This tweet from the University of Reading either is just the right side of things or oversteps the mark.
We’ve had feedback over the last week that some people are unhappy with our plan to offer up to 14 scholarships to refugees living in the local area. To these people, we would like to say: Tough. Jog on. https://t.co/ioDLPp5crw
On the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group, there was dissenting voices between those who liked and those who think this is helping to coarsen debate.
There is no one size fits all with content. This may work in some organisations but not in others.
Using an unscientific yardstick, there are more than 5,000 likes and of the replies there was mix of comments.
So you are indifferent to the criticism or the opinion of those criticizing you, you feel no need to explain yourselves – interesting 🤣
Okay, heard the one about the unsolicted email from someone offering GDPR services?
I know. Funny, isn’t it?
Or an inbox full of emails asking you to re-sign-up to an email list?
There are changes looming with how people look after other people’s data. It’s causing a lot of people to look nervously for a golden bullet. There isn’t one, of course. You need to read some stuff on the subject youself rather than outsource it.
So, as a break from it all, here are some jokes captured from Twitter. Why a hashtag? To see if people would see the funny side of GDPR. They did. If you can’t laugh you’ll cry. The Erasure one is my favourite. How about you? I promise not to share.
That is none of your business. Data tracking is not allowed under any circumstances and the chicken has not given prior physical consent to being contacted. So you'll have no way of knowing if said chicken reached the other side.#GDPRjokes
Knock knock. Who's there? I'm asking as I need to ascertain who is attempting to gain entry to my joke. I won't use your name for any other purpose and you can ask me to forget (perhaps hit me with a stick) at any time. #gdprjokes
An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walked into a council office – to complain that they’d been identified by reference to their nationality as a result of a data breach revealing special category data #gdprjokes
A day a year local government shouts about what it does.
I raise my hat to everyone who took part in the day and created content.
Seven years ago, this was purely a Twitter thing when it started as #walsall24. Over the years the Local Government Association has got involved to support it.
But now that Twitter is the 4th most popular social platform should it just be Twitter? I’m not so sure. If it is true to its aim of reaching people to tell the story of what local government does it needs to find the best platform. Probably, this is an array of platforms.
An additional worry in a discussion on the Public Sector Facebook group is that people struggle to create the time to make #ourday really work. But anecdotally, this does work as internal comms. It also works to encourage service areas to share their stories.
Here are five pieces of content that caught my eye
Radio DJ Nick Grimshaw posting about council gritters on instagram
Nick Grimshaw has 1.3 million followers. He is from Oldham. The winner of their name-a-gritter competition was ‘Nick Grit-shaw’. So, as an Oldham boy made good he shared it with his followers attracting 30,000 likes.
Why is this good? This isn’t the council talking about what they do, it’s a Radio One DJ. That’s far cooler.
A post shared by nicholasgrimshaw (@nicholasgrimshaw) on
An interactive be-a-council-officer game
There used to be a cartoon strip called You Are the Ref where you were given a scenario and had to choose the correct outcome. Doncaster Council used Twitter to create a similar scenario only being faced with the challenge a council officer would face. It gave a taste of the difficulty council staff face.
Let’s get started.
— #OurDay in Doncaster | Story 1 (@DoncasterTales1) November 20, 2017
Why is this good? It’s not saying ‘here’s what we do.’ It asks: ‘what would you do?’
A poem set to video
There are 1,200 services that local government does. It’s hard to cover them all. But a video of just over a minute covers much of the ground. Well done Bath & North East Somerset Council.
Why is this good? It uses video so autoplays in your timeline. It covers a range of things in a short space of time.
Hello doggy
The most popular Facebook update wasn’t a council service as such but a lost dog. Of course it was. It was never going to be an engineer filling in a pothole, was it? You can see it here.
Hello, regular people
One of the benefits of #ourday is putting faces to names and to be able to tell people what they do, as this Derbyshire Dales Council tweet shows.
Busy day ahead for these 3 from our Clean & Green Team. Mick is our central litter bin emptier, while Andrew & Steve are preparing to help with the clearance of autumn leaves #ourdaypic.twitter.com/SZ1iZwehB8
Why is this good? Because it tells you who those familiar faces are and what they do.
A Periscope broadcast to explain a guided walk
South Cambridgeshire has many attractive places and guided walks encourage older people to step out. Here the council used Twitter’s live streaming app Periscope for a council worker to talk about what the scheme is.
A clip-on mic helps to improve the sound.
Why is this good? Because it is getting out of an office and experimenting with technology.
A thousand flowers are blooming in this new era of digital communications.
Amazing things are happening, new rulebooks are being written and old ones tossed away.
But if you are too busy growing roses you won’t spot the great things happening.
Or in other words, look outside your own corner of the world and you’ll find great things.
And so it is with fire and rescue services not just across the UK but across the world. I’ve done some work in the sector and got to know some people and I’ve always left with knew ideas on how to do things.
Often, people in the sector don’t realise just how great their work is. Less in number than local and central government comms people from the sector communicate to save lives and to prevent them. I’d love them to be bolder. They don’t just get you to test your smoke alarm. They save lives.
One myth exploded, though. In the UK the comms is not geared up primarily for documenting heroic rescue. Prevention is better than cure. Statistics say there were 258 fatalities in the 12-months to March 2015 and 3,225 were taken to hospital. There were almost 155,000 fires. This is the second lowest in UK history.
Fire comms people need to move from the pedestrian pace of advice to business to communicating death and sometimes the death of their own colleagues. That takes guts. Not everyone can do this.
There is a community of fire communicators
The FirePRO organisation is the umbrella group for the sector and a bright bunch they are too. But Twitter also connects them not just across the UK but far further. The fact I asked a question about best practice on a Friday night and got a pile of responses is perfect evidence. Neil Spencer from West Midlands fire describes this as a ‘can do, will do, let’s give it a try attitude.’
Here are 14 things you can learn from fire comms
#1 Using planning to get your shizzle ready
Nobody wants an emergency. But they tend to happen and when they do public sector comms people have to react. I’ve lost count of the number of blank faces in local government when I ask what they’d do if a plane crashed, a bomb went off or a tower block started to fall down. Not so fire and rescue.
“The way to sum this up quickly – and sorry to anyone who knows me because you’ll have heard me utter this phrase, annoyingly, hundreds of times before – you have to be proactive about your reactive communications.”
Lesson: Good comms planning always helps.
#2 Using Periscope for realtime situation reports
Lesson: If an incident is breaking live video from the scene to give situation reports has real value and can plug into online networks as well as media organisations.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 18-months co-delivering workshops on making effective video for comms. It teaches people to plan, edit, shoot and post video. However, in an emergency the value is not the well-shot video. The value is have video footage from that particular spot at that particular time. Why? So you can communicate with people in realtime. In the UK, there is a duty on comms people in local government, fire, police and other agencies to warn and inform.
As this US example shows, a firefighter giving a commentary or even a brief situation report – has value. Don’t forget anyone with a smartphone and the Periscope app has the ability to fill that information vacuum. Questions can also be posed by people following the stream and answered by fire crew.
In an era where video is highly sought by media organisations online to be in the frontline is priceless.
Lesson: A simple sharable hashtag can help spread a campaign.
One of the greatest uses of a hashtag by anyone in the public sector is the excellent #testittuesday tag. Started by Norfolk Fire and rescue it is that brilliant thing of basic advice shared as a hashtag. It encourages people every Tuesday to test their smoke alarm. As basic good advice it can be hard to measure the effectiveness or the fires that didn’t happen because of a test.
Lesson: Instagram can be used for soft power. Images of the work people to do interspersed with more serious messages.
Services across the world are starting to make headway with Instagram. Really, there’s no surprise. It’s not like there’s nothing to photograph. If there isn’t a fire there’s the equipment or the staff in the equipment. Kent Fire and Rescue Service excell in this area. A stream that is engaging, fun and personable people could do worse than looking at this.
A photo posted by Fire and Rescue (@kentfirerescue) on Jul 12, 2016 at 5:41am PDT
#5 Using mapping
Lesson: Maps can communicate with the media and residents and reduce avoidable contact.
Back when I was a journalist we made a round of calls to fire stations on our patch at 7.30am, 1pm and 10pm. There were six in our patch and a further 14 in surrounding areas which we sort of covered. That’s 60 calls a call.
Essex County Fire and Rescue Service have a mapping page embedded in their website which gives news of incidents with some basic details. They also post images and videos which can be used with a credit. This must cut the amount of time on routine calls. Hats off to Sarah Roberts for this.
#6 Using the social web as a firefighter and human being
Lesson: People respond to people so let your people.
One thing I’ve long argued for is for public sector people to use social media as themselves. There’s far greater cut-through. People connect better to real people than a logo. So, it’s always inspiring to see real people doing just that. Thanks to @rubonist on Twitter for flagging this.
@danslee@Rubonist I’m a big fan of keeping my community informed. This includes #media when something significant is occurring.
Lesson: Using the social web allows senior people to be visible and to listen better. It also allows partners and the organisation to better understand their thinking and priorities.
There has been a trend in recent years of senior public sector people using Twitter to engage, listen, share ideas and give some visibility to yourself.
Lesson: Embedding video to drop into people’s timelines can be a good way to communicate.
Sometimes things don’t always go to plan as this incident which saw five people die in Nechells, Birmingham. Video content posted to Twitter shared the press conference to the community. This could have been uploaded to Facebook too.
Lesson: Being creative about your communications and the channels you use can pay off.
As London Fire Brigade showed in their epic news jacking of the racy film 50 Shades of Grey imagination on comms works. A campaign followed in the wake of the film to talk about the number of times people had called for help with locked handcuffs, penis rings and other rather embarrassment-creating problems. The #50shadesofred campaign is a benchmark in public sector comms. Data driven it used a range of channels.
#10 Using data to allow people to build their own picture
Lesson: Data can be turned into something searchable to give people street-level insight.
Everyone’s experience is different. This is why it is refreshing to see West Midlands Fire Service use their incident data to allow you to search by postcode to see what incidents happened in your neighbourhood.
#11 Using Flickr as an image library
Lesson: A Flickr library can make thousands of images available for re-use.
Social photo storage site Flickr may not have the sexiness as Snapchat but as a place to be your public image library it remains peerless. There are several organisations in the UK using it well. However, the US use is the benchmark. Los Angeles Fire Department post images to the stream. They have almost 20,000 images. With an open licence anyone can use them. As the argument goes, public money paid for then so why shouldn’t with the permission of the photographer people and organisations re-use them?
#12 Using Facebook for large communities
Lesson: Facebook pages are a start but not the last word on how people can be reached on the platform.
Pages can be a useful way to have some Facebook real estate although they deal with broadcasting to small corners of the web that can be shared on. Manchester Fire and Rescue and Scottish Fire and Rescue are examples.
But to really engage, you need to use Facebook as the page to comment and add content on other pages. Or join Facebook groups as an individual.
#13 Using Facebook for niche communities
Lesson: Facebook pages for smaller communities can be effective ways of reaching them. The Polish community, maybe. Or in Biker Down‘s case motorbike riders.
Facebook has the numbers so it is worth using. Seeing as it has the numbers yo can also carve out niches where people will congregate. There were more than 5,000 serious incidents with motorbikes in 2014. I’ve long believed that the single corporate page is almost always not the answer for large organisations. There are communities within them, so plug into them. If you are a biker the Biker Down page would work.
#14 Using Facebook quizzes
Lesson: Quizes reach people. Often people who are hard to engage with.
Facebook quizzes can engage with audiences that may well be resistant to leaflets and other comms. London Fire Brigade uses them well and creates them to accompany campaigns. They’ve done them to see if people fancy being firefighters, for example. With this one, they are celebrating their 150th anniversary with helmets.
#15 Using Snapchat
Lesson: Yes, you can use Snapchat.
One of the good things about the web is coming across organisations doing good things in other countries. Take Sapeurs Pompiers Volontaires du Gard. They are a French fire brigade in Nimes in the south of the country who have an imaginative use of images on Twitter and Snapchat too.
Thanks for the input for this post from people across the Fire and Rescue comms community. In particular: Catherine Levin, Neil Spencer, Bridget Aherne, Sarah Roberts, Robert Coles, @Rubonist, Thanh Ngugen, Steven Morgan, Phillip Gillingham, Jim Williams, Pave Dhande, Leigh Holmes, Jack Grasby, Pete Richardson, Dave Walton and Dawn Whittaker.
The title I was given for the session ‘video: it’s the future’ made me think. It’s actually already here.
It’s been clear for some time that video has been getting more important.
These aren’t bold predictions from industry analysts that may or may not come off. They’re the here and now.
The four reasons for video’s rise
What has convinced me is first anecdotal data of travelling on buses and trains watching people with their mobile phones. Where once they read newspapers now they are on their phones swiping through emails, websites and social media. People’s smartphones have got more powerful. They can watch and shoot their own video. Behemoths like Facebook and Twitter fall over themselves to make video more accessible in your timeline. Besides, we are inherently lazy. We are drawn to images.
The data makes the case
All that is true and where it is confirmed is the data. Ofcom say that 66 per cent of UK adults have a smartphone and almost half are happy to watch short form video. That’s footage less than five minutes. TV is still here. So is TV news. But in the battle for your attention it is getting out-gunned by the clip of a new-born panda. No wonder BBC journalists are being taught how to make more short-form content.
People want to learn
It’s been an amazing experience co-delivering video skills for comms workshops with Steven Davies. People do want to learn and with a few basics they are off making good use of video. The barrier? Often it is the tech and time. An android or an apple device will cut it. A blackberry won’t. As you practice more the quicker you get at thinking through, creating, editing and delivering video.
But where does video go?
Convention has it that YouTube is the only show in town. That’s not the case anymore. Facebook at the moment is rewarding you for uploading video to a page by showing it to more people. Twitter joined Facebook in autoplaying video as you scroll through your timeline. It’s made it easier to post video from your phone. But the idea of making one video and posting it everywhere is dangerous. The optimum time for a Facebook video is 22 seconds and on YouTube far longer. Vine is six seconds and Instagram not much more than 10 seconds. What counts as a view is opaque. On Facebook it is three seconds and YouTube 30 seconds.
The what is next?
We’re moving as fast as the tech is moving. A few years ago watching video on your phone would have been unimaginable. Today? It’s common. Two important steps are realtime and what can be grouped together as virtual reality.
Realtime is the posting video as live. Your smartphone becomes an outside broadcasting truck and as the super-portable clip onto yourself GoPro cameras are now integrated with livestreaming Twitter app Periscope the climber livestreaming his ascent up the north face of the Eiger is now possible. Even with a smartphone you can post within minutes an Environment Agency officer talking during the floods of how the Morpeth dam was working:
Area Manager Marie Fallon has been in #Morpeth today – here she talks about the dam operating overnight last night pic.twitter.com/Z4dym0CLH5
Virtual reality is something I’ve blogged about before. It’s watching footage that sees you standing in the scene and allows you to look down and around. New York Times are pioneering new ways of storytelling.
Facebook’s 360 video allows you to watch footage on your smartphone and move it around to see a different perspective. Footage of US fighter pilots taking off show this. YouTube has also allowed a 360 video and Flickr has done something similar.
But the tech
A few years ago virtual reality could be said to be a niche. Now a Google cardboard headset costs a tenner and allows a more immersive experience. But you can watch just with your tablet or smartphone. It’s not strictly the same experience but you get a flavour.
Two helpful things
We’ve created an ever-updated resource for video and comms. You can see it here.
We also co-deliver workshops for comms people with University lecturer Steven Davies who has worked as a cameraman with BBC and as a filmmaker across the public sector.
Twitter is not the last word in digital communications and maybe it’s about time you remembered that.
There’s been a lot written just lately about how Twitter is changing.
If you’ve missed it, the way you are presented with tweets is going to change. Gone will go the timeline of most recent first. In comes a Facebook-style algorithm of things they think you’ll like first. It may be optional when first introduced. The unique 140-character limit may also go too.
Of course, being Twitter, there was a meltdown on Twitter and a hashtag #TwitterRIP.
It may be the end of Twitter. It may just evolve as Facebook has done.
But all this talk of change poses you three questions.
Where else can I now get what I get from Twitter?
As the ground shifts beneath our feet should we really be surprised?
Do I even care?
Do you care? Many people do. If you have been using the platform you will. If you won’t it won’t trouble you. But if you aren’t a bit interested in how all this will affect how you do your job, that troubles me.
Once-great platforms like Friends Reunited, AOL or MySpace have withered. Why should Twitter be any different? Besides, as broadcaster and historian Dan Snow wrote in The Guardian, if Twitter didn’t exist someone would have to invent it.
What makes this an important question to think on for UK public sector comms people is that Twitter has become hugely important. It’s precisely that the most recent tweet gets shown first that makes it useful to it. Realtime matters. What was first truly shown during the riots of 2011 was confirmed yet again this year by flooding.
But hold on. Maybe we got lazy. Maybe we just thought that Twitter was everything. So, maybe it’s actually quite healthy to rethink that.
What can do what Twitter does?
Thinking about LinkedIn. Sharing a useful link to help you with your work was one thing Twitter was brilliant at. But more and more when gathering links for comms2point0 it’s been to LinkedIn that I’ve been turning. What was once an ecosystem for grey people is now a thriving network.
Thinking about blogging. Again, LinkedIn scores well. Blogging functionality was introduced in early 2014 and engagement rates are good. Anecdotally, people are far more likely to comment and share on a post on LinkedIn than in on a blogging platform.
Thinking about email. With a decent list and decent content your organisation can duck below shifts in platform changes. Almost everyone has an email address. A cinderella platform it is quietly being effective for many places. Ask Amazon.
Thinking about other platforms. As social media grows and evolves an ecosystem of channels for sub-groups has developed. WhatsApp. Instagram. Snapchat. It means your job has got harder to understand how each works. Know enough to know when it is relevant for what you are trying to do.
Thinking about Facebook. If you want Facebook you can have Facebook. Why would you want Twitter? For organisations without a budget to advertise and reach key demographics will continue to struggle.
Thinking about serendipity. Of course, one of the great things about Twitter was the stumbling across something a friend had just shared that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It’s hard to see how this won’t be affected. Email bulletins like Nieman Lab, Feverbee or econsultancy do that for me. You’ve probably got some good ones too.
Thinking about how Twitter used to be. Back in 2008 it was an amazing place where many people were connecting for the first time. Events were organised through it and friendships grew. Much of my Facebook timeline is now those original Twitter people I’m connected to.
It’s foolish to think that disruption and change won’t stop. It will. Maybe these Twitter chances will be seismic. Maybe they won’t. But as Robert Phillips writes in ‘Trust Me: PR is Dead’ to embrace chaos is one of the most important things a 21st century comms person needs to do. So, who cares? Embrace it.
So, there we were 10 minutes before 6am at the start of #walsall24 and still not sure if it would work.
What was this? We were using Twitter to tell people a snapshot of all the things our council did in real-time over the course of 24-hours from a pothole on the A41 to a Zumba class. Nothing would be too small.
We’d got some content lined-up. Lists of scheduled work from road engineers, leisure centre programmes and had someone stationed in the social care contact centre in the small hours.
Would it work? We checked our first potential tweet and knew that it would… it was environmental health officers investigating a noisy cockerel in a built-up area. Wow. I didn’t know we did that.
From there, we took part in the first Local Government Association #ourday and hosted the first discussion of a #housingday for housing.
We’ve learned things since and from this experience here’s 12 things to help shape your day.
Routine is interesting. From the jet pilot to the parking officer, everyone thinks their job is boring and no interest to anyone else. It always fascinates other people. Find the routine and share that.
Realtime is interesting. One of the strengths of Twitter is the realtime aspect of things whether they be football results or road closures. Tell people as you do it.
Pictures work and video works better. Words of text don’t leap off the screen like an image or footage. You have a smartphone in your pocket. Use it.
Share the sweets. Let other people from across the organisation tell their stories in realtime.
Tell stories. The boiler being installed in Brown Street, Oxdown is great. The boiler being installed for Jessie Timmins who has two children aged five and nine is greater.
Get people to do something. Stories of what librarians are doing are fine. Asking people to sign-up to join the library or to take out a book is better.
Shout wider… the world is not on Twitter. So embed the content on your website, use something like storify to capture your tweets and embed it on the relevant webpage.
Shout wider… and use other platforms. There’s this amazing website called Facebook that’s doing quite well. Whats App or Snapchat too. Experiment. Don’t stand still.
Shout wider… internally. By screenshot, email, poster or telephone call. The telling of the story shouldn’t be limited to just online. Take it offline too.
Best content comes from outside the office. Encourage those people who are out and about to use social media and in places where they don’t or wouldn’t shadow them for a while. If the street cleaner clears up rubbish in an empty street at 6.12am… does she?
Use the main account as Match of the Day highlights… and use others. This is where the wider network of linked social accounts works. Let the library talk on the library, the repairs team on theirs. Use the central one to collate and share.
Build a community from it. Update your A-Z list of council accounts. Bring the people connected to them together. What worked well? What didn’t work well? Meet in a café at 4pm where they serve coffee and cake. Do it regularly.
Back in the day when the social web seemed new case studies and examples emerged like roadsigns in the fog. Rarely and eagerly sought.
Today, things are different and what was once rare is now expected. Such is the pace of change. So, here’s a crack at rounding-up some of the good things in one place before they get lost. Some you may know. Some may be new. I’ve veered away from posting the sort of content I’m helping to share on comms2point0. That’s more case studies, data and think pieces.
Celtic fans respond with cocoa pops to online Turkish fans who threaten to stab them
Turkish football fans have carved out a reputation for trouble in the past with knife attacks on rival supporters. So, when Fenerbache drew Celtic in Europe some armchair hooligans took selfies with knives threatening violence.
The response from the Celtic supporters was rather sharp. They could have threatened even greater violence in response. Instead they used the Simpsons-inspired hashtag #thatsnotaknife to respond with an arms race of their own. They took masked selfies with household objects including a spoon, a banana and a box of cocoa pops. As an example of an organic self-organised campaign it’s brilliant.
I’m really no Star Wars nerd. I really couldn’t tell you the name of the bar Hans Solo walked into in Return of the Jedi. Or was it Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? But this collection of mock retro album covers really is a fabulous thing of design.
3. Australian batsmen Chris Rodgers and Steve Smith head through the Long Room at Lord’s
Another Ashes series and another victory for England. As ever, the two sides went head-to-head ov er social media to see who could produce the best content. Video emerged as a key battleground. Here’ is a clip of the two batsmen coming off the field through the historic Long Room. It works for me for being real-time, slightly geurilla, unpolished but giving behind-the-scenes content. It was shared almost 200-times giving a tidy digital footprint.
There are two sides to the internet. The good and the bad. The Humans of New York Facebook page is everything that’s good about the internet. It started as a photography project by a photographer. As he took the pictures the powerful human stories behind them came tumbling out. Sometimes they make me laugh and sometimes cry. Always they tell a story with humanity. This summer the page has visited Pakistan and Iran. Two countries whose web presence in my timeline is shrouded in darkness. The Humans of New York page let some sunshine in.
As the Humans of New York is to cities the Homes of Football Twitter is to football. Roy Stuart Clarke has been taking pictures of the sport for more than 20 years. He’s not interested in the action. It’s what happens away from the pitch that he’s more interested in.
Back in the day you had two choices. You went to the paper shop and bought a paper and maybe they something on Stoke City. Or you used ceefax and turned to p312. It was the internet of the day and how I loved it. But then its faster and slicker younger brother the web came along and turned our heads. But a geek in a bedroom has rebuilt Ceefax and has taken a live news stream so you can watch today’s news again. Slowly.
This is as close to a perfect public sector Facebook page as its possible to get. Public servants talking like humans. There’s wit, humour and drama. All of it points towards the fact that there isn’t much crime there but if there is they are ready to strike.
As new sites are created it’s sometimes hard to keep track of ones that have been started. That great Facebook page. What was it called again? Councils across Dorset – there’s seven of them – do collaboration while others just talk about it. They have a shared website and they’ve got a shared A-Z where people can find social sites from across the region.
Access to the life under the Pyongyang regime is closely restricted. But bizarrely, one of the few routes is via Instagram. The official North Korean government account @northkorea_dprk_today is one route that’s open. Propaganda posters, pictures of crops and smiling people prevail along with lengthy narratives in support of the socialist utopia. If you want to get a flavour of what the USSR would be like on social media it’s here. A historic oddity. No pictures of starvation or opponents getting machine gunned, however.
When the RNLI go to work they do it miles from view with no-one really to see. The trouble is that people love to see what they get up to. This footage from the onboard camera is raw and unedited but was seen by almost 3,000 on the Facebook page and more via mainstream media. This demonstrates the benefit of sharing the sweets by sharing access to those on the ground as well as the usefulness of video.
Packed full of insight it is that rare thing of a free report that will help you if you work even just a little bit in digital communications.
It’s also a document that we often keen going back to so this time around we thought we’d fillet it and, because we love you, we thought we’d publish it in bite-sized chunks so it can help you too.
Much attention has been focussed on the fact that adults spend more time engaged with the media – eight hours 41 minutes – than they sleep which accounts fr eight hours 21 minutes.
More hidden in the report is the conclusion that the differing types of communicatin is leading to a generation gap. Where once post and the telephone was universal now young people only send a letter when they absolutely have to while the habit remains with older people.
The figures cover the first quarter of 2014.
An average day for a UK adult aged 16+ (selected)
2’58” watching live TV
1’19” listening to the radio.
0’47” email
0’40” recorded TV
0’36” websites or apps
0’29” phone calls
0’25” social media
0’15” newspapers (print or news website)
0’04” online news but not a news site
0’03” magazines
0’02” photo or video messaging
Popular UK social media sites
40.0 million YouTube
35.1 million Facebook
11.9 million Twitter
11.3 million LinkedIn
8.8 million Google Plus
0.9 million MySpace
0.4 million Friends Reunited
eBay overtook Amazon as the most popular retail site with 27.3 million users
Social media use by adults
2009 – 30 per cent
2010 – 40 per cent
2011 – 46 per cent
2012 – 50 per cent
2013 – 53 per cent
2014 – 54 per cent
News consumption
Television 75 per cent
Internet 41 per cent
Newspapers 40 per cent
Radio 36 per cent
General stats
Adults spend more time – eight hours 41 minutes – engaged with the media than time spent sleeping (eight hours 21 minutes.)
We are getting used to following two things at once. We may watch television and use the internet at the same time as 11 hours seven minutes worth f media is consumed in that eight hours 41 minutes.
We watch two hours 58 minutes of TV a day.
There are 83.1 mobile phones in the UK.
8 hours a month is spent on Facebook
Mail has fallen 5 per cent in 12-months
20 per cent of adults didn’t get an item of post in the last week.
77 per cent of all UK households have broadband.
79 per cent of homes have a PC or a laptop.
61 per cent of all adults own a smartphone.
57 per cent of all adults use their mobile phone to access the internet.
44 per cent of all UK households have a tablet.
60 per cent of adults say that technology confuses them.
49 per cent say technology isn’t making a difference to their lives either way.
24 per cent say technology is harming their lives.
16 per cent live in a mobile phone-only home.
Radio remains popular but is falling from 24.3 to 21.5 hours a week.
71 per cent of audio activity is radio.
2 per cent have used 3D printers.
82 per cent of households have an internet connection.
66 per cent say that they rely on the post.
Adults
46 per cent say they email fr work purposes out-of-hours.
23 per cent say they email about work while they are on holiday.
80 per cent say flexible working makes it hard to switch off.
51 minutes a day is social media use.
37 per cent of their time spent using the media is spent on watching TV.
2 per cent of their time spent using the media is spent on print media.
16 per cent of their time spent using the media is spent on text.
94 per cent watch live TV.
77 per cent use email.
71 per cent send SMS messages.
18 per cent of their time spent with the media is spent on social media.
41 per cent of adults use the internet to consume news.
Adults over 65
50 per cent overall have internet access at home.
66 per cent of adults 65 to 74 have internet access.
6 per cent of their time spent using the media is spent on print media.
49 per cent of their time spent using the media is spent on watching TV.
7 per cent of their time spent using the media is spent on text.
19 per cent play games on social media – the highest of any age group.
Young people aged 16-24-years-old
74 per cent use a social network.
4 and a half hours is the time they spend on media activity every day
If they use it they’ll spend one-and-a-half hours using social media a day.
They are watching less TV a day than they did. This has fallen to 148 minutes a day from 154
60 per cent get their news online – three times the amount of other adults.
1 per cent of their time spent using media is spent on print media.
24 per cent of their time spent using media is spent watching TV or films.
23 per cent of time spent using media is spent using text.
Young people aged 12-15
30 per cent are likely to use print media – half the adult average.
36 per cent of their media time is spent on social media – double the rate of adults.
Young people aged 6-15-years-old
60 per cent use a tablet.
75 per cent say they wouldn’t know what to do without technology.
70 per cent say they tell friends and family about new technology.
18 per cent use Snapchat.
Young people aged six-11-years-old
26 per cent of their time using the media is spent using social media.
Television stats
Digital TV take-up has risen from 84 per cent in 2008 to 95 per cent.
Smart TVs – web enabled TVs – have risen by five per centage points to 12 per cent in 12-months.
Smart TVs account for 45 per cent of TVs sold in the UK.
With social media dedicated frontline people can brilliantly provide a human face to champion the work an organisation is doing.
Morgan Bowers, Walsall Council’s senior countryside ranger, is a pioneer of this approach and has worked to innovate around how people outside the comms team in the public sector can do to really connect with people.
Seeing what she does blows away any institutional objections that comms people may have to opening up the gate to allow people outside comms to use social media. She connects using Twitter, Facebook, Scribd and a range of platforms not because they are there but because they serve a useful purpose.
Morgan is what happens when you open up social media use at an organisation to allow people to use social tools not as a one-off project but every day.
For my own part, I’m hugely proud of Morgan because I helped shape the open door access for frontline staff when I was at Walsall Council. In short, this was an appproach which saw people invited to come forward with ideas on how they could use social media. If their manager was fine and they were willing to have a chat we let people get going. One thing we did make sure of was that we got people to undergo some basic training for a couple of hours wiith a reminder that the code of conduct still applied online as it does offline. We also had six golden rules based around common sense that we asked people to abide by. Then we let them get on with it and were at the end of a phone if they needed help.
I’ve lost count of the number off times during training I’ve pointed to what Morgan is doing.
So, it was great to catch-up with her sat on a log in the middle of Merrion’s Wood surrounded with birdsong to chat to her to create a Soundcloud podcast you can hear here:
Twitter
Morgan started the @walsallwildlife Twitter account in March 2011 which has grown to 1,700 followers. She looks to update every working day and finds that pictures work well. This may be a newt survey or volunteers repairing a fence. She’ll look to respond to people and will try and answer when people have a question. For events, the real time element of Twitter works really well as well as joining in wider discussions.
With more than 300-people added to her email list people who aren’t on social media can still keep in contact. If you come to a session you can get added to the mailing list to get updates on events being staged by the Walsall Council countryside services team.
Facebook
For Morgan, the people liking her page are more from Walsall than further afield. Why? Maybe this is because Walsall people sign-up for it and when they comment thekir friends comment when they see them commenting or sharing an image. It becomes self-fulfilling but people are less inclined to click on a link to navigate away on Facebook than they are with Twitter. But they are more likely to share an image and ask what that particular plant or animal is.
Flickr
Pictures are taken by Morgan at events and while she is out and about and then posted to her own Flickr stream as a record of where and what things have been done.It builds up a useful image library not just of the places Morgan looks after but provides sharable content that can drive traffic.
Being passionate about wildlife Morgan was keen to get information out about the bee populations in Walsall and how people could help. She created a download which was titled very ambitiously The Bees of Walsall: Volume One. It got 2,000 downloads in a short space of time. If a niche subject like bees and Walsall can achieve wuite a lot in a short space of time just imagine what will happen with a more mainstream subject that people are really, really keen to hear.
Audioboo
Morgan has recorded audio trails around places like Merrions Wood in Walsall where she can record short sound clips. She makes QR codes on laminated paper cheaply and then puts them up across the wood so people with smartphones can directly access the clip. The beauty is that it is cheap to do.
What’s the downside?
Is it all good? Are there times when there is a chalk mark in the downside column? Absolutely. ForMorgan, the grey area between work and life can be a problem. She has her own Twitter account where she can talk about other things on days off. But she does often respond when someone on Friday night asks what to do with a baby bird.
So, what’s Morgan‘s return on investment?
For Morgan, the drive for using social media is not to do it for the sake of it but to connect with people. Still do the traditional commss like the press release to reach some people but overwhelmingly the web of Twitter, Facebook and email can be the way that Morgan sells out her activities and sessions which is an important way that she can quantify how effective her and her department is.
The Meteorwatch events that draws people to Walsall venues to help observe meteor showers has gone from attracting just 20 people to brining along up to 3,000 people which is a staggering figure.
A thousand flowers are blooming in this new era of digital communications.
Lesson: Yes, you can use Snapchat.
The title I was given for the session ‘video: it’s the future’ made me think. It’s actually already here.
Twitter is not the last word in digital communications and maybe it’s about time you remembered that.
