@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!

History: Part Three: Oracle vs Community

I'd explored instant messaging and blogging so where did my Internet expedition take me next? Forums...well, one forum anyway.

Offline life sort of set me off down this avenue as I got engaged and began planning for my two wedding days. Looking back it is obvious that this was probably the point at which I really began to reap the value of communicating on the Internet rather than just using it for the sake of using
it.

Wedding magazines are incredibly pricey and shows are sometimes hard to get to and don't necessarily cater for those looking to stray from the traditional path. And I didn't have any real life friends to ask for advice or recommendations being among the first of my circle of friends to tie the knot.So, online I went.

I tried all the (now) well established websites from offline wedding brands. Then I found what was to be my online home for the best part of four years (two and a half wedding planning then moving to the baby talk board).

At the time I was slightly in awe of the way you could get an answer to any question at all from the collective knowledge available through the forum. Now of course that seems almost run of the mill given the way social media is evolving but for my first experience of it there was a danger of being overwhelmed.

I shared many wedding days through that board as people revealed their plans, counted down to their big day and then posted their experience and top tips for future brides.It was easy to get recommendations and many smaller, independent retailers were members giving a greater depth to the knowledge available.

How these suppliers were allowed to use the boards led to member debate and self-policing when rules were broken.

The bad side of boards were here also. I loved using the boards and the people I spoke to regularly on there but never really stopped feeling like the new girl in class. There were definite cliques on each of the boards which sometimes verged on snobbery or rudeness.

Most of the time if you weren't in the clique or you were a newer member you just got fewer replies to your threads.

Maybe some of this was down to the sheer volume of posts going through the boards. Possibly some of it down to repetition within those threads.Possibly some of it was just pure flaming.

It was a definite community though with some boards being tidal (as weddings passed people tailed off, sometimes to reappear on the off topic or baby boards) others being a more stable forum.

And the communities supported each other...when women were scared or confused on the baby boards there were people there to offer comfort and try to advise (this could have been a real benefit in situations where a woman hadn't revealed a pregnancy in her real world).

When the 7/7 London bombings happened the off topic community set up an informal and impromptu check in for known London members. They also supported each other in the days after posting about why they thought London was great and shouldn't be abandoned because of what had happened. A milder but never-the-less modern version of Blitz-spirit.

Much of the etiquette being bandied about today for newer platforms stood back then especially the 'I'll scratch your back, if you scratch mine' way of community building. If you were an active poster who took time to share and post quality replies you were more likely to get more / higher quality / faster replies when you posted a query.

And the things people wanted to communicate about on the off topic boards haven't vastly changed either...what they're wearing, where they've been, what they're eating. All still popping up consistently and frequently on today's social media landscape.

I learnt a lot even from just lurking on those boards (I can name the designer of a dress at twenty paces and I know more about the signs from your body that baby-making is go than I care to list). I also had a lot of good conversations and genuinely cared about what happened to some of the people I shared offline life journeys with through that forum.

But, like many, I drifted away on the tide. I returned to work after having my son and my daily visits turned to weekly turned to ad hoc. Now (just two year's after my son's birth) I can't even recall which email address I used to register in order to go back and visit those boards.

Just like ICQ and Open Diary before, it seems that the boards of Hitched had served their purpose in my life and I'd once again hit the road in search of a new online space.

Death of an Avatar

It's something that has crossed my mind a few times since I've carried out signigicant portions of my life online - What would happen if I died? Or more accurately what would happen to my online self if my physical self died?

A morbid thought and one which in the past I have tried to quite quickly dismiss as a)something I hope to be a long way off from happening b)something that a grown up would know what to do about if the worse happened.

But truth is, would anyone in my immediate circle of family and friends really think about my online self if my physical self was deceased? Perhaps it is more likely that they would now than a few years ago (for instance in 2003 when I nearly died from a freak medical condition. Which is a whole other story culminating in a magazine article illustrated with this picture).

They may think of a the mainstream areas of my online life - email (do they know how many accounts I have? How many are active?), Facebook maybe. I don't think there is much hope that they would get to the next level on the list; Twitter, Plinky et al. And no hope at all that they would clear out the back of my online cupboard; abandoned MySpace account, email addresses used for specific purposes, a hardly-ever used Messenger account and list.

And this isn't to do any of the people in my life, who would also be going through the real-world process of winding up my estate, but more something that has bothered me on occasion - there is no personal history of where I've been online and the relationships I have built in these places. I have built networks of friends who I may never meet in real life but who I would want to know if I were no longer around.

I'm not feeling particularly morbid at the moment but I was interested to read about Legacy Locker - a sort of online undertaker as the article puts it. For a fee they will store details of your accounts and passwords and will provide these to a designated caretaker in the event of your death (and they need to have a copy of your death certificate delivered to their physical office before they will hand out the details).

It's an interesting concept, and one that is surely only going to become more relevant as more people socialise and carry out business online. This company can make sure your social side is covered by allowing those around you to access services through which you have made friends and also allow them access to PayPal / eBay etc and add your virtual pennies to your estate.

I don't suppose many casual internet users will think about this. Afterall,leaving your mark in the everlasting online space gives at least the appearance of immortality.

To me, a system by which your online self's estate can be wound up with that of the physical self is just another way in which online is merging with traditional offline and becoming a very real and transactionable part of everyday life.