Public Sector Forums present PSF Buzz North East

Headed up to Newcastle today for the Public Sector Forums' event on Effective Social Media and Web 2.0 Strategies for Local Authorities - AKA PSFBuzz North East!!!

This a chance to meet up with some very inspiring, enthusiastic and dedicated local gov online people - some of whom had been at localgovcamp a few weeks ago but some of whom I had only had online conversations with so far so good to meet in person.

Oh, and the line up was pretty good too! I live blogged my notes for each session as well as I could (shaky wifi due to rampant tweeters) and will go back and try and add a sensible summary to each post. You can also catch up with the metaconference on Twitter at #psfbuzz.

Speakers for today:

• Simon Wakeman, Medway Council - Social Media: A Revolution in Local Government Communications? You can see my notes from the session or Simon has posted the presentation on his blog.
• Mike Saunt - sorry! I didn't write the title down :(
  
• Jack Pickard - Accessibility and social media
  and you can also see what Jack blogged at The Pickards
• Carl Haggerty - unblocking access to social media and creating policy / guidance
• Alistair Smith - Managing reputation online
• Stuart Harrison - Planbot / TwitterPlan
• Dave Briggs - Four steps to social media success

The whole day was a blast with the presentations being thought provoking, funny and useful in equal measure. Thanks to all involved in putting it on (PSF, Newcastle, Dave Briggs, suppliers etc). Good to see so many people there - would be great to see other events on same format in other regions :)

A few actions I have set myself after this day:

• Revisit the social media guidelines I drafted and make some changes / additions then chase to get them in place
• Start tracking the conversation happening in the online space about our organisation
• Start tracking the scope and impact of our socmed communications
• A few other things too vague to be stuck up here but have made it to the 'think on' post-it in my diary :0)
  

Alistair Smith - Managing online reputation

Post-event notes (Updated 9 July 2009):

We've been really interested in the work that Newcastle City Council have been doing for a while. They have a really good and well-followed Twitter and a good common-sense approach to listening and joining the conversation.
So it was great to be able to hear this presentation on why it's important to listen, what the danger is if you don't and how Newcastle got to where they are now.
Alistair made some really good points about online vs offline conversation and comments and shared some examples of what is happening in the online space.
Having been asked to give the rest of our public relations team a canter through social media soon there were lots of great bits in this presentation which have got me thinking about what I want to cover with our guys and how and why.
There is some good new stuff on the cards for Alistair and Newcastle and they're developing an interesting Twitter model. Looking forward to a web-friendly version of the presentation being available :)

Alistair has also blogged about his presentation.

What I wrote at the time:

- citizensheep has good flowchart for managing online reputationter
- Internets are places to talk
- Libraries with all the books on the floor
- they can say what they like online - what would you do if they said it offline down the pub etc?
- how do we control online comments?
- loose tweets sink fleets
- know what everyone is using socmed for. Don't make same mistake as habitat
- control of officers? control of councillors? example of Plymouth cllrs inappropriate tweet
- NCL - one central twitter feed. RSS news, events, jobs and events. Plus extra like the bid for the world cup.
- More ppl look at news on twitter / jobs on website
- Libraries twitter @toolibraries - library news + extras. started them off by providing content, provided training, now up to them to run.
0 @Cityeye events
- @NCL101 - customer service & local info - not final name! Run from contact centre - agents twitter enquiries! US model. (Move on from SMS tying into CRM)
- promote info from specific channels to top channels
- new ways of working - used to view it as faceless organisation - now Al is 'face of newcastle' (and epic visionary!)
- more chatty and personal. respond.
- soft launch / beta test
- new project coming with flickr - cut costs from council rather than buying in from agency. Approach local users of flickr - offer rewards for ppl willing to share pics (access to closed buildings, cover of citizen mag).
- Peter Holt - what does success look like?
- can measure in numbers - followers, click-throughs, unique visitors
- impact you have in real world lasts longer than that in the online world
- people will say bad things about you anyway - whether you are there or not!

LocalGovCamp - an unconference for local government - Birmingham 20 June 2009

Yesterday was LocalGovCamp - an unconference for local government - organised by the wonderful Dave Briggs at Fazeley Studios in Birmingham.
To be honest I had so much fun and met so many great, passionate and inspiring people; had so many great discussions; that my head is still reeling but I'm going to try and sum up what came out of the day for me.

Top five: things in my head about LocalGovCamp:

1. Yesterday was a day full of meeting very very nice people. Meeting people you tweet with a lot, about work and about things outside of work, for the first time in person is a bit like meeting a celebrity; you feel you know them yet you know you've never seen them face to face before. For me it was less like networking and more like meeting up with great friends to talk about the stuff we're passionate about (online local gov, music, real ale, cake...)
2. That (aside from the usefulness of what was discussed) having that network of people who are willing to share their experiences and epic visions of where this is all going is the best support network imaginable. Often you may be the lone voice in an organisation pushing for change or certain projects and to be able to share this with people going through the same thing is both motivating and comforting - always good to you're not the only one fighting the fight and so aren't completely off track with your thoughts!
3. There are some great projects and changes going on around the country and it is great to be able to hear about them and think about what that might suggest for our organisation. So useful to have a space to thrash out ideas, here people's experiences, lessons learnt and the possibilities for digital enablement.
4. I've been thinking for a while about a social media cafe in Derby / Derbyshire and I've come back from yesterday convinced that it would be of benefit. Not only would it be a forum for web managers / web people from each of the authorities in the area (not just local gov but the partner organisations too) to meet and chat about things but a great opportunity for us to find out about the community groups and digital business in the area too. I'm already formulating a list of things to do in order to make this happen. Luckily, yesterday gave me a chance to chat with people who also want to make this happen - so let's JFDI!!!
5. Twitter has changed my life. Without having tweeted with people on there I would probably not have found out about LocalGovCamp, might not have gone even if I did. And this also brings us back round to point one :)

So, there are the top five things in my head at the moment and beneath these are a thousand little thoughts which came out of the sessions I attended yesterday - @timdavies session on overcoming the small hurdles to social media in organisations (his notes are here and my notes are here); @paul_cole's session on listening to the conversation happening about your organisation whether you're involved or not (my notes on this session are here) and @carlhaggerty's session on the internal network pilot he's part of (some very rough notes here by me).
I hope people found the impromptu (and definitely unexpected) session that @liz_azyan and I did on academic research into local government social media useful. I hope to speak to all of the people who came along (and more) as part of my thesis research (begins January 2010). I'll try and write up notes from what we talked about in this session as soon as I can.

There are some videos by David Wilcox and photos from the day on Flickr and once again, thank you Dave for organising and thanks to the sponsors also. Really great to meet you all :)

Updated (22 June 2009): I was also interviewed by @podnosh about our use of social media in the recent election. You can see the video and post on the podnosh blog.
And there is a round up of all the stuff being said online at the LocalGovCamp blog.

Are we listening #localgovcamp

Updated (21 June 2009): I made the notes below as the session was in progress and I won't change those.

Paul hosted this session around the work going on in Derby to listen and capture the conversation's happening in the online space related to the area. Paul tracked this on mindmeister.com although the map he'd produced is not generally available yet.

He had searched across many networks, including the main online gathering spaces at the moment of Facebook and Twitter, to show which groups and individuals were participating in conversation about the area or about the authorities / public sector organisations in the city.

Potential issues around gathering this information and different methods of doing so were discussed as well as highlighting how this information can be a useful tool for showing the organisation the conversation is going to be happening with or without their involvement - at the very least they need to listen.

Discussion moved on to cover social media policy / usage and participation guidelines and the need for these given existing internet and email use policies. The discussion also covered the issues around the blurring of personal / professional identity online and what work or responsibility organisations have to make employees more aware (potential education task rather than policy task).

Really interesting discussion over a broad topic and a lot of great examples from a range of councils.

Notes taken during the session (posted 20 June 2009):

Are we listening hosted by @paul_cole

• At different places with projects and also personal social media enthusiast.
• Using mindmeister to showcase something he has developed around the subject
• Shows what they think is going on to show what they are missing out on. Started on Facebook (nodes) to show groups, pages etc to map what conversations are going on.
• Jack Pickard (@thepickards) - done something similar but less mapped. just poking around found existing groups.
• One group (in Derby) has 600 members - more than at any public meeting...are councils integrating comments into meetings / consultation
• Also mapped employee personal profiles
• Manual process.
• Brigton doing from opposite way - identify audience then go to networks to find relevant people.
• More credence to citizen led groups for citizens - more trust
• Easy to find people talking about you on Twitter and other networks.
• Houston, we have a problem - no, houston we have an opportunity.
• Can hear the discussions and then act accordingly.
• Brighton looking to recruit a social media officer.
• People are having conversations without the council - up to council to find and jump in
• Change the way the organisation is perceived.
• Wealth of information out there.
• May be communicating with one citizen at a time but all worth it
• Many organistions use Twitter etc as broadcast channel - good baby step to pursuade stakeholders to allow you to start
• Not about the technology, about confidence to have the conversation. Gradual process to build confidence.
• Small steps - but get involved. @danslee - diving in from day one like being trendy uncle break dancing at a wedding - people who can dance think it's appalling but gets others up on the floor!
• Camden started Twitter as emergency response to bad weather but from there kept it going and started being more conversational
• Just by putting the toe in the water is a move towards providing services to citizens and they can see the council is doing something - even if they're not doing much or well at first
• keep going at it, if the answer is no today, it might not be tomorrow.
• show what they are missing out on
• need to show be benefit of engagement, allow relevant employees to attend and use their learning and networking - today good example- we're all here on our day off!
• blurred lines between professional and personal relationships of social media / comms staff using networks. how much is work? what is allowed?
• are HR telling employees what they can / can't do? outside of work hours you are still representing organisation. have been sending staff off to events without being able to manage but now can see what staff are up to in their own time - managing organisation representation online
• starting to develop social media usage guidelines - updating internet / email use policy. can share our draft guidance with anyone interested. Jake Pickard interested in seeing draft policies.
• simple guidance - what's out there is public, permanent. informal relationships - if you're blogging someone to run it past. '
• under contract not to badmouth organisation - covers social media too. code of conduct. highlight this also applies online.
• how do you raise your voice as a citizen when also an employee? #staff #citizen lol
• never off duty - comments and personal pictures can be used against the organisation! can reap benefits from the flipside
• can be used by council's to convict benefit cheats - this could be concerning - invasion of privacy - but online isn't private the way most people use it!
• moral issues rather than technology issue. journalists now can do the death knock online - example of Express / Dunblane survivors
• younger people don't view privacy in the same way
• people forget and send wrong things - @glinner phone number, Croydon council on Twitter
• Channel 4 about to launch a game to educate children about privacy online
• we're set on digital engagement and moving people to online space from offline but we are still learning - how can we support and encourage when we don't fully understand the possibilities / consequences of our actions?
• unique and different channel for engagement. different audiences within the space.
• reach out to different, hard to reach audiences. Deaf community huge users of Bebo (pos. due to less constrained language). Lots of Eastern European migrants - use Facebook to keep in touch with family. Stats somewhere on demographics for networks - will try to find!
• @paul_cole started off by ward but biggest groups are emotive groups. names impact on popularity form meta-communities.
• Are same people joining many groups across networks? Are these the engaged people anyway, just using another channel?
• Mentioned our election Twitter and Facebook and how members were different - not following on both feeds except small number of people.
• Working out how to engage not just be marketed at. Have smaller feeds for specific groups.
• If all you do is RSS you will get companies, journalists etc. If you do it manually and converse you will get people engaging with you. Better response to having a voice - have a personality don't be personal! Issues around this - see old post about our Twitter.
• Who does this out of hours etc - back to the line between on / off duty being blurred!
• Lots of tools to manage - Hootsuite, Tweet Later etc...

@citizens –local government twitters

I started thinking about this after being inspired by Simon Wakeman’s and Liz Azyan’s recent posts on the whys and ways that local government is using, or could be, using Twitter. The spur into action was Twitter’s change from @replies to@mentions, leading me to spot this one of @Derbyshirecc (the twitter of the organisation for which I work and for which currently I do most of the official tweeting for).

Twitter is not RSS. Why is @DerbyshireCC on twitter if it's not about giving it a human face? *sigh* #LocalGovtFail – 1:31am Mar 14th from TweetDeck.

I think this first part of the post will probably come across as defensive. I don’t really want it to but I think it probably will.
We soft-launched on twitter on 4 March 2009. This was the first step into social media for the organisation. Sure, we have a website but we hadn’t got involved in any other networks.
As yet we’ve not publicised our twitter presence elsewhere online or offline. We’re still finding our feet. Mostly, we’re still learning from other council’s and organisations who have been on twitter for longer and who have different approaches.
Yes, most of our tweets so far could seem like an RSS feed – news, events, consultations. We split jobs off into a separate @JobsDerbyshire account (as an aside I don’t think this one will survive long term and am struggling to identify value in it).
Our intention is to start making our tweets more conversational. We’ve been watching @Dorsetforyou and like their approach although perhaps ours won’t end up being quite so chatty (not saying their approach is wrong, again just my own feeling for our organisation).
We started moving in this direction with ad hoc tweets yesterday – all related to content on our website but more conversational nevertheless.
Where we go from here or where we end up is still very much up for discussion. And all local government is in the same boat really…the general feeling seems to be that we should be getting involved in social media in order to engage with citizens (or talk to people in everyday language) but how and where we do that are still questions to which we’re all trying to find answers.
The @mention tweet is really interesting though – how would we give @Derbyshirecc a ‘human face’?
I suppose I (or another member of the online communcations team) could be the ‘face’ of the organisation and tweet conversationally with followers. There would surely have to be guidelines though of what is and isn’t appropriate to deal with in person on Twitter? Could / should a communications officer have this responsibility?
I think that if we ever do get contacted by one of our followers about a service we’ll be much better off forwarding that query onto a relevant officer (in similar fashion to contact into our call centre) rather than an online communications officer trying to answer directly. So, played out all 30,000 plus staff could need to have access to tweet to the account at various times. Apart from being logistically undoable would this multi-voiced twitter feed be anymore worthwhile than the seemingly faceless one we have now?
How else then? Perhaps the best way would be for our chief executive and leader of the council to have personal twitter streams. Would these contain personal tweets as well as highlighting news etc on our website or elsewhere? The potential here is for ghost-writing (been enough about that on Twitter recently) and possibly having tweets posted by communications officers of one ilk or other rather than the chief exec or leader themselves (I am not saying this WOULD definitely happen, merely is a possibility for any organisation). Is that really any better either?
I would certainly like to see more councillors using twitter or social media to listen to and talk with people. With county elections in June I hope social media and what use it is to them will be something that will be put on the agenda for any new as well as re-elected councillors.
At the moment I don’t think we’ve got @Derbyshirecc quite right but neither do I think we’re completely off track. Although I doubt it looks like it to our social-media-savvy citizens taking a step into the online space is big step forward and we hope to move on from here in leaps and bounds.
Perhaps it may be back to a slightly-tempered but defensive stance: if you aren’t interested, don’t listen; if you want to talk to us, please do; and if you think we could do something better, tell us!
I don't think we joined Twitter with the intention of gaining another broadcast channel although that is pretty much all we’ve done with it so far. I think it would be great if people started talking to us, about council services but also about themselves, via social media. I would love for this to be a starter in the organisation being able to be involved and work in online communities. I do question whether people want to though. In my personal life do I want to talk with my county or district council, my fire service, the police force? No more than I wanted to converse with them by phone, email or in person ie only when I want a service or something has gone wrong.
I want to spend my time talking to people who share my interests or can further my knowledge. I guess I apply some roughly Reithian values to my networks – do they inform, educate or entertain?
I would see an organisation as falling into one of the first two categories and therefore merely broadcasting at me is fine for me.
But I want to know (and I think the organisation should want to know) how people want us to engage with them on social networks, if in fact they do? It is, after all, about conversation and that takes at least two!

Coming together

I'm surprised and pleased by how this week has gone. Especially givent he sense of dread I felt on Monday with Batter Connected 2009 out and a trip to the dentist scheduled.
But we managed to raise ourselves a little in BC09 and the dental work has been put off for another time. Black Monday turned out to be merely a pale grey.
And the sun shone through the rest of the week with the green light being given to several ideas / projects the team had been putting forward for a while.
A happy ending to the week as @Derbyshirecc was launched into the Twittersphere as our first social media endeavour. Next week move two is on the cards and even though these are baby steps they feel like they have been so long coming it's hard not to feel elated!
I'm almost allowing myself to believe that we're turning a corner and all the stuff that was holding us back last year may get resolved.
Add to that the smugness I am still feeling over a marvellous result on my ' Social Psychological Theory in Computer-Mediated Communication' piece and yes, I think this week can be chalked up as a good one.