Consumers vs Citizens – Democratic Society, Four rules for councils’ democratisation work

I’ve just seen an excellent presentation by the Democratic Society on “Four rules for councils’ democratisation work”. It has got me thinking about a few things so i’m going to share some random comments and observations:

First and foremost, we need to remove these “titles” (Consumer, Customer Citizen, Service User etc) and start to focus on PEOPLE. We can use the titles only to help guide us in our method and approach, but we should stop referring to People in those ways as it only confuses us and the people we engage with.

In Local Government we need to recognise (and most of us do) that People have different roles when interacting or engaging with us. They can be either be a consumer of services via websites or contact centres, face to face etc OR they can be citizens who we need to involve  in the design and shaping of what those services look like and feel like in the first place.

Organisations need to refocus to ensure that People to People connections and relationships are understood. This will inevitably have a huge transformational impact on the way we structure our services and how we involve people as well as the internal structures and networks that exist, not just in a single organisation but across the public sector as a whole.

Ok, random thoughts over – check out the presentation and see what you think?

 

 

Twitter’s New Retweet Feature

I logged onto twitter this morning (on the web for a change) and i had been selected to be part of a new “retweet” function.

This is what i saw:

I actually think this is quite a nice feature, and something which i thought should have been developed some time ago. After all one of the key features of the mobile applications for iPhone, blackberry and others have the retweet feature as a key part of the interface.

The biggest change though for me as a beta user is that i won’t be default see someone i follow with the “RT” at the start of their tweet i see the originator of the tweet – like this:

Now i really like this as it gives the originator more focus and more presence within other peoples networks and therefore could allow more connections and different connections to start happening.

It also has a cool feature which shows how many people have retweeted the first tweet – check out the bit next to the “retweeted by PersonYouKnow” it also states “and 2 others”

I’m already thinking this is a cool little metric tool for tweets and might replace the need to search for “RT” in twitter search. You would still however need to maintain your “listening” for reactions to the tweets of course.

Time will of course tell if others think this is a useful tool as well. I’m certainly going to make some use of it (when i use the web interface of course).

 

The Three Business Opportunities of Social Media/Software

I’ve been attending the Gartner Symposium Event in Cannes this week and my brain has been bombarded with so much information on so many topics and I won’t be using this post to share all I learnt but instead i’ll share some snippets around social media and in particular the Business Use of Social Media/Software.

It wasn’t a surprise to me to hear so much about the benefits of social media at a technology event, but what did surprise me was that there wasn’t many people there who actually used it.  There was a symposium tweet-up arranged via twitter for the Wednesday and only 6 people attended  -  yes i was one of them, so a lot of work to do in terms of awareness and understanding if anyone thinks this stuff will impact the business model. You can follow or catch up on the tweets from the Gartner Symposium events on twitter.

So on that note i thought it would be a good idea to start to bring the issue of business use into some context for people based on a number of Gartner sessions i attended and one in particular facilitated by a very good analyst Ed Thompson, who as it happened gave another excellent presentation on Customer Experience (more to follow on this one in a separate post).

Gartner highlight three separate and logical areas to guide thinking and implementation approaches to these tools and technologies within organisations.

I’m going to share my perspective on these areas:

1) Internal -  “your people, your place”
Essentially this area is about looking at the internal opportunities that are there for you. This is an area which I personally feel will deliver great benefits not just around the learning but in supporting a wide range of internal business issues.

It is important to remember that unless your organisation has articulated business issues you will struggle to get buy in or support.
Some potential business issues you might hear which you could link to these tools are as follows: NB this list is an example and is not comprehensive. It also doesn’t imply any particular approach.

- people finder or skills finder (internal staff directory)
- project spaces and business collaboration
- real-time or near real-time internal communications (yes email is an option but that isn’t always collaborative)
- learning communities and peer support groups

2) External – “your people, other people, your place”

The second area that Gartner referred to was external but a platform that was managed by the organisation. An example of this would be where you host a community function for people to discuss and or support each other like a helpdesk community support function. In local government terms this is a challenge as we need to be careful about trying to create communities that we intend to be organic. So the difference here is that we are clear and open about what we would expect such a community to do or what broad outcomes we would expect.
Again some potential business issues you might here to link to would be as follows:

-  service improvement function
- service user support community
- shared communities of practice
- project spaces and collaboration with partners and other organisations

3) Public – “your people, other people, their place”

This aspect is the area that to be honest most people focus on, it includes facebook environments, twitter, youtube etc. This is where stuff (for most social media people) get interesting. However this is also where most fear resides and organisations are low in awareness around the possibilities, case studies, return on investment figures. BUT this is where the MOST VALUE will be gained to all.

Again some possible business issues (not comprehensive) you might come across which could be linked into these solutions or approaches – however i stress and i say this all the time now. Don’t focus on a single technology, do your homework, work out what will actually deliver the value in any given circumstance.

- connecting and engaging with communities
- civic debate and discussion
- trend spotting, listening to the social web community or as Gartner refer to it “the collective” can provide insights into what might be the next big opportunity or next big issue developing.
- people to people connections
- building relationships

All of the above requires a different viewpoint on the traditional way of looking at things. The social space is ALL about the relationships between people and the benefits that spin-off from those interactions. We are now moving into a more focused look at people to people relationships (P2P) – In these difficult times, the potential to interact with people becomes even more important, for all of the issues i have given as examples.

What is interesting about this is that it has always been about P2P but dressed up and disguised as business to business or business to consumer – what drives those agenda = People.

The challenge for anyone wanting to explore the world of social media and social software is to learn more about how people interact and the connections and networks people have. I for one am very excited by this prospect and look forward to learning more over the coming months and years.

DeJa Vu – A lesson for social media

A colleague and friend of mine Martin Howitt has just started blogging outside the comfort of our team blog, where he was the most active blogger. I should blog more over there and will do in the coming weeks about IT/Business Alignment and the benefits of Enterprise Business Architecture in reducing the “lost in translation” effect that often happens when business folk talk to IT and vice versa. I am current fascinated by this issue as it can also help explain some of the issues and negative perceptions that people have about social media.

Anyway, Martin has provided an excellent post on the ROI potential of Social Media and had provided some great seeds for others to hopefully expand  and build on.

Martin states:

it’s probably time someone tried to start mapping out the benefits of SM right across the piece so that a full business case can be made by those who are trying to make the change in their own organisations.

via The social media ROI braindump « Martin Howitt’s blog.

This is the DeJa Vu aspect of the post – haven’t we been here before, with email and council websites and online services?

What we need to remember here though in all this conversation around Social Media ROI is that it wasn’t that long ago, that some councils didn’t even have websites and that officers within councils had to construct a business case for email (yes really a business case for email) – but don’t we all have one ( or even more) now and don’t we all believe even the doubters of social media that email, is a tool that if switched off would have a detrimental effect on how businesses run and function.

The shift and progress around local council websites was helped by the now infamous eGovernment agenda, but credit also needs to go to Socitm who year on year publish Better Connected (whether you like it or not, it provides a snapshot of what is happening) – eGov also did many good things but in my humble opinion failed to address the real issues in technology innovation – again a topic which i will touch on in my IT/Business Alignment post. But we also need to remember that a number of councils had websites before this and were doing some great innovative work on them including online services.

My council (Devon County Council) has had a website (as well as a basic intranet) since around 1998 and it grew organically much like other websites, starting with a strong tourism and visitor information presence into other council services and information resources. I wasn’t involved in the web at that time but i can imagine the type of discussions that were had about developing a County Council website, were quite similar to what people are saying now about social media sites. What is the benefit, how many people will use it, it won’t and doesn’t reach everyone yet….and so on. The key message is, you HAVE to start somewhere and you HAVE to be patient, even more so with social media as we are dealing with relationships and connections with real people, not transaction or visitor statistics.

We (local government) were given targets and timescales to get our websites up to date and up to speed with a set of basic requirements plus a sprinkle of transactions. The ROI that is being used and promoted is that the cost of interacting with people over the web is cheaper and more cost-effective, well it can be if your services are connected to your back office and people are not having to intervene in the process.

BUT where eGovernment failed in my opinion is that instead of focusing on developing online transactions that people actually wanted to use and demonstrated a high volume potential (based on local need and preference) we were mandated to deliver all of them in one way or another. So for most people eGovernment became one very large technology project and it lost the support of people in the business due to the amount of time available.  Plus with so many services developed, the marketing message became diluted with so many services that not many people used. We could be in danger of doing this again unless we start to connect people in the business to the opportunities and technologies out there, whether this is social media tools or not.

OK, so this is where Martin’s post for me gets really interesting. It starts to connect business terms with outputs and opportunities of Social media   – Martin picks out 9 areas, here are a three of them:

Infrastructure (administrative management of eg buildings) -> need maintenance and planning (and even strategy) -> SM can streamline maintenance processes, alerts, and educate people in how to get the best out of their investments.

technology -> Social media can reduce email, provide mashups, enhance remote, mobile and flexible working. This is a big topic in itself.

HR management -> social media tools can be used to provide early warnings of things that are bothering the workforce, ways to access employee resources (like workplace counselling or learning and development); conversely the blocking of social media sites can be demotivating for employees

What WE and i mean everyone who is currently able to work on this stuff proactively, needs to start looking at the metrics and agreeing some consistent ways in which we can demonstrate effectiveness and cost savings. We also need to really start looking at the business issues which our employers have and be flexible enough in our approaches to accept that social media won’t work everywhere.

I think we need to start with opportunities where there is a desire and opportunity to demonstrate value. It sounds obvious but i often here people talking just about twitter or facebook without linking that to a specific business objective. It seems to be more about demonstrating twitter and facebook can work instead of demonstrating that we can improve business outcomes by using a new set of technologies and tools. It is only then we will actually start seeing the ROI of these tools, but it will always become complicated because it will in nearly all cases be part of a wider provision including face to face, telephone, web etc.

For me, all of the tools provide exciting opportunities but that is all they are until i can connect them to a business problem in my council. The new skill for social media people won’t be about the tools but will be about understanding business (people) problems. Which is afterall one of the key features of anything “social”.

 

 

One week after #likeminds

Last friday i attended the inaugral likeminds event in Exeter, where i was also a a panel speaker. It was full of very interesting people and the event itself demonstrated the power and potential of social media tools to bring people together to talk about a common purpose, in this case it was “Social Media ROI”. There were about 200 people who attended and over 560 who watched it live on the internet.

During friday and over the last week the conversation has continued at such a rate on twitter that it got me thinking about the event itself again and has driven me to write this post about. What is quite amazing is the amount of conversation this event generated check out the website for what other people are saying.

On the whole it was a fascinating experience to be part of such a ground breaking event in the South West and in particular for Exeter. Most of the time i hear about or follow innovative events that are happening in London or Birmingham to be honest everywhere else BUT Exeter. So for me on that front it was such a good change not to travel a whole day to get to something and i could still be home in time to read my kids a story at bedtime.

It was great to hear from speakers who had travelled all the way across the pond and then down to good old Devon to speak about Social Media.  Speakers and panelists included:

Trey Pennington, Olivier Blanchard, Daren Forsyth and Maz Nadjm, who were all sharing invaluable experiences and insights. Plus the panelists who were Andrew Davies, Vanessa Warwick, Laura Whitehead, James Barisic, Rick Waghorn, and Matt Waring. A special mention also needs to go to Nick Tadd, who not only took the prize for “coolest person on the day” but who also featured alot in the live twitterfall for having the best haircut. I was even surprised that my shirt was even mentioned on the twitterfall, perhaps a future sponsorship deal could be negotiated for space on my shirt – or perhaps not!!

So what did i get from the day other than meeting great people, some i had never met in any sense of the word, offline or online and some who previously were only ever twitter id’s and only ever shared 140 characters or less of insights and advice on a range of topics not just social media. It was certainly refreshing to have a more free-flowing conversation with real people. For that alone the event rates highly for me.

Now a week on and i start to think more about what value i got personally i start to think more about the next event and how that could be better, bigger, more contextual, more practical, more engaging for attendees. To be honest a bit more “unconference” or “barcamp” like. But that is only my opinion.

During the event there were some interesting views and comments about the event failing to deliver what it promised which was to demonstrate the ROI on social media. I thought this was answered by the very first speaker Trey Pennington, his answer was quite simple “it depends” on what you want to get out of it, what outcomes you are driving. BUT even more i thought some people left with a sour taste in their mouths about the event and for that i think the next one should try and address the self learning and personal responsibility aspect that a “barcamp” for example gives to the attendee.

So it would be great to have a longer day, more sessions, practical learning from people as well as the “keynote” slots which are always valuable and thought-provoking.

We all actually know quite a bit about social media now – the gap for most if not all of us is how can people actually use it. I think the people who attended were interested more in the examples of where, how and what impact it had and was the reason behind some of the negative comments.

On reflection i think we should have had a final slot on the event itself, which was a perfect testimony for social media ROI – Scott Gould posted on how the event took shape and how those who attended which included me all proved social media works – this post could have been a great ending to the event. But would it have been possible to write this before the event. Or even during?

One last thought – We should stop focusing on the tools and technologies that are easy to get stuck into and start to focus on what matters which is relationships, conversations and people. After all without that where would anyone be?