On Friday i attended the second Likeminds event in Exeter. This post will purely be my first thoughts and reflections as i know from attending the first event last year that many more thoughts will evolve, along with blog posts over the coming weeks.
So here goes with the random thoughts and observations and in no particular order:
Don’t become a friend of a brand, local government knows this all to well a previous post and Dave Briggs will always say this if you hear him speak. Why would you become a friend of a council or local authority
Acknowledgement is key to building connections and valuing people – One of the key take aways from Chris Brogan
Government is one of the hardest places to do social media (Thanks to Olivier Blanchard for acknowledging this), so let’s celebrate those that have done excellent work in the sector.
We need to remember that strategy development is game play and we need to model future scenarios more
Olivier Blanchard‘s talk on operationalising social communications was excellent and very relevant but social communications is too narrow a term for government at this point in time – what should it be?
Joanne Jacobs is inspirational, Australian and managed not to swear 🙂
Jonathan Akwue understands the challenge in government and has done real grassroots stuff with netmums around service design.
Chris brogan reminded us that we all want to feel special and that we all want to be noticed – acknowledgement
Where is learning from all sectors being collated and shared?
If local government became social how would comms, PR and marketing deal with the devolution of messages?
The role of councillors is challenged in a social organisational structure – More to come on this subject over the comin weeks along with some thoughts and reflections on the Virtual Town Hall Pilot Project.
Will government be left behind because of all these challenges or will the change be forced and be even more painful for those who haven’t engaged?
Internal comms is dead, internal community management is now critical to organisations. Managing internal information and knowledge flow is critical for managing external social media usage. You can’t effectively deliver external engagement without solving internal communications an offering a social hub to support the knowledge sharing across silos.
We need to start really exploring the wider business impacts of adopting social media in local government and sharing the thinking around this subject.
Social media should plug in and add value and not your brand or org plugged into social media missing the point
What really is a conversation in this space and can orgsanisation be part of that – no – but the people in organisations can be part of that.
Still a huge challenge for some people around the issue of personal vs business profiles.
Young employees might understand the tools but may not understand the business – critical to connect people internally.
Paul Clarke is a great photographer – you can see his likeminds photos as well as many others here
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