Last Friday we held our social media forum which went very very well.
It was attend by about 80 people from a variety of organisations and this year we had quite a bit of twitter buzz throughout the day which was great.
Anyway, if you are interested we’ve created and published a storify of the day and included the presentations over on the re-work digital blog [ Please note the storify doesn’t display correctly in IE6, but then what does 🙂 ]
At the moment, It feels like organising events are something I’m involved in quite a bit, which isn’t a problem when the events are Open Space South West and now the DCC Social Media Forum 4, although this time, I’m getting one of my team Russell to help out and take more of a lead.
I announced the tickets a couple of weeks ago and it has almost sold out which is reassuring to know but also demonstrates the increasing desire from colleagues across the council and our partners to learn and share learning around social and digital technologies. If you work in the public sector in Devon and want to come along get in touch via the comments and I’ll pass the details on. I’ve started to collect names of people who want to be on a distribution list for these kinds of things.
The development of the social media forum has been interesting and is something that has already become a critical way of maintaining an overview on the projects which are going on across the council.
It is through this event you start to get into the details of the projects you previously only heard about at a high level and thought “that sounds like a good idea, wonder how that will work”.
The pace of social projects means that you never really have to wait a long time to learn from the outcomes and experiences from the people who were involved, although some benefits and outcomes won’t be seen for some time.
The event is on Friday 13th July (lucky for us) and I’ll blog about the day and share any presentations and insights afterwards.
The previous events summary and presentations can be found here
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 Â – 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:
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.
One of the first things I put on my to-do list when I became Digital Communications Manager, was to restart and refocus the DCC Social Media Forum. Â The last one was over 2 years ago and one of the last things discussed was opening it up to our public sector family across Devon…So that is what I have done.
Friday 7th October is the  DCC Social Media Forum and there is over 75 people from across the county council and our public sector colleagues – and not just the usual suspects which is a success in its own right…
We have operational staff and Heads of Service in attendance from across a range of services including Highways, Â Customer Services, ICT, Emergency Planning, Communication, Trading Standards, Workforce Development, Audit, Information Management and colleagues from our District Councils, Unitary Councils plus Cornwall Council, Devon & Somerset Fire, Â Devon & Cornwall Police, Met Office and even the MoD, which is absolutely fantastic and I’m personally very grateful to all the people who are coming for taking the time out of their busy schedules to come together and share, connect, challenge and inspire one another.
The agenda is split into two parts…a set of 20 minute shared learning sessions on the following topics:
A journey through life - Carl's Notepad 