Social Media points the way for Corporate Website Development

I have had a draft web strategy written for some time now as i need to finish off a few extra bits which will hopefully complete the picture. One of these areas is the technical architecture required to deliver the desired outcomes.

In looking into this and speaking to several of my more knowledgeable ICT colleagues on this topic it occurred to me that what we really want to do is to follow the social media approach. I’ll try to explain what i mean and include some pictures to help me.

Firstly, it is worth trying to explain what i believe the future is for local government websites and online service delivery. I must stress this is my view and does not reflect the views of my employer.

Social media is allowing us to see how people prefer to use the Internet and what features, functions and opportunities they prefer to have available to them, as well as the seamless use across multiple platforms and browsers for example, PC, notebook, PDA, Mobile, iPhone etc and this will in my view increase.

What is also interesting when seeing what social media offers is that most if not all of what it does is allow people to select and dictate the relevance of the content and services delivered to a given browser.  It is also coupled with the fact that people are also at the same time connecting with other people and allowing information to flow through their networks.

So social media is providing choice, relevance and connections, if you throw in the trend of local and hyper local and in a local government sense the drive toward Total Place. I see a model where corporate websites are essentially delivering packages of “information and services” into the wider Internet community or even social networks. This would essentially allow people to participate in particular topics, based on their preferred community.

So a “package” could be a specific service on its own or a collection of other services based on a geographic or specific community (see end of post for community types).

For example I live in Exeter, so there could be a “Exeter” package which would contain a set of services (Not just local government services) but a set of relevant location focused services. Part of the personalisation of that package could be my specific postcode and therefore a more local neighbourhood context (hyper-local). Or i may just be interested in service such as transport, which would allow me to access the travel to work information based on my preferences (think of the google maps (from here to there scenario) and the information would be displayed based on those parameters.

As a user i would simply select the services within that package which were relevant to me at any given time. For example i would select the following and then have the opportunity to display a combination of or all of the sub services within the package:

Service based packages

• Schools (location, for admissions, term times, governor info, school news and access to my child’s school performance data etc)
• Transport (location, for public transport info, roadworks, travel information, car tax,)
• Environment (location, planning, waste collection, recycling, graffiti, fly tipping etc)
• Health (location, local dentist, GP’s, pharmacies,  NHS direct etc)

Alternatively you could deliver geographic based packages

• Exeter
• Newton Abbot
• Barnstaple

These might be presented in the style of widgets or gadgets, an example of how this might work on a website or even within a social network application is on the BBC website – The key thing is to allow and facilitate a deeper level of customisation within that widget itself – the only thing the BBC widget doesn’t facilitate which would be essential is mapping function which would allow you specify your geography (travel to work, school run etc)

BBC News Widget

This essentially combines local and national information within a single package. This would require everyone to develop in such a way that allowed mashups and web services with information related to the following community types.

The types of communities that we need to understand in terms of matching services and information to are in my opinion the following:

• Community of place are people who are bound together because of where they reside, work, visit or otherwise spend a continuous portion of their time.
• Community of interest are people who share a common interest, pastime or passion.
• Community of circumstance – is driven by position, circumstance or life experiences rather than a shared interest. An example could be a Cancer sufferers support group.
• Community of position – is distinguished from a community of practice community in that it tends to be more personally focused. This community is built around life stages (such as teenage years, university/college student years, marriage, or parenthood) provide individuals with the opportunity to build relationships with others during that particular phase of their lives.
• Community of practice – refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals.
• Community of purpose – people who are going through the same process or are trying to achieve a similar objective. Such communities serve a functional purpose, smoothing the path of the member for a limited period surrounding a given activity. For example community’s purpose revolves around allowing people to accomplish something they want or need to do whether it’s buying something, selling something, fixing something, dating, or the like.

What i believe is that the increasing complexity of people’s lives is being amplified with social media in such as way that the most important things we as information and service providers need to think about is how we manage and classify our content in such as way that whatever the situation, whatever the search, the right content appears and is delivered to a user. If that means it is joined together with another organisations to give context or to give it additional purpose then we need to facilitate that.

This will no doubt require a change in architecture for some councils towards a more flexible Internet service delivery framework.  This type of framework essentially provides the opportunity to allow a councils content and its services to be delivered to a presentation layer (combination of html, mobile and ditv) as well as to other platforms such as facebook, twitter, iphone app store.

This isn’t rocket science and it certainly isn’t new but in the context of social media it allows us to provide relevant content and services not through pages and groups or friends but through applications which allow a greater deal of interaction directly with us as a service provider.

Internet Service Delivery Framework

The future looks very exciting from a user perspective and very scary from a local government web team perspective, however it certainly looks like it going to be a lot of fun getting there.

Enterprise Social Software in the Public Sector

Since we started our internal social networking pilot earlier this year i have been asked three main questions:

1. Why are you using Enterprise Social Software in Local Government
2. What value does it offer your organisation?
3. Where next?

I have posted on this before, albeit briefly and based around a presentation i did at LocalGovCamp in Birmingham but i didn’t really go into too much detail at the time.

Let me take this three questions one at a time to help provide some context and my thinking as to why, what and where i see this type of functionality benefiting local government and potentially the wider public sector.

Why?

Okay, for me, social media and social networking is already and will become even more pervasive in the lives of the public and this will impact and influence how public services are delivered, developed and used.

With the increasingly use of mobile applications linked with the social connectedness of these tools, people are becoming more and more aware of what is around them, who is around them and how they can access information and services around them. Local today means much more than it did when even i was a little boy back in the early 80’s.

However with all this usage in people’s daily lives it isn’t often we use such tools in a professional capacity as an employee of an organisation, granted many people participate in environments like Communities of Practice, but these situations are not the mainstream approach. What people do use practically everyday is email and that is something which for most still lacks a professional approach by most. But i guess that depends on why you are using it.

For me however piloting the use of social networking enables people in an organisation to experience what most people only experience in sites like facebook in a professional environment. It will in my opinion help people (staff) grasp the concept of engaging people in online environments far easier than trying to explain and demonstrate how it can be done in more mainstream sites like facebook.

What is the value?

There are huge pressures on the public sector to engage with people and to involve people in the design and development of services. Without using new technologies in innovative ways we will never be in a position to truly engage people and more importantly enough people in that process to demonstrate appropriate engagement.

The lessons learned from using such tools internally will enable us to better understand the challenges faced with external engagement and online participation.

If organisations can learn how to effective engage with people online in internal environments we will all appreciate the benefits and pitfalls in managing such an approach.

In our pilot we have experienced a number of challenges as well as opening up new opportunities just by using the software first hand. Now i have used facebook for sometime now and it would have been hard for to have seen the kind of opportunities available without putting myself in that professional context of an internal social networking environment. Some examples of some of the potential uses of an internal social software platform.

• Staff directory – people finder, by subject, skill, interest etc
• Workforce data – qualifications and skills gaps
• Internal project management
• Alternative to email (refocuses email on more formal internal communications and allows conversations to be surfaced and searched – supports Freedom of Information)
• Internal helpdesk (ICT, HR etc – enables staff to self support and generates and more effective user community)
• Ideas development
• Collaboration with colleagues and partners
• Keeping staff informed (enables managers to keep up to date with what there staff are doing in remote or home based team environments
• Reduces the need for face to face contact and when required adds value to face to face contact/meetings
• elearning and peer to peer support
• Plus many more…..

We have identified a wide range of opportunities just by actually being able to use such a product internally and without fear of making a mistake in the public domain.

There are of course still people who are sceptical of such tools but the purpose of such as pilot is two fold. One is to demonstrate some of the benefits identified early on and secondly to allow people to experience a tool first hand.

Where next?

The biggest question really, where next, well in my opinion bringing these types of tools into an organisation especially local government will provide a number of strategic benefits and the challenge is whether or not we are prepared to take that leap and do it.

Traditionally and my council is no different, the age profile of the organisation is top heavy, by that i mean we have a large proportion of people expected to retire without having enough younger people coming in.  The reality is that younger people are already expecting to communicate in new innovative ways and if we don’t provide them with the types of communications tools that they expect we will face a challenge to keep these people engaged and motivated in the workforce.

We also have huge pressures as mentioned before to engage with people, i believe internal social networks can provide an effective “learning” environment for external online engagement and participation.

New roles around online community managers, which is a blend of project management and facilitation to some degree but in an online context, something which is completely new and requires new skills.

I think the immediate next step is to increase people’s access to and usage of these tools to enable people locally to understand how these tools can be used and how they can be deployed as part of their wider service delivery framework.

Ideally i’d love to continue the internal learning and enable the organisation to foster a new culture of learning and ideas as well as complimenting existing communications channels.

I previously posted this video but it makes more sense to post it in this post then it did in the last one. It is an interview of myself and Rob Gray (Blue Ocean IQ) by David Wilcox at LocalGovCamp talking about the pilot we have done here in Devon.

Social Networking – a Strategy for Learning?

After many conversations with colleagues internally there is a real vision around the eLearning agenda and much of it overlaps with the future of social networking and social media.

What i see as a vision is that what society is doing in social media and social networking now is essentially informal learning and sharing of knowledge. It just so happens to be more fluid and flexible and based around people then around learning topics like most things are now.

Learning for me works differently, it is something that happens in conversations and in meeting new people, in being challenged about my ideas and the way i work. It is also more formal in that i may study or participate in learning sets etc.

Essentially though learning is about about networking with people who can help you on that journey either through providing a structure or framework (facilitation, training, tutors etc) or by providing the sounding board for discussions. (forums, classes, networks etc)

This is essentially how young people are learning in the class room, asking questions first about who can help them achieve the aim as opposed to working individually and alone to resolve an issue.

Social networking can really help transform society and our learning if we allow it to enter all aspects of our lives. We don’t just need to think about technology as we are generally all connected with people offline.

The challenge is for organisations to embrace a culture of learning and to allow people to develop and create new connections with people as part of a journey of learning throughout their working life.

I have much more to think about in relation to our internal social networking pilot and the potential for this to stimulate a true learning culture. I’ll keep you posted. )

Facebook In Devon – Statistics

Whilst raising awareness of social networking and the possibilities that it offers local government, something which i am always asked is “So how many people are we really talking about then?”

Well i thought i would find out, so I used the facebook “advertising” option and this is the results based on facebook’s Estimates.

All the following statistics are based on these search criteria:

who live in the United Kingdom
who live within 25 miles of Exeter, Barnstaple, Torquay, Newton Abbot, Tiverton or Plymouth
Age range

• Under 25 – 66,560 people
• 26- 40 – 56,380 people
• 41 – 55 – 23,300 people
• 56 plus – 5,240 people
• Men – 73,780 people
• Women – 79,180 people

What I find interesting about these statistics is that for most groups we are talking about the size of a small/medium town, so it would seem to add value to the argument that we really need to listen and communicate/engage these people somehow to find out what we can do to improve services locally for them.

The bigger question though for me and i’m not 100% sure of the answer although i’d guess at No is:

• Are these people likely to be engaged already in Shaping Local Services?

Now facebook isn’t the only tool, but it does provide a good example of the level of people locally who you could reach, and who are likely to have not been reached before. Surely that can only be good for local democracy and service improvement.

Thoughts on Internal Social Networking – LocalGovCamp

Earlier this year we embarked on a pilot project on Internal Social Networking using  a product called Bluekiwi.

I was at the Localgovcamp event on Saturday and ran a session on our experiences and lessons learned. It proved very useful to me as well as others so i thought i would capture that in a blog post.

It is important to note here that whilst i am personally keen on social networking as a way of supporting business transformation, the technology is only one part of enabling the wider business change required to realise the benefits of moving in this direction.

Like most organisations we experience a silo mentality, this isn’t always a negative thing, organisational structures are a form of social network, so they do often make sense, but when you work in large organisations, the ability to share and exchange internal best practice and ideas becomes harder if you don’t have any processes for allowing knowledge etc to be shared.

We also recognised that internal helpdesks are often overloaded with simple requests and common questions. The answers to most of these could be captured in a tool which either allowed the helpdesk to contribute or in our view allow users to submit answers themselves – essentially providing a user support community, much like you see online for products.

We did struggle to really know how the organisation would respond to this pilot and were reluctant to promise anything we didn’t feel a pilot could actually deliver. This did mean that the business case was pretty thin on the ground, the main areas we focused on were around possible reduction in helpdesk calls, ideas forum (only one idea had to really deliver the cost of the pilot to demonstrate value) but we also made a big play on the “potential” opportunities that could be presented when people get together and start interacting and having conversations.

We did know that once people started to engage they would start to see the opportunities for themselves (after all they know their business better than we do) and that is what started to happen.  We knew that by “connecting people” in new ways would spark ideas and conversations, we also knew that it would provide new opportunities for surfacing common issues and problems and our hope was that it would become self supporting (after all we all like to chat with our colleague about “stuff”).

We did target some groups, due to the pilot nature, we wanted to focus on enabling groups who could potentially demonstrate value in different ways. So we had a mix of cross directorate groups from different levels of the organisation (no one directly from the front line at this stage) who after conversations with these groups had identified some other groups who they thought they could benefit from being connected to.

We initiated a Pilot Project to help us learn more about how this functionality could offer value  -  my view was that if we could learn to professionally experience Social Networking inside the council and start to engage with staff in new and exciting ways, it wouldn’t be too much of a step to engage with the public in similar spaces.

However the reality of the pilot was that the business case was pretty thin, and was more about learning lessons and a “leap of faith” then about real metrics and business value.

We are only 3 months into the pilot and we are learning about new opportunities all the time, i will continue to post my thoughts about the benefits and pitfalls.

In the meantime, I thought I would share this video interview that David Wilcox recorded of Rob Gray (Blue Ocean IQ) and Myself at Localgovcamp.