Month: October 2010

Events, dear boy…

My diary is starting to fill up a bit with events to attend, and those I have been asked to speak at. Here’s a quick run down.

FirePRO Conference – Wednesday 13th October

I’ll be speaking to the conference for public relations officers in the Fire and Rescue Services.

My session is all about “How to get the most from social media”:

Is social media a ‘nice to have’ or is it an essential part of a modern communication strategy? This session will discuss ways of integrating social media into mainstream communication and ask whether FRSs can work together to maximise the benefits of online communication.

SLCC National Conference – Saturday 16th October

I’ll be talking to local council clerks about how they can use the web to get people more involved in local democracy and the activity of parish, town and community councils.

Beyond 2010 – 20th and 21st October

I’ll be attending this great looking event in Birmingham as a punter rather than a speaker, and am really looking forward to it given the great line up. Nick wrote it up nicely here.

How to save money and influence people: Implementing behaviour change strategies – 24th November

This LGA conference is all about how councils can manage the significant changes necessary to meet the challenges facing local government – without utterly alienating staff. I’ll be talking about the role that social technology can play in this.

WLGA Member Support and Development Conference – 26th November

I’ll be talking to this Welsh LGA conference about how councillors can be supported in their use of the web to engage with residents.

The death of crowd control

James Gardner:

The point,  of course, is that if the central thinking is that communications are about crowd control, then organisations are really forcing the many-to-many communication outside their organisation. Although I don’t think we are about crowd control at the department, the fact that we don’t have our new communications channels yet has already resulted in crowds forming beyond the firewall. Imagine the circumstance when new channels, far being lacking, aren’t even allowed.

My conclusion, based on this, is that crowd control is pretty much dead. And that centralised command-and-control will soon follow.

Public Sector Online 2010

psonline

Tomorrow (that’s Monday, 4th October) I’ll be at The Guardian‘s Public Sector Online conference, which looks like it should be a great day.

I’m on at 15:30, for the closing panel titled “Innovation in social media”. Here’s the skinny:

As more people use social networking sites to keep informed, and organisations use them to spread information and market services, what are the best ways for public sector bodies to engage with the public?

  • The rise in the use of social networks as a line of communication
  • Twittiquette – best use of Tweets
  • Twitter as a public service: e.g. Gritterfeeds
  • Generating and monitoring content – Social media etiquette
  • Online engagement – encouraging two way usage

Joining me on the panel will be:

Which means that, even if nobody else has any fun, at least I’ll get to hang out with some cool people for an hour or so!

If you are attending, do get in touch and let’s meet up! Twitter will probably be the easiest way.

Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants

I love stuff like this.

Nick CNick Charney works in government in Canada, and is also a prolific and excellent blogger. He’s also pretty active on GovLoop, which is where I first came across him I think. Anyway, follow his stuff.

Nick has just published an ebook called Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants which is great reading.

It’s “a tactical guide for any public servant looking to make an impact. It offers practical advice on how to be innovative in the public service while managing your relationships and reputation.” Awesome!

I have embedded the document below, or for those whose employers don’t trust them, here’s the direct PDF download.

I mentioned to Nick that the style reminded me a little of Colin McKay’s wonderful (even after 3 years!) Secret Guide to Social Media in Large Organizations – and it turns out that document helped inspire Nick to write his guide. Good stuff.

101 cool tools: Paper.li

This is a new regular series of posts where I highlight a cool online service that you may or may not have heard of. Whether I ever make it to 101 is debatable I feel… I’ve also set up a Twitter feed where links to these posts will be automatically pumped.

This is the first post, and it’s about paper.li.

paperli

Paper.li is a service that integrates with Twitter, and creates a dynamically produced page, that looks a bit like a newspaper, from the links that are added to Twitter.

You can create a paper from your own (or indeed, someone else’s) followers, or a hashtag, or one of your lists of Twitter users. Here’s what mine looked like when I created it just now:

dbpaper

Here’s an explanation from the website about how it works:

  • extract all tweets that include URLs
  • extract the content found on these URLs:
    • text, e.g. blog post, newspaper article
    • photo, e.g. Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, …
    • video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, …
  • analyze the extracted text for topic, e.g. Politics, Technology, …
  • surface the day’s most relevant articles (using paper.li magic)
  • construct a newspaper frontpage using the filtered articles, photos and videos

So you can quickly produce an automatically curated page of useful content that people you are interested in have found – on the topics you are interested in. It really is just a case of signing up, typing your terms in and clicking go.

The downside is that you have little control over what it produces. You can see a local council, for example, producing a paper containing content concerning the local area – but it may have to come with caveats!

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