PHOTO SHOP: How Flickr made a difference to an empty shop

Sometimes good things come to those who wait.

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.

GUEST POST: How Norfolk used Twitter to show a human face

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.

Links:

Storify highlights of library staff’s day: http://storify.com/norfolkcc/httpyfrogcomkjbkmwcj

Storify highlights of Norfolk Fire and Rescue’s day: http://storify.com/norfolkcc/nccourday-day-in-the-life-of-norfolks-fire-and-res

Storify highlights of a social worker’s day: http://storify.com/norfolkcc/our-day-2

Storify highlights of customer services staff’s day:  http://storify.com/norfolkcc/nccourday-day-in-the-life-of-customer-services

Storify highlights of highway ranger’s day: http://storify.com/norfolkcc/nccourday-day-in-the-life-of

Overall event highlights: http://storify.com/norfolkcc/our-day

Audioboo on how Toby became a social worker: http://audioboo.fm/boos/492638

Clare from Picture Norfolk on Audioboo: http://audioboo.fm/boos/492424-picture-norfolk-with-clare-everitt

CHANNEL SHIFT: Picking the right voice to tell the council news story

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?

Creative Commons credits

Reading newspaper http://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/4659576761/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Newspaper iphone http://www.flickr.com/photos/yjv/4123045194/

SOCIAL NATION: Further adventures with 24-hour Twitter

Like a wild flower seed a good idea can take root in unexpected places, grow and get better.

One such idea is the idea of using Twitter to tweet in real time what local government is up to.

Starting with snow, ice and grit alerts in 2009 the approach went stellar in 2010 when Greater Manchester Police tweeted calls it recieved.

As a local government approach, Walsall 24 saw a 24 hour snapshot of what local government does from crossing patrols, complaints about rats as big as badgers to missing people reported to social care staff at 1am.

As proud as I am to be involved with that project, we always hoped that a little further down the track that idea would be eclipsed by something far more impressive.

Go, Scotland!

With practically the whole of Scottish local government coming together to live tweet what it does that moment looks to arrived. And then some.

A total of 28 of 32 local councils in Scotland are taking part from noon on Tuesday September 27. You can read about it here.

It’s a fantastic achievement just to reach the start line and yet to me this is no surprise. There are some hugely talented people in Scotland. I met some of them on a trip to an LG Comms seminar in Dalkeith  near Edinburgh earlier this year.

I’m looking forward to meeting many of them again at the Public Sector Network event in Glasgow on Wednesday September 28.

It’ll be good to see how the Scottish Twitter 24 event develops. That hashtag for that is #whatwedo.

Go, Bracknell!

It’s also brilliant to see Bracknell Forest Council in Southern England look to stage a 24 hour event using 140 character updates. On Monday September 26 using the hashtag #yourbfc for Your Bracknell Forest Council. The single council approach definitely still works and the benefits both internally and for Bracknell residents in knowing more about what their council does will be worth it. You can read more here.

Should real time Twitter only be used on large scale 24 hour events? Hell, no although there’s a place for it. I’m convinced the approach can work on a smaller level and become part of the comms mix routinely. In other words, it can become something that’s part of everyday use.

For example, if you’re looking to explain a new traffic scheme, yes write the press release but also walk the route with the engineers, tweet in real time and take pictures or video footage to help explain the project.

Curating and storing 

The one thing I’d always suggest would be to find a way to store and preserve some of the content.

There was some recent research that showed the lifespan of a tweet to be three hours. Something like Storify can preserve what you’ve produced as well as allowing non-Twitter users to see what you’re up to. This is a Storify from Walsall 100.

Some other useful linked social events

Water Aid 24 Saw a water charity span the globe from Australia to Zambia over a 24 hour period to tweet from the frontline as well as from its support centres. It’s something I blogged about before. The press release is here. The piece in Brand Republic is here.

Shropshire 360 Saw Shropshire County Council tweet over the course of a week focussing on different areas of what it does every day. Press release.

Walsall 100 Saw West Midlands Police join with Walsall Council and public sector partners to tweet on topics over a seven day period. This covered a police initiative against errant drivers to a Q&A with regeneration staff LGC Plus, council web page, blog on the aims, council website, residents’ local history blog,

Mole Vale District Council during #molevalley15 became the first district council to use the linked social approach and tweeted day-to-day tasks. They reached 3,000 people against a following list of 300: Press release.

RSPCA the animal charity staged a 24 hour Twitter #rspca247 event to highlight the day-to-day tasks it does. Sky News.

Tameside Council. 24 hour Twitter in June 2011 focussing on day-to-day tasks. Council press release,  Manchester Evening News, The Guardian.

BRILLIANT: A new Flickr group for local government

It’s quite mad to think that there wasn’t a Flickr group for local government.

Snow ploughs? Yes. There’s two groups. There’s more you can shake a stick at for  libraries and museums but there was nothing for the overall umbrella institution of local government.

So, after a bit of messing about there’s now the Local Government Does Brilliant Things Flickr group.  Feel free to have a nose around and explore it.

What’s there? A whole array. This Japanese election poster with a man and a lapdog is stunning. So is Brian doing the bins. And as for the Korean school dinner… that’s about as far away from the pink custard of my school days as it’s possible to get.

Amazingly, after two weeks there’s now more than 400 images posted to the new group from several dozen Flickr streams. The excellent US blogger, Gov 20 Radio host, Flickr user and advocate for Nation Builder Adriel Hampton has got behind it too with this blog post which is rather great to see.

What is Flickr?

It’s a social photography website that people, clubs and organisations have been using in growing numbers. Or six billion to be exact. That’s the number of images uploaded so far.

You join and upload images and you can post them to an array of different groups with a common theme.

Yes, local government can be a frustrating institution at times and when it’s done badly it can be as horrid as the little girl in the story. But even it’s fiercest critic must admit that local government does some really good things. It’s by celebrating them that we ensure it’ll be around in the future.

Celebrate the routine stuff…

I’m becoming increasingly interested in the routine things that local government does. We’re hopeless at shouting about the day-to-day things that get taken for granted. That’s the play equipment, the park, the roads we drive on  the school bus or 700 other services.

It’s fascinating to look through what’s been posted to the local government Flickr pool so far to see shots of routine tasks being done elsewhere in the world.

Yes, there’s a place for the set piece media ribbon cutting shot. But the routine shots of people just doing everyday things for me are what really stand out. All to often what we think is everyday is actually a really vital service to someone else’s parents.

So, you’re no David Bailey. What can you do?

It would be really fantastic if you could post some too. They really don’t have to be a staggeringly good quality. A camera phone will do.

Just so long as there’s something of local government in them.


ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA: ‘Yes, but what happens if people shout at us?’

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:

    1. Be credible
      • Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
    2. Be consistent
      • Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
    3. Be responsive
      • When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.
    4. Be integrated
      • Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.
    5. 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.

Creative commons credits:

Swimming pool: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/3837864998/sizes/z/in/photostream/

FACING UP: Twelve ways local government can use Facebook

Amazingly, there are two and a half times as many people in the UK registered on Facebook than buy a daily paper. 

That’s a 29 million versus 12 million split. Even more astonishing is how poor local government is at connecting with its residents and what meagre resources it devotes to it.It’s an after thought when it should be part of what we do.

Look around for really good case studies and you start to struggle. Yes, there’s Coventry City Council’s logo-free Facebook pagewith 19,000 followers. That aside it’s slim pickings.

Should local government use Facebook?

Absolutely. I’ve blogged before on how to see how many Facebook-registered people there are in your area. You can read it here. Using Facebook is a way of sending relevant contentinto people’s streams. They may not buy a newspaper. A regular Facebook user may check the site two or three times a day to see what’s new.

Why wouldn’t you want to make contact like this?

1. Because lots of people use it.
2. Because Facebook is the world’s 4th largest site in the world.
3. Because if that’s people’s platform of choice then we should stop thinking it’s still 1985 and talk to people right there.

There’s two ways to use it.

One is to build things and hope people come. The other is to go out and talk to people on Facebook pages and groups they’ve created themselves. That’s something that the public sector is astonishingly bad at.

Aside from Al Smith’s poston how he used his own profile to talk to people campaigning to save the Cooperage pub in Newcastle-upon-Tyne there’s not much out there.

How do you get started?

Organisations are generally driven by carrot and stick to take out a Facebook page. You’ll need a personal profile to do this. That’s simple to create. Once you’ve create the page you can invite your friends and colleagues to ‘like’ it. Once they do that you can selectively grant admin rights to other specific individuals. The stick? If you don’t create a page and create a profile instead you run the risk of getting shut down for violating terms and conditions.

That’s never good.

The carrot? As an admin they’ll give you a barrage of stats on how many page impressions you’ll have, how many people you have ‘liking’ it, where they are from. It’s all good stuff. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to take out a Facebook page. It’s much harderto use it constructively. Poor use and you’ll do damage to your reputation.

There are three things you’ll need to remember creating a Facebook page

1. Create several admins so you can share the burden.
2. Update two or three times a day and no more. People get a bit fed-up of lots of noise.
3. If people post a question or a comment, try get back as quickly as possible.Within 24 hours at most. Live with criticism. Don’t delete it but do so if people shout and swear.

But that’s the brass tacks. What about the ways to use Facebook? Should you look outside the public sector for what works? Definitely.

Should there just be one Facebook page in your organisation?

It’s a regular question and often posed by comms people more keen on keeping control of the message than actually communicating.

Please don’t do this. Please.

There are 700 services provided by local government. People are busy. Think about you. Do you want to hear about all of them? Probably not. When you are looking for a leisure event do you google it? Probably. So do so with Facebook. Yes, have a central page. But also have one for a library. Or for a museum too. Or a festival.

TWELVE ways to use Facebook

1. The Tumbleweed Anti-Social Broadcast Page.

You think Facebook is important. You don’t know why. You create something, put the logo on your website and flyers and then every now and then you post a link to a press release. You’ll ignore comments. Then you sit back and wonder why it’s not working. We’ve all seen it. Don’t do it.

Think about how you’ll make it work before you create anything.

2. The Good Corporate Page.

Ally Hook at Coventry City Council wrote the rule book on this. She created a Facebook page called simply ‘Coventry’ with a nice picture of the city. Why? Because people would be happier signing up to the place where they live over the institution that governs it.

It’s the model we shamelessly copied at Walsall Council for Our Walsall which you can see here.

Worcester City Council have 4,000 likes and follow the Coventry model. It’s really rather good.The content is lively too. A picture taken from the Cathedral spire the day before was posted generating 34 comments. That’s good stuff.

The City of Manor, Texas takes a more formal approach but images, warnings, links and the freedom for people to post on the wall makes this an engaging place.

Size does not matter. Shrewsbury Town Council has a Facebook page with regular content.

But let’s not just look at local government. Whatever you may think of global politics, the US Marines have 1.5 million people liking their page. Bite size updates make it work. They make use of YouTube content really well. You can find their page here.

3. The Page Where They Want You To Just Connect

Coca Cola plough massive resources into social media. Their Facebook page is ‘liked’ by 33.6 million people. They don’t bombard people with messages to buy the stuff. They allow people to talk about the stuff. It was actually created by fans and became the official page when Coke woke up to its success.

On the HP Sauce page , the discussion is brown sauce or not on a sausage sandwich. They just want to connect for fun and from that more interesting things can happen .

4. The Page That Consults People

When Iceland decided to re-write their constitution they turned to Facebook. They could have posted a link to a huge downloadable document that only policy wonks would have read. They didn’t. Instead they asked simple bite size questions so people could spare a few minutes to answer. More than 4,400 have signed up to give feedback. In a country of 250,000 that’s good going. You can follow it here. You can read more here.

5. The Page For a Venue

Walsall in the West Midlands has a 200-year-old heritage of leather working. The Queen’s saddles are made there and dozens of companies can still be found that rely on it. There is a community of people who follow We Love Walsall Leather Museum and the Facebook page targets them specifically. Pictures, events and other chatty updates are posted.

The Library of Birmingham from Birmingham City Council have an engaging Facebook presence with YouTube clips and other content. All the more impressive is that it doesn’t open until 2013.

Tintagel Castle, an English Heritage property, shows how a venue can work on Facebook. More than 700 like it and get updates on what is going on. They also ran a Facebook-only competition to allow people to post ideas on what they’d like to do with private access. The most likes won the access.

6. The Page For Countryside

National Parks across Britain are excellent at this. For example, the I Love the Lake District National Park site sends you updates on what to look out for and user generated shots. It has a human touch and content that appeals. Especially when you’ve just been stuck in commuter traffic.

Stirling Council have adopted this tack too. Their page highlights work they do on their patch

7. The Page For A Service Area

Museums, countryside and libraries can pull this off. Just about. Otherwise the danger can be a watered down thing. There are more than 500 following Derbyshire libraries 

In the US in Virginia, Fairfax County’s Public Schools have a whopping 20,000 people liking it. That’s an immense number. This is the equivalent of an education department having a Facebook profile. It works too. There are daily updates and – get this – updates in the holidays too. You can see it here.

8. The Page That’s Actually A Corporate Website

The Mayor of Takeo got fed-up at people leaving anonymous feedback. So fed-up he moved his council’s entire website to Facebook.

Naoyuki Miyaguchi, a city spokesman, said: “There were some doubts at first when we were thinking of changing to Facebook because it could only be accessed by those who had an account. For this reason, there was some opposition as it would limit access to city information for some citizens. But since we were considering the shift, Facebook changed its rules to make pages viewable to anybody, and from that point on it was a go.”

Over 6,500 people like the page from 50,000 residents. US local government blogger Ari Herzog has written a fine post on it here. 

Is that a bit extreme? Darn right. You’re at risk of Facebook taking down your site and losing piles of data. But it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

9. The Page To Report Stuff

Lothian and Borders police want to use the popularity of Facebook to encourage people to report crime via an ad. Anonymously if they so wish.
In the US, an app is being used in Burleson, Texas where residents can report non-emergency issues. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

10. The Page Designed Around the User (Not the Service Area)

Lots of web presences are built around the service area. Not the user. That can be daft. Who wants to ‘like’ Street Scene?

This is the thinking behind Shropshire Family Info from Shropshire County Council. Put updates in the one place for parents and carers. It really is that simple and hats off to them. You can see it here.

As an experiment in this area myself and one of our marketing officers at Walsall Council Ian Morton-Jones have started the page We Love Walsall Children’s Events. This is to be a place for parents to follow to get updates that can help keep their children busy in the holidays. It may be museums, libraries, events or countryside. If there is relevant information it gets posted here. That’s the theory, anyway. It’s here.

11. The Page For An Individual

Walsall Council countryside ranger Morgan Bowers has been updating Facebook alongside Twitter and Flickr for more than six months. It’s a way of putting a human face on a service.

12. The Page For An Event

The one-off event can work well. Stirling Council’s Off The Page Festival celebrates their sixth annual event..

An extension of this is a Facebook page for events as a whole. This is what Gedling Borough Council do. They’re from Nottinghamshire.

So what does it all mean?

The good thing about all this is that we’ve only just started and the really useful ways to use Facebook are emerging from bright people within service areas themselves. That’s only something that should be encouraged.

Big thank you to the following who suggested pages for this blog: Corrine Douglas, Kim Stephens, James Hall, Justin Griggs, Kate Bentham, Peter Cruickshank, Steph Thorpe and Asset Transfer Unit.


EMERGENCY COMMS: ‘Whatever you do, put social media in your emergency plan.’

Fire, storm, pestilence or just a burst water main, in an emergency local government can swing into action.

In the UK it’s known as emergency planning and in the US emergency management. Whichever part of the world you are in it’s the part of the public sector that has plans for every eventuality.

For a comms person, it’s often only when there’s a problem you’ll speak to the emergency planners. Don’t let that happe  n. Make a pact with yourself.  Go and speak to them as soon as you can and sort out what to do with social media. Here is why.

At localgovcamp in Birmingham this year Ben Proctor, who runs the Like A Word consultancy, ran an excellent session on emergency planning and the social web. It’s something he writes about well too. His blog is well worth a look.

Catherine Howe, who does things with Public I, made the closing but clear point: “Whatever you do put social media in your emergency plan.”

Of course, I reflected smugly, my council has. There’s 3,000 people following the our corporate Twitter stream. What could go wrong?

Overnight there had been a minor incident that I’d missed on my Blackberry which had ran flat. Thankfully, it wasn’t more serious. But it showed very clearly where we’re blindsided.

If only comms people have the keys to the Facebook and Twitter things can easily fall down. What’s the answer? Go to where the audience is. Give them access to the corporate account. They’re generally very sensible people and know what to say. If the situation develops you can always step in.

So, what sort of role does social media play in an emergency?

In a true disaster the web falls down before SMS. But people are instinctively running to it.

A tornado in Joplin – In in the Mid West US town when a milewide tornado struck, the community rallied by building their own space on the web. At first this was to search for missing people and then as the disaster turned to recovery it charted that phase too. The moral? People have the tools like this or this community Facebook page to build things for themselves. They’re not waiting for the council to do it. They just will.


The EDL in Birmingham – When the far right English Defence League first rallied they used Twitter to spread misinformation. The police monitored by were powerless.  Third time they came they had an officer monitoring Twitter, Mark Payne checking each claim and then re-butting within minutes point by point.

Facebook in Queensland – When floods struck 3,000 comments a day were posted on the Queensland Police site. It took a 24-hour effort to monitor, explain and rebuff wild rumour.

The report into the Queendsland event singled out social media as part of a range of channels to take action with. Ben Proctor has blogged on it here. A key finding is to talk, prepare and practice. That’s as just as much relevant to comms people as anyone.

An interim report into the Queensland flood made a series of comments and recommendations. On social media it stated:

“As it may be possible for the public to post information directly to an official social media site there are concerns that a member of the public may post false information. For example, inaccurate information was posted on the Western Downs Regional Facebook page. However, where there are enough staff to monitor content social media can be a useful tool to respond to rumours in the community.”

Seven things comms people need to know

1. Share the keys – Give emergency planning an awareness of what social media is, encourage them to monitor and respond and give them the keys to the corporate feeds.

2. You can’t control the message – As if the main message of our times is needed to be repeated.

3. There’s a shorter turn around time to respond – Speed may be of the essence.

4. It’s not just about social media – It’s one channel of several. Important and growing but don’t think that everyone will be on Facebook.

5. It’s good for combating rumours – As a comms person that can save yourself time.

6. Journalists will follow and like – You can save time and effort by creating channels of communications.

7. If the balloon goes up it’ll take resources – Social media is free is a bit of a myth. The platform is free. The time spent to manage it, listen and update isn’t. The lessons of Queensland are that it can take up resources. But you do get valuable return on investment for doing so. Regular monitoring when there is a crisis is absolutely critical. Don’t link to a press release and forget about it.

Creative commons

Fire http://www.flickr.com/photos/danieldslee/5075758029/sizes/m/in/photostream/

SEVEN LINKS: Five blogs to delve into

A rather wonderful thing happened the other day. Someone who I’ve never met recommended my blog as part of a pass it forward sort of project.

Seven links sees bloggers talk about things they’ve learned from what they’ve posted and nominate five bloggers to do the same. The result is some learning and picking up some other blogs you may not have come across before.

Andy Simcox, the blogger who nominated me, works in local government. He writes about things here. He writes with honesty about often personal things. It’s good stuff.

So, to pass it forward here are seven things I’ve learned and five bloggers I’d recommend and like to know what makes them tick too. I could have listed about 15 quite easily from the blogroll on the right but ere are five.

My most beautiful post

Being a news journalist was easy. You asked who, when, where and why and invariably wrote it in the first par. “Two people were taken to hospital when three cars collided on the M6 in West Bromwich today.” Easy. What I found difficult were features that need a different approach. The only feature I wrote in 12 years as a print journalist I could hang my hat on was about my grandfather’s death in the First World War. Not on the glamorous Western Front but of dysentry in Mesopotamia, near Basra in modern day Iraq.

With Remembrance Day approaching I told that tale again as a blog. It’s a desperately sad story that knocked me sideways to write and involved a death in the First World War and the domino consequences that ended with a mother abandoning her children to search bins for food. It’s here.

My most popular post

Showing colleagues Twitter I posted a request to people who followed me for advice. It came back in unexpected numbers and quality. Rather than cast it to the wind I collected it, blogged it and thought no more about it.

Things started to get a little mad when it wa spicked up by @twitter and reposted. Overnight, 8,000 people clicked through to read it and overall 22,000 have. More than 700 people have retweeted it on Twitter. Mad, really.

The moral? Do and share and there’s unexpected consequences.

My most controversial post

Writing about things in  local government isn’t actually that controversial. But Andy Mabbett once got quite animated about what we did with opening-up museums to Walsall Flickr group members. The museum service wanted people to sign a quite draconian permissions sheet based on a neighbouring council’s. The hugely talented Steph Jennings worked to draw-up a compromise that left everyone happy. Andy argued that it should have gone further. It’s not exactly the Rumble in the Jungle but you can read it here.  What did I learn? People don’t have to agree with everything you say and that’s a good thing. It makes you think.

My most helpful post

There motivation for this blog was to share what we’d done at Walsall Council. The most important step we’d taken was the route we’d taken to secure a green light. This boiled down to eight steps. It was written with someone from Lancashire in mind who at UK Govcamp made a plea for help. What did I learn? It’s good to share.

A post whose success surprises me

The post on helping colleagues understanding Twitter that’s also my most popular. It was a bit surprising was that.

A post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

There’s some stinkers that don’t deserve a wider audience. This one about what Turkish football team Galatasaray can teach local government probably deserves a wider re-pimp.

The post I am most proud of

Not for it’s immediate impact. A handful of people read it. But the post wondering aloud a conversation I’d had with Si Whitehouse if we should have a hyperlocalgovcamp led to some good things that I’m hugely proud we did. It’s here.  I suppose that’s the point. It’s not the numbers. It’s what a handful of readers can do with it that counts.

Here are five – from lots – that I rate highly and really do urge you explore:

Chie Elliott is brilliant. There is a tonne of good learning on her blog Blaggetty, Blogetty Bragitee. As a publishing person who packed it in to get NCTJ training as a journalist she has a different perspective on news and the media. She’s always bang on the money, always engaging and always thoughtful. That she is job hunting means she is writing a blog of quiet rage at the system she finds herself. Some people sink when hit with the invisible brick walls of the JobCentre. Not Chie. You can read here unemployment blog here.

I’ve probably learned more from Liz Azyan than any other local government blogger. There is more pearls of wisdom per square inch at her blog LGEO Research than almost anywhere else online. The other week I dropped her an email on behalf of a colleague asking her for 100 words on her thoughts on user testing websites. She didn’t just reply to the email, she wrote a blog on it. That one act sums up the generosity of spirit and willingness to share that endlessly inspires me about the local government community online.

When I was starting to get my head around social media there were a few people I badgered for help. I rang them up in the manner of a cold caller. Alastair Smith patiently listened and explained. He was the first person to tell me about Flickr. His work at Newcastle City Council has been trailblazing and his blog on engaging with an angry community on Facebook set a standard. You can read him here  and now he’s back in local government I’m kinda hoping he’ll pick up the blogging baton again.

Jim Garrow works in emergency management in Philadelphia. That’s emergency planning in the UK.  But wait. It’s not a blog about hi-vis jackets and tabards. It’s big picture stuff. There isn’t a blog like it for stopping me in my tracks and making me think. You can read it here and I urge you to.

Kate Hughes is doing some brilliant stuff quietly in a corner of the Black Country. As a press officer for Wolverhampton Homes she is innovating in an area where you wouldn’t imagine there is the ability to innovate. If it works in Wolvo, it can work anywhere. You can read her blog here.

Over to you I think …

Creative commons credits

Localgovcamp 1gl http://www.flickr.com/photos/1gl/5845575017/sizes/m/in/pool-1155288@N23/

The way I see it http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/2970736472/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Stop Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org   http://www.flickr.com/photos/erica_marshall/2669075603/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Pots of colour http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucynieto/2263693205/sizes/z/in/photostream/

CIVIC SOCIAL: How digital tools can help connect a Mayor

Mayors in Walsall go back to the 13th century. Yes, children it’s safe to say that even pre-dates Friends Reunited.

What helped spread the word then was probably a Town Crier with the useful profile of having a loud voice in the marketplace where people gathered.

Today, the landscape has changed. But a voice in the place where people gather is still important.

Since May when Cllr Garry Perry was appointed to the post he’s been successfully experimenting with digital channels. As a 33-year-old he’s the borough’s youngest ever appointment. As a Facebook native and as at home there as in the Council Chamber it made sense for him to experiment using the channel.

He’s also used Twitter and connected with the Walsall Flickr group. Jokingly, Cllr Perry has spoken about creating the Mayor’s Parlour as a location on Foursquare so he can become Mayor of that too.

But is this just a gimmick? Or have lessons been learned?

Facebook

A Facebook page was created for the Mayor of Walsall. The idea was to allow the Mayor to post updates and pictures from his phone when out and about. The aim was conversational. It also helps give an idea of where the Mayor had been and the people he’d met. It’s not a dusty civic position. It’s carried out by a person. For an organisation for people.

The stats speak for themselves. More than 160 people have signed up in about six weeks. There has been more than 8,000 page views in a four week period and people have responded posting enthusiastic comments. It’s clear that successful events also draw-in enthusiasm from residents.

The events functionality also allows a good way to flag up fundraisers.

As the Mayor of Walsall Cllr Perry says: “It’s been brilliant for getting feedback from people and for connecting with them. When you’re at an event you can post that you’ve been there with a picture. There’s still a tremendous respect for the office of Mayor and it’s good to be able to meet people. Using things like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr have really helped reach a different audience.”

Twitter

More than 180 people and organisations have signed-up with updates of visits and fundraising. Cllr Perry’s sporadic previous account was re-named @mayorofwalsall.

Flickr 

A Flickr meet was staged where members of the excellent Walsall Flickr group  came along to the Mayor’s Parlour and Council House one Saturday morning.

More than 200 shots were posted by six photographers to a specially created group to capture shots for the day. It was a chance for Walsall people to visit the 1905 building and meet the Mayor. As a visit it was a success. Those who came took some excellent pictures and Cllr Perry’s – and the Mayoress’ – easy going and informal approach saw the council giving a good account of itself. Staging a Flickr meet at a council venue is something I’ve blogged about before.

As a spin-off, and by no means the purpose of the event, the photographers were happy for the authority to re-use the posted pics for the website or for other marketing. That’s a good thing whichever way you look at it. You can see the pictures here.

Press releases

Yes, we’ll do the traditional things too for old media too. That’s part of the repertoire.

Lessons to learn

1. It can put a human face on an organisation. As Pc Rich Stanley does for West Midlands Police in Walsall so Cllr Perry does for Walsall Council. They use social media to put a human face on the organisation that can sometimes be seen as remote.

2. It depends on the individual. A social mayor who is at home with the channels or willing to learn will prosper. A remote character with few social graces and mistrust of technology won’t.

3. Little and often works. Updates on the routine day-to-day tasks work really well. Don’t think you need to crack the front page of the local paper with every update.

4. It works best if the Mayor writes it. A voice can be unique and despite being a fairly politically neutral post it’s not for council officers to update on people’s behalf.

5. Be prepared to JFDI.  Not everything with social media has a 100-year-old record to it. That’s a given. So just try things out.

Pic credit: Swissrolli (c) http://www.flickr.com/photos/swissrolli/5989959370/in/photostream