Digital engagement – Dave Briggs

My content curation workflow

December 8, 2014

shutterstock_129038348 Curating content online is a fairly hot topic these days – information overload being what it is, folk tend to like it when someone spends a bit of time picking the wheat from the chaff for them.

It doesn’t have to be too time-consuming an exercise either and there are lots of tools to help you put together a workflow that puts the web to work for you, rather than the other way around.

Here’s mine. It may work for you, or just bits of it. Don’t feel the need to copy it all if you don’t want to, or indeed ignore everything if it all seems utterly idiotic to you.

Feedly

The place to start is with my chosen service for RSS subscriptions. I know people keep saying that RSS is dead as a way to consume content, but it continues to work for me. I use Feedly to subscribe to about 800 feeds from various sites. I rarely read them all – there are a few sites I especially look out for, but generally I treat it as a stream to dip into rather than a list that must all be read. To this end, I always mark everything as read on a Sunday evening so I can start the week with a blank slate.

Reeder 2

Here’s the thing though, I don’t actually use the Feedly web interface at all – I just use it as the synchronisation service to manage my subscriptions and to ensure that they are up to date across my various devices. My preferred client to actually read through the content from my feeds is Reeder 2 on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The interface is just one that I am comfortable with and it makes reading through stuff a joy.

Pinboard

When I decide something is worth saving and sharing, I bookmark it using Pinboard. I used to be a big fan of Delicious, but since the various changes of ownership of that service, I decided to go somewhere a bit more reliable, hence Pinboard – an indie service that you have to pay for. I bookmark stuff either by using the helpful button within Reeder, or by opening the item in a browser and using a bookmarklet button. I’m a bit lazy and tend to just leave the title as is – with the odd edit for length (see later) and don’t bother adding a description. I do tag things though, and try to limit myself to just one or two tags.

Twitter

Everything I bookmark appears on Twitter shortly afterwards, thanks to a recipe on IFTTT. IFTTT is a super useful service that helps you build up automated workflows triggered by online activity. So, in this case, IFTTT spots when I add a new bookmark in Pinboard, and then tweets it for me. I make IFTTT put some quote marks around the title of the article which I think helps to distinguish it from something I have written myself.

With this Twitter process in mind, I will often amend the title of the bookmark, knowing that it is the main bit that gets tweeted. I might add a hashtag, for instance, or @ mention the author to add a little context, without breaking the meaning when the link is viewed in other contexts.

Pocket

I save everything I bookmark for later reading into Pocket, thanks to another IFTTT script. This is especially useful for longer items. Pocket saves a copy of the articles I save locally on my phone, so if I have a spare few minutes at any time, there’s always something interesting to read.

Email

I include several links in my email newsletter. Right now this is a manual process – when writing the email, I scan through my recent bookmarks in Pinboard and pull out the most interesting ones, then write a bit of commentary about them. This could be automated via Mailchimp’s feature to build an email through the RSS feed generated by Pinboard, but I suspect this would end up taking more work to edit and so on than I currently expend doing it manually.

My blog

Articles I curate only currently appear in the footer of my blog as a widget called ‘Link list’. I very much doubt anybody looks at it. In the past I did have automated posts collecting recently bookmarked links together, which I lost when I recently rehosted my site. I ought to look into reinstating this, as I think it can be pretty useful.

What others are doing

I asked on Twitter how others curate, and these are the responses I got by the time of publishing this post:

@davebriggs scanning rss feeds of all my fave blogs/ news sources on Netvibes and using Buffer to url shorten/ bookmark and schedule or post

— Jemima (she/her) 🙈 @JemimaG@mastodon.me.uk (@JemimaG) December 8, 2014

@davebriggs Press/Feedly for rss + tweetdeck -> Instapaper for stuff to read, Pinboard for stuff to share (which autogenerates blog posts)

— Stefan Czerniawski (@pubstrat) December 8, 2014

What is your curation workflow? It would be great to hear about it!

Planning digital engagement

November 28, 2014

I recorded this a little while ago to go alongside some other training and consulting work I was doing at the time.

I basically explain how to plan out digital engagement work to ensure it is most likely to succeed, by thinking about your own objectives, the needs of the people you want to engage with, and that sort of thing.

It refers to a template throughout – you can download a copy of that here – it’s in PowerPoint format.

Hope it’s useful!

Get your levels of engagement right

September 29, 2014

When I delivered the Civil Service Learning digital engagement for policymakers course with Steph Gray, Steph put in a really neat slide which explained that different people have different needs from any one engagement exercise.

Some people are happy to just know a bit more about what is going on. Others want to be able to have their say. Some people don’t want to be bothered about it at all!

This is an important thing to remember when trying to engage people with your policy, campaign, event or service. A single digital solution will put off as many people as it attracts.

Planning a digital engagement exercise needs to include consideration of each different audience, what their needs are, and what they are able to offer.

For those that just want to know more, try a clear English version of your policy to help people understand what you are trying to do.

For those who would like to be involved but perhaps don’t have the expertise to contribute in a major way, provide some kind of interactive quiz or exercise to allow them to give their overall view without getting bogged down in detail.

Then, for those with deep knowledge of the policy area you are engaging with, provide easy ways for them to be able to share that knowledge and their views – through a nice survey or commendable document, say.

The important thing is to do the research and planning to begin with – who will have a view on this? What will they want to do? How much understanding do they have?

Once you’ve done this, it ought to be much easier to design engaging tools to help make it happen.

Need some help getting your digital approach right? Join me at my Achieving Digital Transformation workshop in December!

New successful digital engagement course open for registration

May 20, 2013

Our first successful digital engagement course is up and running and going great guns. In fact, I’ve already had a few people asking when the next one is going to be.

So, am happy to provide an answer! We’ll be running it again starting on 4th September 2013 and it will again run for 8 weeks, and so will come to a close in early November. You can find out more and book a place here.

Here’s a reminder of the course content:

The course consists of eight lessons, which last for a week each. Total learner time per lesson is around an hour, which they can do in one chunk or spread throughout the week – it is entirely up to them.

Support is provided both to the group as a whole, with discussion and sharing of experience and knowledge encouraged; and privately through email or telephone discussion between the course facilitator and learners.

Each lesson will include some or all of the following elements:

An introductory video introducing the topic and explaining some details
Downloadable templates, resources, guides and case studies
Links to further reading and case studies
Interviews with practitioners
Screencast demos of how to perform certain actions
Learner discussion areas
One to one private email or telephone support
Additional content in response to queries and requests
Assignments to practice learning

The eight lessons in this course are:

Introductions, objectives, how the course and the platform works
What is digital engagement and what defines success?
Strategies for successful digital engagement
- Different approaches – organisational, team based, individual
- Different focuses – external, internal, partnership based
- Different objectives – informing, consulting, collaborating
Popular platforms and how they are best used
- Twitter
- Facebook
- YouTube
- LinkedIn
Emerging platforms – how might they be employed to best effect?
- Instagram
- Tumblr
- Foursquare
- Pinterest
Other tools and techniques
- Web chats
- Blogging
- Commentable documents
- Crowdsourcing
Skills and roles
- Community management
- Social reporting
- Curator
- Networker
Bringing it all together – a chance for reflective practice

Wanting to engage online? Put people first.

April 15, 2013

I had an interesting chat last week with someone from a fairly large NGO who wanted to start using online tools to engage people with their work.

As usual, there were no easy answers.

However, there is an answer, only it takes a bit of explaining and rather a lot of doing. The problem is that people aren’t a homogenous group, they’re all different and they want different things and do different things too.

It’s so annoying!

Anyway, annoying things shouldn’t be ignored, they should be attacked, head on. So, the thing to do hear is to chunk up all these different people into groups and have a think about what they want and what they want to do.

In other words, come up with some personas. The quickest way to describe them in this context is that they are made up stereotypes of the sort of people you are trying to engage with. Then you imagine what their ‘stories’ might be as they come into contact with you online.

You can do this properly and scientifically, but it can also be really helpful if you just do it in the usual JFDI quick-and-dirty style.

In my contact’s situation, they could clearly break people down into several groups, each of which would have different needs and requirements. A one size fits all approach would not be appropriate.

One group would be social media savvy “passers by” who don’t know much if anything about the organisation and its work. The best outcome of engagement with this group might be to simply raise awareness by getting a tweet in front of them, a real success might be getting them to like the Facebook, or follow a Twitter account.

Another group would be an older person, who perhaps has just taken early retirement, has some spare time and is looking to invest it in a good cause. Perhaps they’ve used computers a fair bit in their working lives, and use Facebook for family stuff, but it’s not second nature to them. The organisation might realistically hope to get such people to agree to do some volunteering or perhaps join the organisation.

Thirdly, how about people who are already effectively activtists on the issue, but who do their own thing, not as part of the wider activity of the organisation? They know the issues inside out from a practical perspective and are keen and motivated to get things done in the real world as well as online. They need to be given things to do, quickly, as well as getting the benefits that a larger organisation could offer, including support, research and so on.

A fourth group were identified as stakeholders and academics, who the organisation probably knows by name and have a deep seated interest and knowledge of the topics. The best way to get such people involved probably won’t happen in social media. They probably will want a big PDF report to chew on and talk about in committees.

Such people probably have deep links to specific pages in the organisation’s website saved in their bookmarks. So maybe we shouldn’t use up too much homepage real estate on our website trying to attract their attention.

So pretty quickly we’ve imagined four groups of people with different needs and can use them to work out how we might engage with them online, and where to focus our efforts.

This is pretty standard ladder of participation stuff. The key points are:

You don’t engage everyone using the same medium
Don’t ask everyong to do the same thing

This helps answer a common argument I come across when it comes to digital engagement which is that “our stakeholders aren’t on Twitter”. In which case, fine, do something else with them. But other people you could be working with are in these spaces and you’re missing a trick if you don’t involve them.

So, if you’re planning a campaign that will use digital engagement, bear this in mind and put some work in up front to think about who you want to engage, where they will be, and what they are likely to want to do.

There’s some really good stuff on this from Steph and others here.

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