Digital engagement – Dave Briggs

My content curation workflow

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 Gibbons (@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

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

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

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.

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.

Strategising digital engagement

Do you need a digital engagement strategy to get it right? Perhaps you don’t, but it can’t not help, surely.

Start with a vision. What do we want to achieve? Where do we want to end up? Pick an arbitrary date in the future – say 2015 – and imagine how you’d like things to be done then. What steps to get there?

One way I’d look at it would be that with budgets under lots of pressure, a digital by default (or design) approach has a load of advantages for organisations. You won’t reach everyone online, but you will get to plenty of people in a cost effective way.

Next, think organisationally. We want everyone we work with to get the benefit of this new digital way of working! How can we achieve that? It might be by having digital enthusiasts in each department talking regularly to their colleagues about how putting information and opening up services online can help improve things and make them more efficient.

Think about how having lots of people on Twitter and Facebook might affect the organisation. What training might they need? How can we know about all the profiles and pages that have been set up? How can you support people to keep up the momentum, or to help them make the right response to a question? How to help them not cock something up and get the organisation into hot water – or how to get them out of trouble if they do?

Consider breaking down activity into different types, such as having business-as-usual digital activity (ie ongoing), digital campaigns (ie time limited) and the difference between communicating, engaging and collaborating.

Now, write this stuff up on a sheet of paper. It shouldn’t take more than a side of A4. Show it to your boss, their boss, the chief exec. Get the most senior person you can to endorse it.

Start doing stuff yourself. Play with some tools. Find which ones work for you in your role, and for your team and service area. Monitor responses, successful interactions, not so successful interactions. Get your colleagues involved, ask them to cover for you when you’re on holiday, or off sick. Then encourage them to do their own thing once they realise it’s really not that bad. It’s actually fun!

Next, identify the willing. Find those digital enthusiasts, show them your bit of paper and the signature on it. Get them to show it to their bosses, and their bosses. Do talks at team meetings about it. Show people what you’ve been doing and how it worked. Tell them what went wrong and how you fixed it.

Get your digital enthusiasts to meet up every so often to share experience and stories. Maybe have an online community of practice so you can keep discussions going, even when you’re not in the same room. Encourage them, support them, cajole them, replace them when they leave.

Show other teams your community of practice. Show them how they could have one too, to share their learning, experience and problems with one another.

Revisit your strategy. Are you closer to achieving those goals? Is the organisation becoming more digital? Is the use of online tools for communication, engagement and service delivery becoming embedded in lots of people’s working lives?

What needs to change? What could be improved? Change it. Improve it.

Make it happen.

Need help getting the skills and knowledge to make this stuff a reality? Check out our online Successful Digital Engagement course now!.

Succeeding or not on the internet

A lot of people are unwilling to innovate online because they’re worried it’ll go badly. After all, there’s a story every week in the media about someone ballsing up online in one way or another.

It strikes me, from only a cursory examination of a lot of these stories, that most of the time, people or organisations get into bother online for one of two reasons.

They either take the internet too seriously, or they don’t take it seriously enough.

If you take it too seriously, you worry about what you put online to the point where it comes out like it was written by committee, is completely bland and unengaging. Decisions take ages to be made, and opportunities are missed – and disasters can’t be fixed in time.

If you don’t take it seriously enough, you don’t take enough care. Maybe you don’t feel all that bothered about what users of the net think, or say. Being dismissive of the medium is disastrous, but we see it all the time.

The trick is – as always! – to take a sensible, middle way. Treat the web and the people who spend their time there with respect, but don’t take the whole thing so seriously that you and your colleagues tie yourselves up in knots every time you need to post on a Facebook page or reply to a tweet.

As is so often the case in terms of tone and style on the net, getting the balance right is one of the main keys to success.

A few thoughts on the year ahead

But certainly not any predictions!

In the space in which Kind of Digital operates – which means largely working with public sector people in helping them innovate in the way they engage with citizens and communities using technology – I suspect the next twelve months will see a bit of gradual evolution.

There are two conflicting agendas in a way – perhaps a bit of a catch 22. There’s no money to innovate, but unless organisations start to innovate they’re to making the most of the money they do have.

Still, I think the move this year is likely to be around the use of those tools that emerged recently by more people within organisations. Twitter isn’t quite the telephone on your desk, but it can’t be too long before the comparison is valid.

I still feel that we haven’t seen anything really interesting with mobile in the digital engagement space. Money is an issue here of course, as mobile development needs time and space to get figured out and money to develop. Still, with the proliferation of smart phones these days, surely someone is going to make the jump soon.

One other area I’ll be keeping an eye on is the rollout of quicker broadband throughout most of the country. There are still a lot of questions about those rural areas that won’t get the access, but even so – what happens once the vast majority of folk have decent speed internet access? Most folk assume that having it is de facto a good thing – and I agree with them – but it will be fascinating to see the use cases emerge.

For me personally, there are challenges ahead, and the economic situation is very much a part of that. It’s tough out there and one has to work ever harder for each pound customers pay.

I’m obviously looking forward to OurHousing being up and running in the next couple of months – it’s a new sector to work in, and an exciting tool that we are developing which I think can have a really positive social impact.

I’d like to get around to blogging more often here – it was this blog that allowed me to start doing this stuff for a living and I feel I owe it some love. Part of that will be to start doing regular web chats again, and maybe experimenting with other ways of interacting online – maybe some Google Hangouts perhaps?

That’s probably enough from me. Many thanks to all the lovely people who have supported me and Kind of Digital in 2012 – and here’s to another interesting twelve months!

What I’m talking about when I’m talking about digital engagement

I do a fair bit of training on digital engagement to public sector bodies up and down the country and most of the time it means very different things to very different people.

To some, it means running a corporate Twitter account or Facebook page – which, of course, it does.

To others it means teams delivering services making use of digital tools to engage with service users, to improve the quality of the service being provided – which, of course, it does.

To another group, it means bringing social technology into the organisation, to improve the way people work, learn and generally get stuff done – which, of course, it does.

Then there are those to whom it means an approach to consultation on a particular decision, policy, campaign or project – which, of course, it does.

So all of these things, and a fair few others as well, are a part of what digital engagement means. Often the trouble is that they aren’t always considered by those looking to implement digital engagement.

So, if people bring me in to deliver some training on this, it’s usually because they have one of the above things in mind.

Rarely do they want to take a step back and put into place a kind of framework so that everything that digital engagement can mean can happen, in a sensible and well-governed way.

In other words, setting up and maintaining corporate Twitter and Facebook presences matter and are important. Equally important, however, is the use by people in service delivery roles, and indeed the other forms of engagement I mention above.

One shouldn’t preclude the others, and nor should they necessarily take precedence over others.

So what does this mean for organisations wanting to start to engage digitally?

As part of the book I’m still writing, I’ve broken digital engagement down into three main elements which should be considered by anyone undertaking some digital engagement work.

The first is strategy – whether organisation-wide, within a team or teams, partnership working with other organisations or even as an individuals. External or internal is another strategic consideration.

The second is tools and techniques, which includes the big platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but also non platform-centric stuff like blogs, email newsletters, web chats, crowdsourcing, mapping and so on.

Finally there are the skills such as curation, community management, social reporting, user centred design approaches etc.

Overall, organisations need to take an approach where:

Every piece of work undertaken is encouraged to have a digital element unless there’s a good reason not to
Anyone within the organisation can make use of a documented suite of digital tools and techniques to support this
A policy sets out people’s responsibilities and what they ought to be doing
Training is provided to fill in skills gaps

It just seems a shame to me when so much effort is put into working out how just one part of an organisation can make effective use of digital tools. Building a framework that the whole organisation can use strikes me as a much better use of time.

Webchatting about localism

Our site for NALC, What Next for Localism, is going pretty well. Quite a few ideas submitted and some conversation starting up around them and the articles published on the blog.

To further development the online discussion, we’ll be hosting a live web chat on the site next Tuesday (16th October) at 1pm on the future of localism.

It ought to be a great opportunity to debate the issues and opportunities with a group of like-minded folk – so bookmark the page and stick a reminder in your calendar!