach that some councils have of creating a Flickr group where by adding you allow automatic re-use. It just doesn’t feel right.
If there’s an image a resident had taken ask nicely, explain what it’ll be used for stick to the agreement and don’t be offended if the answer is ‘no’ and if there is some cash in the budget for payment try very hard to.
‘I love newspapers,’ wrote former newspaper editor Harold Evans a while back. ‘But I’m intoxicated by the speed and possibility of the internet.’
As a former journalist I know just where he’s coming from. The social web allows you to tell your story directly and in real time to people.
I’ve been banging on for a while about real time events that use Twitter. They’re a great way to use the web and the inescapable truth is that real time conversations – a kind of linked social – are going to become more common.
We’re not far off from being routine the fly-tipped rubbish reported on Twitter will be responded to on Twitter by the council with an update from a countryside ranger also online and in real time.
It’s been really fascinating to see how different ideas have emerged with real time events.
A few weeks back I was asked to Glasgow by the excellent Public Sector Customer Services Forum to talk about them.
Was the title ‘Real Time Social Media Campaigns Can Make Routine Tasks Sexy’ a bit bold? Maybe.
What was timely as it co-incided with the Scottish local government What We Do event which saw 28 out of 32 councils take part to tweet updates.
Since then,the public sector in Norfolk have done good things with an event and Louise Kidney, a passionate innovative officer for Blackburn with Darwen has kicked about successfully the #1515gov idea. The idea is for local government officers to informally tweet what they are doing at 3.15pm every day to give a small rolling snapshot of what we do. It’s a great idea.
But most importantly, I’m a big believer that anyone can do these sorts of things. Small or big. You don’t have to have a Phd from the University of Great Online ideas first. Have a bright idea. Try it out.
It’s fascinating seeing how these platforms evolve.
I’m looking forward to updating this and speaking on the same subject at the Epic Social Media for Public Sector South West event in Exeter on Thursday December 1. You can find out more here.
Worth waiting for has been an informal project between the Walsall Flickr group and Walsall Council.
Faced with an empty Tesco supermarket in the centre of town a debate was started on how to fill it.
A chance comment from a Flickr member Lee Jordan made some time ago came to the fore. He is @reelgonekid on Twitter.
Wouldn’t it be great, he said, some time before if shots of Walsall taken and posted to Flickr were displayed in an empty shop window?
Wouldn’t that be better than having an empty shop?
So, that’s just what we did.
Walsall Council’s regeneration town centre team have Jon Burnett working to improvce the town centre. He came up with the funding and picked up the ball. The landlord was agreeable. Jon helps run @walsalltown on Twitter, by the way.
I helped Jon ask the wider Walsall Flickr group if they’d like to take part and were pleasantly surprised at the response. You can see the original conversation thread here.
More than half a dozen members submitted more than 30 shots and our print and design team who then pulled together a design with some town centre information.
We added a picture credit and a link back to the photographer’s Flickr stream. That was important.
There’s plans to redevelop the site and Primark and The Co-Operative are lined up to move in some months down the track.
When that happens the vinyl images will be taken down. But until then bright, creative people of Walsall have a chance to celebrate their work and their town.
According to a Local Data Company report there are more than 28,000 empty shops. That’s about 14 per cent of all the 202,000 shops in England, Scotland and Wales.
This isn’t an answer to all any town centre’s problems. It’s just a good thing to do to ask local people to display their work and brighten up empty shops.
LINKS
A slide show of the Walsall town centre Flickr window by Stuart Williams can be seen here.
Lee Jordan, whose inital idea it was, took a set of pics including this one.
Norfolk County Council and its partners did a rather innovative thing using Twitter recently. They told the story of five different public servants. It put a human face on what they do. I rather liked the idea. And I really liked the way they made use of Storify and Audioboo so you can catch-up. So much so I asked Norfolk County Council’s Susie Lockwood to write a guest post on how it worked and what she learned. On Twitter she is @susieinnorfolk. Here it is:
I should start by saying I’m not Dan, I’m Susie. Dan has very kindly invited me to write a guest post about a Twitter event I helped to organise last week.
I’m a media officer at Norfolk County Council and on Tuesday, 4 October we tweeted the working days of five very different frontline service areas under the hashtag #nccourday.
We took our lead from Walsall Council and other public sector tweeting pioneers and sought to increase understanding and make people feel closer to the council and its services. But we also wanted to do something a little different to what had gone before, initially because we knew we stood to get more attention for the project this way.
We decided to focus on trying to convey a day in the life of five specific teams or individuals who work for the council, all in one day, ‘Our Day’.
We felt this would give a human and engaging feel to the organisation and our tweets while also demonstrating the breadth of work we do and the different ways our employees support and serve the people of Norfolk.
Five seemed like a good number too – manageable to resource but still giving us enough scope to show how multi-faceted the council is.
So on that Tuesday, I was out in mid-Norfolk shadowing and tweeting about the working day of two of our highway rangers while some of my colleagues followed an adult social worker, a shift of fire-fighters, our biggest library and our customer service team.
I’d say this approach worked better than we could have imagined, in ways that we didn’t really consider when we decided on it, and I’ll explain why in a short while. First, so you can judge for yourself, we’ve preserved the #nccourday tweets on Storify, have a look here (and you’ll make us very happy!), you’ll find each of the five strands that we ran on Our Day separated out into individual stories. We’ve included some of the retweets, comments and questions we got – and ‘Storifying’ the tweets has made me realise just how much interaction and support we got.
So what worked well?
I think our ambition to give the council a human face, or more accurately several different human faces, really worked. We used first names of our staff where appropriate and because my colleagues and I were tweeting as observers it had the feel of being fly-on-the-wall, helped by the fact that we, the tweeters, were ‘visible’ as narrators – we thought it was important to make it clear whose perspective was being tweeted and this meant we could react and comment ourselves.
We also supplemented the ‘official’ tweets with ones from our personal accounts, still using the hashtag, and this was adopted by some other staff who were involved in or aware of the event.
You can see from Storify that we received a lot of warmth in the feedback, and we were surprised to get no negative feedback about #nccourday on Twitter whatsoever, and I think this was in no small part due to the obvious human touch that ran through it.
It was also great to run the event across three well-established Norfolk County Council Twitter accounts. @Norfolkfire tweeted the fire-fighters, @NorfolkLibs tweeted the library and @NorfolkCC tweeted the rest. This meant we could reach more people and reduce the potential for confusion and the risk of clogging up people’s feeds from one account. It also meant that members of the communications team, where I work, got the chance to work closely with those people in the fire service and library service who are responsible for their social media work, and it was brilliant to share our knowledge and work together, it’s knitted us together where before, although supportive of each other, we were pretty disparate.
We’re already talking about other ways we can continue to link up and hopefully get other partners involved too – and on this note I think holding the event engendered increased goodwill towards us on Twitter from some of our peers in Norfolk too.
One of the best outcomes of Our Day was the boost it seemed to give the staff we shadowed, and their wider teams.
We chose the five service areas because they were ‘customer-facing’ and for the breadth they demonstrated as a whole, but also because each in their own way can be misunderstood and have a bit of an image problem.
Without exception we found the teams were really pleased that their roles were considered interesting and important enough to be featured in the event. And it did the profile of the communications team and our work the world of good internally.
By the end of my day with the highway rangers they were suggesting that I should come out on a gritter with them and do something similar again while in the customer service centre some of the team have expressed an interest in shadowing members of the communications team for a day too.
It’s also worth mentioning that we got really good traditional media coverage locally for the event, which of course helped to prove its worth.
We all think we probably could have got more coverage in fact but we were on a tight deadline because we wanted to run the event to coincide with Customer Service Week, for internal rather than external communications purposes, and really only had two weeks to plan the whole event from start to finish.
But of course you can always do more and having to get on with it and not having the chance to second guess and doubt our approach too much was no bad thing in this instance.
And this brings me to the final benefit – Our Day invigorated us!
It made us believe that we can ‘do’ social media and not to be afraid of it. We had played it pretty safe up till that point and I would heartily recommend doing something along these lines if you think your council’s social media endeavours could do with a bit of a kick start. I think the success of the event, for all the reasons listed above, has given us confidence, will make us ‘think bigger’ in the future and potentially be bolder in our choices.
Would we change anything if we had our time again? Well, not much. There were minor technical problems at stages but none were catastrophic, although perhaps we would have a clearer back-up plan in place next time. There were benefits and drawbacks to tweeting three strands from the @NorfolkCC account, and at times it was probably a bit confusing to follow (this feedback from within the communications team rather than from a resident or on Twitter) so we might reconsider this approach if doing something as broad again, perhaps using more – and even personal – accounts. And it would be nice to think of a way to involve other members of staff in a future event.
One employee tweeted us to congratulate us on Our Day and said he hoped he might be allowed to tweet his working day at some point – the challenge will be not letting Twitter interfere, or appear to interfere, with the important work done by our staff but it’s definitely something we’d bear in mind.
I’ll leave you with some stats, if I may. In the week when Our Day happened the @NorfolkCC account gained about 100 followers, which is more than usual (my estimate would be 20-30 on an average week). The #nccourday hashtag was used more than 550 times, with fewer than half of these coming from the three official accounts.
Do feel free to comment below (she says, making herself at home on Dan’s blog!) with any feedback or queries, or DM me @SusieinNorfolk or ‘me and others’ on the @NorfolkCC account if you want to get in touch.
You know the good thing about listening to different voices? Sometimes you get a different perspective.
That’s certainly true of Adrian Short, a web developer, who has written two excellent posts that comms people really do need to read. The first How to Fix Council News you can read here. It deals with a frustration that very few councils do council news on the web terribly well.
At best it’s a cut and pasted press release.
The second piece from Adrian is a 12 commandments for council news. It’s good thought provoking stuff and like the first post I don’t agree with all of it there’s enough there to think and reflect about.
Here are a few extracts:
Too long, too dull and far too pleased with itself. Little more than an exercise in vanity publishing. Irrelevant to the vast majority of people.
What’s this? 400 words on a benefit fraud case that didn’t even result in a prison sentence, complete with lengthy quotations from the magistrate and the lead councillor.
Now here’s 700 words on an upgrade to the council’s IT system that won’t be noticed by a single resident.
Sadly this useful information is presented, like the rest, in a turgid press release style. Residents are asked to plough through a huge slab of words that’s hard to scan for the essential details. The text is laden with contrived quotations from people no-one knows that rarely do anything more than state the obvious. It finishes without a call to action. It’s a wonder that anyone bothers at all.
There’s more points in the second blog post of commandments:
News is for residents. Press releases are for journalists. Thou shalt mark the distinction and honour it in all thy labours.
Thy reader is not an Editor and does not require his Notes. Likewise, his news shalt end when it ends, not when he espies “ENDS”.
Every comms person should read this stuff. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, it’ll make you think.
What is true is that council news is often steeped in the traditions of print. Many press officers a drawn from newspapers which makes sense as for decades newspapers and the council newsletter have been a prime source of information. The press release is tailored for the newspaper. It has a snappy intro, a quote from the relevant elected member and notes for editors. For newspapers it works. For the web, less so.
What’s needed is one approach for print, a different approach for the web and a different approach for each social media platform.
News is print + web + social media. Each of these needs a different voice.
Trying to bolt one format onto each of those doesn’t work.
So, how long before someone gets hired for their Twitter skills alone rather than their ability to write a press release?
It’s the standard question people ask wavering at the side of the social media pool wondering whether or not to dive in on behalf of an organisation.
As they consider putting their toe in they’ll think the water will be populated by sharks.
They’re organisation will be deluged with abuse and it’ll all be their fault for having the temerity to start a Facebook page for a council. Or a museum. Or a park. Or whatever.
Maybe, it’s better just not to take the risk.
Maybe it’s a bigger risk not to dive in and swim a few strokes.
In sweariness, reality is different. Even with the weather at minus nine degrees with schools at the risk of closing the sweary ranters are pretty infrequent. I can recall two in three years looking after a corporate Facebook and Twitter.
There’s not many councils that would tear out all the phones and throw them into a skip because someone rang up and was hostile.
So, why should it be any different with Facebook and Twitter? Particularly when it’s so infrequent.
That’s not to say everyone on the internet using a corporate social media channel is sweetness and light. They’re not. But they are in the minority. It’s important to have something in place to act as a Linus blanket. Especially for the less digitally savvy members of staff who may be called upon to update and monitor a Twitter presence.
Think how your telephone policy works. Or in the front office. At the sharp end most people will be happy to talk to people if they are angry but won’t if the persopn they’re talking to swears.
So, how should you behave? For me, exactly the same as offline. Be polite and don’t get into a blazing row, for a start-off. Having a row in 140 characters is never a good idea.
Criticism is okay
Social media should not be a one way channel where you tell people about the great job you are doing. For it to work it needs to be a two way thing. People tell you if they like something. They’ll be quicker to tell you if they don’t. That’s life. The cracked pavement reported on Twitter should be listened to. The key is how you respond.
Here are two links that may be a starting point.
I’ve been meaning to blog both links for quite literally ages. But maybe that’s the point. Both stand the test of time.
What the Civil Service says:
The Home Office’s code for civil servants was shaped by Tom Watson MP when he was a minister.
Tom crowdsourced what went into the code. In other words, he asked people what should be in it. He stuck up a blog post which you can read here and shaped it after listening to opinions. The finished advice for civil servants is here.
There are five points all of which are common sense. They are:
Be credible
Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
Be consistent
Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
Be responsive
When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.
Be integrated
Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.
Be a civil servant
Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.
What the Citizenship Foundation says:
The very excellent Michael Grimes from the Citizenship Foundation drafted an engagement flow chart a while back. It stands the test of time. You can find it here.
Based on a US Air Force template it softens the language and makes it more politely Anglophile.
It follows a flow of advice on what to do and how to respond online.
Point scoring sarcasm can’t really be engaged with meaningfully, Michael says. Criticism broadly can.
If you’re working with social media as a conversational tool it’s well worth a look at and I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve recommended it to.
