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.

 

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Social Media Stages/Themes for Local Government

I read with interest Dan Slee’s blog post “Linked Social: Eight steps of social media evolution in local government” and whilst I agree with Dan I commented on his post with a slightly different perspective.

I recommend that you can read the post directly but I have included a bit of my comment below:

With regard to social media and wider social technologies there are lots and lots and lots of people using them and very much engaged in them and they are part of an unwritten future we are heading towards. The potential application of the variety of social technologies are creating a unique set of opportunities to transform not just the public sector but generally our way of life….from broadcast to conversations to collectively decisions to location based services to event driven location services to a seamless offering of content and services based on who and where i am. And the role of local government and the web in this context looks different to me.

So I’d suggest something like this in terms of an evolution which simply places your view into a slightly different context and one i think you may have eluded to before, but can’t seem to find a link…

I don’t really see these as a hierarchy or a straight path from 1 through to 6, more a set of themes which have different approaches and challenges depending on where your ambition is and where your current state is….

1) Ignorance and defiance

2) One way communication

3) Dialogue and conversation

4) Collective decision making

5) “check in” for content and services around me and for me

6) “push notification” for content and services around me and for me

The above applies for internal (staff) and external (residents and citizens) delivery

To be honest, I’ve blogged on a similar topic before but hadn’t really expressed my view on the stages or themes on the use of social technologies in this way before as I do kind of prefer self discovery with some of this, but here is a first stab at explaining in a bit more detail what I think about each of these stages / themes.

However the rule that I proposed in that blog post a couple of years ago is still very much valid:

Rule Number One:
Don’t focus on the technology, technology itself doesn’t do anything, there is a saying that we use in my council “there is no such thing as an IT project, there are only business projects”. The key message here is YOU need to focus on business problems and issues and if social media tools are part of the solution then great. But don’t force social media where it isn’t needed or wanted. To put it another way, try using a social media tool that offers you no value for me something like friendfeed is that tool, i don’t get it or understand it, so i don’t use it, at this point in time it doesn’t solve any problem i have.

I’m not claiming that this is ground breaking because it certainly isn’t but it has helped me understand how much you can or can’t progress depending on your organisations ambition with regard to social technologies.

1) Ignorance and defiance
Straight forward stage really, this represents organisations who may have isolated staff trying to push forward social technologies but those people struggle to get acceptance and open access to sites.

There seems to be a strong defiance to progressing this agenda in the current climate and most of the views held by decision makers are this is a disruptive technology and is counter productive to the aims of the organisation or council.

The defiance and ignorance isn’t restricted to external use only, there is also culture that restricts internal opportunities to use social solutions.

For people who work in such organisations I blogged recently about some do’s and don’ts for getting buy-in by senior managers – these may help, but they don’t come with a guarantee.

2) One way communication

This stage/theme is characterised by organisations and councils who only see the more mainstream social media tools to amplify their existing broadcast channels. This is often represented and seen as a continuous stream of one way traffic made up of press releases. You won’t see much conversation or retweeting of other people’s content.

To be fair this is a common approach and one which allows organisations and councils to experience the social media approach within a very narrow field – I’m not saying it is right or wrong, however the challenge here is moving beyond simply one way broadcast within a reasonable time period so that you don’t lose the opportunity to engage a new audience with your content and or services.

3) Dialogue and conversation

This is where I sense most councils are looking to aim toward in the short-term, it certainly seems the most logical and on reflection looks as though it can create some value.

This is really about changing the way your organisation sees and understands internet based communication tools. My personal view is organisations are happy to allow staff to enter into some kind of email conversation with a customer/citizen providing that they are providing accurate and relevant information or signposting, perhaps even a service directly.

Moving this approach into a more real-time environment seems to present challenges to organisations around relevance, reputation, behaviour etc which currently exist within our traditional communications channels such as phone, face to face and email.

My experience is that organisations and councils have “over time” created a set of consistent standards relating to each channel that they expect their staff to adhere to, thus ensuring that any risks are mitigated and the customer/citizen is engaged with appropriately.

The simple answer is that we all need to develop the same kind of standards for the new channels (easier said than done of course). This in itself presents more challenges which are related to the first stage (Ignorance and Defiance) as there are still perceptions that “social” is not “business”.

I refer back to Rule Number 1 at this point as this is, in my opinion, the approach you will need to take to ensure that you deliver value and take the focus away from the actual tool and seek to simply create a solution to an existing and emerging problem.

4) Collective Decision Making

In most conversations I hear about social technologies, the one area that really does fascinate me is the whole issue of democratic engagement and how social technologies can support and change the way in which citizens are involved in decision-making at a local, national and international level.

I’m not going to go into huge detail about what I believe this is, as I believe this space is still emerging and progress is being made by other people, we just need to learn before a wider set of organisations actually start progressing this area.

One person who I admire and whose blog I enjoy reading around this area is Catherine Howe (Chief Executive of Public i). On her blog you can read all about the Virtual Town Hall project as well as understand her thinking into all of this.

You can of course read about others experiences and views on this area, a couple more people I enjoy reading are: Richard Wilson (Izwe), Carl Whistlecraft (Kirklees Council) and Dave McKenna (Swansea Council)

5) “check in” for content and services around me and for me

I am not currently aware of any council really progressing this aspect, but I know some are using services such as foursquare and Facebook places as a method to engage customers/citizens.

Essentially it is about using the location-based services as a means to access particular services or content. An example might be within libraries, someone checks in and then is made aware of a particular offer or event that is being promoted, a simple process really but it does take some planning and co-ordination across channels in order to maximise the opportunity.

An internal example here might be a public sector worker checks into a public building and is pushed tasks via workflow.

This idea builds on the concept that colleague Martin Howitt articulates in his Location Based Architecture blog post.

6) “push notification” for content and services around me and for me

This is the only evolutionary step in these stages/themes as this is really pushing the previous stage/theme to a more proactive level and again building on the location-based architecture approach.

The main difference in this area is that i wouldn’t need to check in, in order to be pushed tasks, my smart device which naturally has GPS (ok this is a future thing as we need connectivity and devices to catch up), knows where I am and pushes a notification as I pass within a reasonable distance of a public building/space where I have tasks to complete.

Stages/themes 5 and 6 both require a significant underlying architecture and infrastructure in order to maximise the value and opportunity. This post is not the post to explain the infrastructure, that will have to be another time.

I know that each of these stages present different opportunities and challenges and solutions are already emerging which help organisations support their goals within each area. It will be down to each individual organisation to understand its own ambitions.

The only aspect i didn’t refer to is the cultural challenges in transitioning from a traditional business to a social business…that is definitely another blog post.

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.

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.