Remembering to reflect on your own journey

Last week I had a telephone conversation with Liz Azyan about the progress that Devon has made around social media etc since we spoke last on this topic late 2009.

One of the great things conversations like that do is make your reflect on how far you and your organisation has come in that time.

One thing I haven’t been doing very well lately is looking back through my own blog and seeing how my thinking has evolved, how ideas developed and changed as well as how my approach has changed…This is actually very empowering and liberating to see first hand that I have made progress individually, my thinking in some areas has come to light and made practical difference to people working for the council.

It also shows me where I have left behind some ideas in favour of news ones, but I haven’t clearly articulated to myself that I’ve changed direction and that is something I find important as my mind is full of “stuff” and I need to make practical steps to make sense of that in ways that not only I can understand but others.

I thought I’d take a look at my blogs footprint through a wordle and get a sense of the topics I blog about using my blogs RSS feed. (

When I looked back at the content I posted on my blog during January of 2010 – a whole 2 years ago now – I was in a different mindset, a different world almost…I was in fact in a completely different job, one focused more on strategy first than practical application….whereas now I have to think about both of those in equal measure.

I blogged a total of five times and the majority were about risk and governance and of course there was the now compulsory UKGovCamp blog post (January is the UKGovCamp Rock Fest Month)

However one post, which was more of a link to previous thinking and external blogging content was the Facebookisation of the Enterprise post – essentially suggesting and proposing what could happen if the IT department behaved more like facebook and created a platform for stuff to be built upon.

I’ve taken aspects of the thinking around that and have taken this into the Content Strategy I am writing.  It is interesting to see how little ideas last and evolve into other aspects of my thinking.

So in looking at all of this, I’ve decided to be more reflective overall and to first look back at my own thinking before I write something on the blog, or use that challenge of my own thinking as the basis of a blog post itself.

Do you reflect on your own blog posts? How has your thinking evolved over the months and years you’ve been blogging?

Advertisement

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.

 

I think we are missing the point

I have written quite a few posts recently about not focusing on the technology or the tools when speaking about social media and that is what I believe (I could be wrong), but we really have to take people on a journey in order that they can see the real impact of all of this stuff and that is the “behaviour change” and “expectation” this all creates in individuals (staff and citizens), mostly everyone recognises this but we rarely focus on this when speaking to folk.

Ok so twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Flickr, YouTube and many others are all the tools that people use to share stuff with friends, family and pretty much anyone interested in their stuff.  But the key point to focus on is the behaviour change all these tools are driving and the expectations they are creating in everyone we meet.

I’ve been to two events in the last week where this issue has popped up – last week I attended the Guardian ICT Leadership Forum in London and yesterday I attended a lecture at the Met Office (for Met Office staff primarily) by @AnnHolman on the impacts of social technology on business.

The thing that kept coming up was that people get fixated on the current tools and make comments like “I’m not in Facebook, or on twitter so I can’t see the value” or “surely Facebook and twitter will go away of be bought by someone and we’ll need to get on the next big thing”.  The answer to both of these comments is “your missing the point”….

The point is (for me anyway) and I made this at the Leadership forum as well as the Met Office meeting (although Ann had already said exactly the same thing at the beginning of her talk – it is about behaviour) is that these tools are not the things we should be primarily concerned about, it is the impact on people and the expectations and behaviour changes they foster in people…

• the fact that friends and family can instantly communicate via any device to each other from anywhere in the world.
• the fact that I can share precious moments with people via video or photo as soon as something happens or even broadcast it live over the internet
• the fact that i can learn new topics and subjects and watch videos on how to play the guitar or learn how to use a software package by simply searching google
• the fact that i can access a huge amount of information about what my friends like and what they are doing, thinking, watching, listening to, who they are with all from my mobile phone
• the fact that email seems like it takes too long to get a response and I might as well instant message someone instead
• the fact that i can touch a screen and it responds instantly to my gestures and I can explore information in new ways
• the fact that when i work on something i expect friends and people I’ve never met to help and assist me with my tasks.

I’ve not mentioned any particular tool here, but I could…but what value would that add to the conversation?

These are simply some of the basic changes people expect to see, I’ve not mentioned or referred to location based services, mapping, workflow, task management, i could go on and when you take these expectations into a local government context you can see the challenge we are facing. Challenges we *must* overcome or we will become irrelevant to pretty much everyone.  The issue is we expect these kinds of solutions in an organisational experience.

The challenge/question for ICT leaders and managers is can consumer grade products provide 80% of the functionality to reduce costs across the sector…or do we spend lots of cash on enterprise grade products that can’t change as quickly and force uniformity on everyone – the web allows individuality?

The impact of social media isn’t whether or not you have a twitter account, Facebook profile, YouTube channel, Flickr stream – It is whether your organisation wants to be relevant and able to communicate with people how they communicate with each other.

This all means we need to rethink everything about our organisations and keep the stuff that is relevant and change the rest that isn’t…for some (if not most) that will mean everything.  We do need to face some potential obstacles though and we can not ignore them.

• Security – we need to think about security in a pragmatic way that allows us to stay in touch and relevant whilst maintaining our legal duty.
• Risk – we need to think about our approach to risk, we need to manage and mitigate, not avoid.
• Thinking – we need to change our thinking, we *must* focus on opportunities presented to us by new thinking
• People – we need to accept that all of this is about people and changing people’s behaviours.
• Culture – we need to challenge existing cultures by empowering people to adopt new thinking, to take risks.

But saying all of this, sometimes it helps to start with twitter and work out very quickly to the wider issues, but we need to make sure we don’t stay focused on the tool, it is the behaviour change we need to champion.