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!

Academic research for local gov - LocalGovCamp

The power of suggestion (via Twitter) led to @liz_azyan and I hosting a session at LocalGovCamp on academic research for local government.
I may have been carried away in the moment when I agreed to do this but I think there were some useful points at the session. I didn't make any notes so this is all from memory - if anyone who attended to session wants to jump in maybe we can crowdsource the overview? :)
Many of the people who came to the session had been interviewed by Liz as part of her research but we each gave an overview of the work we are / will be doing. This lead to plenty of discussion and praise for Liz's blog LGEO Research (and that stands for Local Government Engagement Online). The overriding feeling here is that independent academic and active research is valuable to local government as a way of stepping back and explaining what you're doing and why (rather than the more practical how), having a way of seeing the bigger picture of what other people are up to and in some cases providing validation to the harder-to-convince within an organisation.
On a personal level several people said they had found being interviewed with Liz a cathartic, therapeutic experience which allowed them to re-focus their thoughts on their work.
We also discussed and explained the process of sharing the results of the research. Due to the research being part of our studies neither Liz or I will be able to share much as we go along. We both fully intend to publish and share as soon as we are able - Liz mentioned this may be early summer 2010 for her while it is likely to be early 2011 for my own research.
We also talked through my planned research and there were several people who felt that they would be interested in talking to me further about this and would be interested in the outcomes - I've certainly made a note of people I would like to talk to when I get underway!
We then returned to the place of academic and active research and how we can sustain this rather than rely on people like Liz and myself choosing it as a subject area and becoming part of the community. The funding available from the IDeA (session I missed earlier in the day) was mooted (not muted as I accidentally wrote earlier) as one of the possible sources which should be looked into, or whether an organisation like SOCITM may take up the role of carrying out independent research. The idea was tweeted and RT several times after the session and perhaps this is a discussion which needs to continue.
Altogether I found it really useful to talk through the reasons and uses of research and meet some people who I am sure I will need to speak to more as time goes on.

Picture credit: @JaduCMS

Internal networks - #localgovcamp

Updated (21 June 2009):
I admit I missed the first couple of minutes of this session (having too much fun chatting) but I am really interested in the pilot that Carl Haggerty and Rob Gray were discussing about the internal social network they have set up at Devon County Council with Blue Kiwi (please correct me if I am wrong about this!).

It's interesting to me both in a professional capacity as we'll be doing some work around internal communications / our intranet soon (ish) and also because my thesis next year is on the place of social media in local government internal communications.

It was a busy session and there was lots of great information about the reasons behind the pilot, the practicalities of setting it up and where they are now. There were lots of questions around the pilot and about internal communications in general.

I tried to make some notes at the time and I hope @liz_azyan captured some of the discussion on video as well. There is this video with Carl Haggerty and Rob Gray by David Wilcox:

Notes I made during the session (posted 20 June 2009):

• Great slides by @caralhaggerty - hoepfully these will be shared so I don't have to make too many notes. I'm having too much fun listening.
• Lots of really great suggestions backed with practical examples about how to get people internal to the organisation connecting online.
• Lead by example - great complete profiles including information on where to be found online, cvs, personal information, image, networks, where to find me online, skills etc
• Manage expectations but encourage people who are unsure to join. There is an optimum number (25-35) where a community becomes self-sufficient.
• Tell people what eblic engaging allows the system to do for them
• Coventry use Yammer internally - why not use a system that everybody already in and by default follows each other and then opts out. Saves having to rely on it self propogating
• Be great not to have to pilot but organisations don't always work like that - particularly public sector
• Make them give something up to use social media - so no more emails. @carlhaggerty does this with his team - no more email in their team! Sometimes generates social media envy, hopes pilot breaks down the barriers and answers questions while trying out new systems
• Great for early conversations
• How do you measure success?
• How do you overcome resistence to change? Nurture and support those that do adopt early, suggest people take the question / conversation into the internal network
• Currently 4 months into pilot Devon CC and Blue Kiwi
• Try and encourage people to be more informal as well as having social conversations alongside the business questions - change of culture for many public sector orgs perhaps?
• Fit in with existing internal business strategy - where there is a communication problem - is there a social media solution?
• Didn't see a lot of the benefits they have already reaped from the pilot
• Would organisation see benefit of getting 250 ppl together in a room to talk about issues?
• It's not an instant messaging service - is asynchronous. It's basically a large chat room - tells you to refresh when new information available
• Will be happy to share the results and lesson's learned
• More business conversations - not set out to replace email etc although that could be outcome!
• Is marketing to council staff based on the interests they put in their internal network profile a step too far?
• Target people who can help shape it - don't want it to be an internal version of Facebook but legitimate business tool.
• Only people with core access to business systems at the moment.
• Could be used to identify gaps in training by HR to enable more people to get involved
• Share details and skills - by having this information in the network allows HR and teams to work more efficiently and identify exisiting skill base?
• Put the network in and let the business evaluate what the benefits are...don't anticipate how this benefit each individual
• Users who are engaged and finding benefits encourage others to join and so the conversation widens and benefits and could drive change
• Middle managers important as they are vital in strategy
• There will always be those who converse more
• How much did it cost? Less than £10,000 but not much!
• Around 100 users is good number for pilot
• Deliberately seperate from ICT - intranets etc

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...

Old life vs New life

I'm currently undertaking the Digital Media and Society module as part of my masters. It's been great to get stuck into as it meets up with not only so much of what I am currently working on (online local gov) but also my undergraduate work and first industry (journalism and newspapers).
It's been good to retreive some of that undergraduate learning (hello Habermas, my old friend) and put it into context with the current state of play for both sectors.
But while all this is fascinating learning, the time has come to pick my assignment and get on with the final paper. I find myself torn between my old life and new life when it comes to assignment topics:

1. Old life: Discuss the characteristics of online news journalism, indicating where and why it differs from traditional models and practices. (You may discuss the topic either in general or with specific reference to blogs.)
2. New life: It is often claimed that digital technologies have the potential to restore ‘direct democracy’. Explain and evaluate the claim with particular reference to electoral politics.

Option one would be interesting not only as there is so much chatter about this subject at the moment but also as it would be a nice update to my undergraduate dissertation (worryingly 10-years-on).
But I already know which way I will fall. Option two it will be seeing as am in the middle of all our local election online coverage right now (perfect timing). I'm happy with my choice...but it feels a little disloyal and sad to have to choose between my old life and new life.

@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.