Rediscovering connections

People gathering on a beach – Photo from https://unsplash.com/@kimsondoan

Last week, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with a wonderful person, and that person is Sarah Lay. Sarah was one of the first people I connected to outside of Devon many many years ago when I was involved in the corporate web and digital space.

The great thing about talking with Sarah was that it sparked a reconnection to those times when we first met, speaking about similar challenges, similar hopes, and similar frustrations — imagining, dreaming, wondering what could be…. those kind of conversations, reflecting back to probably 2011/2012, are what led to the wider connections and strong network of people that eventually became LocalGovDigital, a network of professional people who all shared a similar purpose and felt under-represented and misunderstood, but all wanted and needed to see public services improve and get better for people and communities.

We reflected on what occurred for each of us in the last 8 years as both of us took a step away from the LocalGovDigital space in 2016, each choosing different paths and each growing, learning, and developing who we are as people. We both found it fascinating that we are both in a similar position of wanting to seek out and find the people with the energy to disrupt, innovate, and be radical in thought and imagine a new public service landscape. 

I can see that some of the people I used to connect with have moved on, some have moved out of the sector and have taken the steps into consultancy or have joined organisations who really do understand the challenges of the sector and are not the big consultancies who are not seen as really focusing on purpose and value.

With so many platforms for connecting now, it is hard to know, where and how to find people in the same way it was 10-15 years ago. When I joined twitter in 2008, it was very easy to find people who were talking about reimaging public services, not just in the UK but globally, it wasn’t populated with millions of bots. I remember attending UKGovCamp in 2009 in London and the first LocalGovCamp in 2009 in Birmingham and those events changed the way I connected with people…The people I connected with back then were and still are some of the most influential people in my professional life and there may even be a few who I’ve never met in person but whose perspectives and views stimulate and challenge my own. 

I remember last week in the conversation with Sarah, we laughed a few times, one of the things that made me laugh was when Sarah shared the memory of being at a GovCamp event and we simply pitched for a room with the title “reflective practice”, the idea being that anyone who may have needed a quiet space or some recovery space after the pre -event food and drink could use the room to simply sit and reflect. It was well attended and I remember we invented the idea of penetration testing hashtags and were just tweeting random things…but it also sparked connections and friendships.

So coming back to now, I shared with Sarah that when I started to think about reconnecting with wider networks, my first thought was LocalGovDigitial because of the history I have with it, but somehow it didn’t feel like a space I belonged anymore, I wasn’t directly in the Digital space, more in a space of organisational change and transformation, but for me it felt like I was an imposter…I suspect that says more about me than the network, but it didn’t feel right, so I have tried over the last few years to make new connections and find spaces to find new people, but they aren’t easy to find. Or am I just missing the obvious?

I must acknowledge and thank Dave Briggs here who has helped me get some perspective on joining back into things and I respect and admire Dave a lot, he has been incredibly influential for me since back in the day, almost holding a place of “he’s famous” frame. I suspect Dave will love and hate this comment in equal measure 🙂

As I finish up this post, I caught sight of a couple of posts by Catherine Howe. Catherine is another person who has been such an influence on me, someone whose views and perspectives really challenge my thinking and I love the way Catherine leads herself and others, it is hugely inspirational. Catherine’s posts are sort of linked to my reflections, but written far more succinctly and intentional. Her post on “so long twitter” resonates so much with the reflections Sarah and I shared that it is worth a read. and her other post, “Fantasy System“, is an invitation to bring together people for something different, new and radical…

So my final reflection on where to find people is linked to Catherine’s invitation, if the spaces don’t exist, then the only response is that one has to create them with others. This is really the key learning from all those years ago – if it doesn’t exist yet, then create it and see what emerges, after all it may just be the thing that generates the spark.

Why I think #LocalGov hasn’t really cracked #Facebook

This won’t be a long in-depth post, I won’t be quoting research or statistics.

My thoughts are quite simple really and if I compare the relative success of twitter by councils as opposed to facebook, it isn’t really rocket science why it hasn’t worked.

Lets start with a few key things about twitter.

1. you only have 2 privacy settings – Open or Closed
2. twitter is a wider environment not specifically tied into people’s personal or family social networks.
3. twitter is not about existing networks but actually helps people to build and connect to larger ones
4. you don’t need approval to follow someone (unless you’ve blocked your account)

Now compare that to facebook and you can start to understand some of the complexity that exists for councils before even reaching someones stream.

1. the privacy settings are multi-level, multi-user and are only becoming more complicated as each month passes.
2. facebook is more about existing connections and networks
3. the process of connecting requires both parties to approve.

So take these simply things and then think about how a council fits into this picture.

I appreciate I’ve simplified so much here but you don’t need me to tell you all the differences between them….

So my assumption and conclusion is that twitter is great for those people who want to find out information without having to seek approval from people…in fact a bit like subscribing to an RSS feed but with opportunities to actually engage with the content.

The use of facebook will only ever “really” work for local government when we actually already have connections with people…so it really could be seen as an extension of a CRM system as opposed to a communications platform as it is about existing connections and not about creating new ones.

Once you see it in this way, you’ll start to think of more appropriate ways to use it.

So the reason local government hasn’t cracked facebook is because it is trying to reach “new” people and not focusing on adding value to those people it already has connections with…this is one reason I believe libraries make such good use from facebook.

It’s crude but still very interesting

I was asked a very interesting question earlier today – A colleague asked me how many twitter accounts there are in Devon? To which my reply was (slightly paraphrased):

“Hmmmm, I’m not sure to be honest…however we could provide a crude figure for the number of facebook users or potential reach using the advertising feature….we could then,  again this is crude but use the worldwide ratio of twitter to facebook users and apply that to our figures and this would give us a best guess figure, at least it is sort of logical…”

“That sounds like it could be a useful starting point, let me know what you find out.”

So I did exactly what i suggested and the result of which I include below…It is crude I know but very interesting, even if we take a very conservative position on the figures they are actually still very significant.

Facebook

More than 800 million users worldwide – more than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices.

Facebook Estimated reach in Devon – 488,820 people

• Who live within 40 kilometres/25 Miles of Exeter, Barnstaple, Tiverton, Sidmouth, Tavistock, Bideford, Newton Abbot, Ivybridge, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Okehampton, Dartmouth, Kingsbridge, Salcombe, Exmouth, Lynton, Lynmouth, Bovey Tracey, Ashburton, Braunton, Cullompton, Honiton, Ilfracombe, Ottery Saint Mary or Totnes
• Figures are based on users who are aged 13 or over.
• The towns listed are those which I used and found and which i think represent a good coverage of Devon in terms of the 25 mile radius…

 Twitter

More than 380 Million users worldwide – Ratio of twitter to facebook therefore is  just under 50%.

If  we apply the crude formula to the facebook figures for Devon then we would expect to see approximately 240,000 twitter users.

For context  – the population of Devon is just under 750,000 – using the County Council boundary – therefore excluding Plymouth and Torbay…although it is likely that some Plymouth and Torbay users will be included due to the geography. It shows that a significant proportion – around 65% of residents are allegedly on Facebook…and approximately 30%-35% are allegedly on Twitter.

I’ll say it again, it’s crude but it is very interesting…

 

Reflecting on the Social Media Forum #DCCSMF

Updated 12/10/11: added QR codes summary discussion

Last Friday was the Social Media Forum#DCCSMF.

It was very well attended with over 70 people from across the council and partner organisations. It went very well, a few technical and timing issues but nothing major. Everyone wants more but better next time…so an interesting challenge.

Even the Head of our Press Office attended and found it valuable…

http://twitter.com/#!/MBombers/status/122330044961005568

Overall I couldn’t be happier with how it went…I’ve included the presentations from the day below.

I was also very pleased with the action on the hashtag #DCCSMF  – my expectation was that only a few people would participate but it surprised me…It was also a bit unfamiliar for some to do this within a formal council meeting and I did receive some feedback, where some people thought it was rude that people were looking down at their phones…however I had given people permission at the start, but a cultural challenge nonetheless.

http://twitter.com/#!/allyblue22/status/122248608673312768

and we even had people who couldn’t attend joining in the discussion.

http://twitter.com/#!/SgtGaryWatts/status/122262578813616128

Presentations…

Welcome and Introduction

Open and Linked Data

QR codes

Social Media Campaigns

FOI and twitter

The internal use of Social networking tools

Nurturing Online Communities

Crisis Communications

Social Media Risk Assessment

And a copy of the Draft Risk Assessment

Summary of the afternoon discussion sessions.

Not all received as of today, so i’ll add the others in when available:

Crisis Communications

Areas discussed were more general:

1. How we got started
2. How we got/get permission to tweet/FB at will! “But what about sign off?!” there is none….
3. Start doing it – better to apologise after than just keep waiting to be allowed to begin
4. What’s the resource requirement – and what about in a crisis? 24h nature
5. How do you get followers – and that followers are not the be all and end all…Content is king
6. RT is the aim – how far does your tweet actually go?
7. How do you make a judgement call on what to respond to
8. Management tools such as hootsuite and tweetdeck for keeping an eye on the conversation
9. Peaks and troughs – and how to manage them
10. The power of hashtags – getting in there early and first, identifying with a prefix e.g. #CCxxxx for Cornwall Council

In the future it would be useful to talk about some of the toolkits that we all use to manage the social media elements and some of the more practical elements for people just embarking on the social media journey.

Open Data

The main point to come out of the open data discussion was the potential conflict between open data and ‘control’ of communications, and the reputation issues that could follow. Some suggested that if we didn’t like the press that would follow a release of data, then we should change the way we work rather than suppress the data.

Also discussed was the different ‘levels’ of data:

1) the simple stuff – officers’ salaries, organisational structures etc. The FoI related stuff.

2) useful data that we could put in to the public domain and see what people did with it – accident locations, pot hole enquiries, timetables etc.

3) the difficult stuff – making our systems open and exposing the raw data – with the obvious data protection measures.

Internal Social Networking

There is a lot of nerves around FOI despite it not being an issue

People are looking for critical mass and one tool to rule them all

Concern around signal to noise ratios especially if using multiple comms channels

Top quote “people are reluctant to be interesting online”

Discussion of Devon learning Network as an internal social platform

We actually need an extranet as DCC fractures into partnerships

Social Media Risk Assessment

Risk is linked to culture of the organisation

Finding the balance between those interested in social but not trusted and those trusted but not interested

Comms interested in risk to reputation and ICT interested in Risk to systems and information

How can you harness and manage the energy and innovation as well as the risk

Provide a training package “passport” approach to support and mentor people through the learning process

QR Codes

The discussion on the table concerned whether or not the use of QR codes was appropriate for particular services. One example was a training team who’s material is all online and they don’t produce any printed leaflets. For them a QR code would not really benefit their service as they have no means of distributing them.

There was also some discussion about the life time of a QR codes, how long will they be used for and when will something better come along. It was explained that there is already better options out there for creating attractive campaign materials but these are at a higher cost and are not as wide spread as QR.

 

Integrating social with your corporate website – localgov style!

I’ve been managing, albeit slowly, to catch up on the many blogs, documents, videos etc I’ve saved for “later” (the joy of owning an iPad in my view).

Anyway I was very interested in this webinar that was funded by Janrain and Badgeville that the Altemeter Group’s  Jeremiah Owyang gave some excellent insights into How to Integrate Social Into Your Website:

I’ve embedded the webinar below, it is well worth watching.

It got me thinking about how far a local authority or public sector website can actually integrate social into its corporate website without it looking, well “crap” for the want of a better word.

I’m not aware of any examples of seamless “social” integration within a public sector corporate website in the UK (yet) to the level that Jeremiah suggests, but progress is being made which is reassuring across a range of aspects and I guess that priorities are different wherever you go.

I do think that utah.gov‘s approach to some of its “social” and “mobile” provision is something that we in the UK could certainly learn from and adapt. I won’t comment on the site as a whole as it didn’t actually seem to work very well in google chrome, so reverted back to Firefox to check out content. I think it is fair to say that I suspect that the broadband speed in Utah are much better than they are within Rural England, so perhaps large images load fast for their core audience.

Despite the initial challenges to accessing the site, I did find some very good things which I’d love to see developed further (note not replicated) here in Devon, for example Utah Collaborate sets a nice tone but doesn’t quite go far enough to really be about “collaboration” however it is better than most if not all things I’ve seen elsewhere (NB: I’ve not done formal research in this area and my visits to websites have been random)

The collaborate idea could be a great platform for linked data and service design as well as a space for developers to show of their apps or services directly to the end users…I think if we created a much better relationship to our local developer community the whole collaborate idea would be about how other people can develop our services with or without us better than we can, thus saving money.

Utah, have got something which sort of creates a foundation for this alongside the collaborate space and that is Utah Widgets. I think that this has huge potential for people to hack data sets and create widgets based on their preferences, I’m sure Utah have a roadmap for this kind of thing, but what would be good would be to see a range of community data sets includes alongside the ones provided already and the widget space become a “mash-up” centre in a similar way the Knowledge Hub plans to provide this function for the UK Public sector as a whole.

Finally I do like the way that they integrate Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms within the site and don’t initially send people off away from the corporate site – this is a key lesson I think we can all learn from.

On a separate but linked note, the way that the online services and transactions are promoted on Utah is not something I feel would encourage people to interact online….but the social aspects are good….the reality is the online services are where the costs savings are.