Dave Briggs – Page 139 – An online notebook

Sunday, 16 August, 2009

Free Local Gov E-Learning Event in Ripley

Learning Pool

Learning Pool are running a free breakfast meeting for local authorities in the East and West Midlands.

This meeting will give you the chance to see and hear what your neighboring local authorities are doing with E-Learning, hear how you can create efficiency savings using e-learning as well as give you an opportunity to share your own thoughts and ideas.

It takes place in Ripley, Derbyshire on 3 September between 9.30 and 12.30.

You can find out more and book yourself a place by visiting the Learning Pool website.

You’d be daft to miss it.

Permalink

Thursday, 13 August, 2009

GoogleLocalGov community

Those who attended, or would have liked to have done, the Google event last week might be interested in a new group we have set up:

http://groups.google.com/group/googlelocalgov

To talk about how local government can use Google tools. Though this isn’t an official Google space, it will have Google folk as members who will be able to join in where they feel they can help.

To save you a click or two, here’s a handy form…

Subscribe to GoogleLocalGov

Email:

Visit this group

Permalink

Wednesday, 12 August, 2009

Getting noticed: The Five Step Programme

The second Wednesday guest post! Thanks to Sarah for this great post – if you’d like to contribute, just email me – and being called Sarah isn’t necessarily a requirement!

Online communication isn’t always taken seriously. It’s a nice to have on top of offline work or something organisations have been told to do. It isn’t necessarily considered a channel in its own right. And those that work online aren’t always respected in terms of their skills, their knowledge or the value they can bring.

Convincing others of your worth within an organisation is sometimes a bigger hurdle than convincing them of the value of online communications.

So, how to go about raising your profile and getting social media offerings to the table? I’ve worked up a list of five approaches. This list isn’t exhaustive. I’d like to hear people argue against or add their own take and experience.

1. Passion

Fall in love with online but don’t be blind to limitations and suitability. Talk to anyone who will listen about the possibilities but respect their concerns. Be able to explain why you are passionate about online – have examples of where social media has helped improve life, improved efficiency (internally or for citizens) or has saved money (pick according to your audience). Be savvy and believe in what you’re trying to get others to see the value of. And while being a geek is something to be cherished try to remember than social media is about being social so get out there and talk!

2. Persuasion

You may be the only person that believes that online communication, social media and digital engagement has an important part in your organisation. This can lead to frustration, doubts about your sanity and a relentless need to persuade others to listen to your suggestions. A good way to get people to listen to you is to listen to them – why don’t they value / understand / like online? Once you understand where they are coming from you can work out how best to showcase options to them. They still might not be sold but at the very least they will be more aware of what social media is (and probably think you’re a decent, reasonable sort as well).

3. Persistence

Things move slowly in the public sector, and social media is developing fast. Be the middle ground between the need to develop strategy, policy, protocol and being left behind because by the time you get to the dock that particular online ship has sailed.
Just because the answer is no today doesn’t mean the answer will be no tomorrow. Keep making suggestions, keep listening to the concerns around the use of social media, keep trying out ideas. Just keep on keeping on.

4. Private sector attitude

If you believe you could lose your customers to a competitor you’ll try harder to be the first with innovation and the best with services. We’re all citizens as well as public sector employees so what use of social media would make your personal dealings with the council easier? What would your neighbour, your mum, your friends find more useful. In the private sector you need to get the edge on your competitors and by having this attitude in the public sector you’ll get closer to delivering above and beyond what is expected and be able to prove why what you’re doing is of value to the organisation.

5. Play, practice, prove

Alright, that’s not one but three things. I really mean knowing what you’re talking about. Being passionate and persuasive will come more naturally if you use and know social media. The Internet is a playground so don’t be afraid to try out new platforms and ideas. Get to know other people in the sector and find out what they’re doing, share your ideas and experience with them. Collectively we can be more innovative and efficient than working in silos. And gather your evidence. Know how many people are online and using social media, know the demographics of different platforms, know how far you reach with online communications, know what your citizens think of what you’re doing. Know which tool to use for which job.

So, what do others think? Anyone used a different approach or mix in order to get word out about what they can do for the organisation with social media?

Sarah Lay blogs at www.sarahlay.com, works in online communications for Derbyshire County Council (who don’t necessarily share her views) and is studying for a Masters in eCommunications, concentrating on local government use of social media. She is also the organiser of the first social media cafe for Derby and Derbyshire. If you live or work in the area and are interested in online communications and social media come along to meet others – find out more and join the group.

Permalink

Tuesday, 11 August, 2009

Some interesting reading

Some dead interesting stuff popped up when I logged in this morning – all worth giving a read:

Facebook buys FriendFeed

Lots of people seem to be quite upset about this one. Friendfeed is still a pretty niche service, even by the standards of the social web, so this isn’t that seismic a change. The interesting thing about FriendFeed is that it was founded and developed by a really skilled team of ex-Googlers and it is probably those guys’ brains that Facebook are after.

Google makes new search engine available

Google have responded to the threat of a revitalised Microsoft web search (in the form of the ludicrously named Bing) by starting to re-engineer their core search product. You can test it out on the sandbox site – I found it noticeably quicker and the results are different.

IE team ‘defends’ IE6

There have been a whole bunch of memes on the web around the fact that Internet Explorer 6 sucks and that people should replace it. This was reflected in the UKGovWeb scene with Tom Watson’s parliamentary questions asking when government departments would be upgrading from this ancient bit of tech.

Microsoft’s IE team have responded to this chatter on their blog, not necessarily defending IE6 as a product (they would prefer people to upgrade, too) but explaining the reasons why big organisations – and indeed individuals – might be happy sticking with what they know.

Permalink

Monday, 10 August, 2009

Sunday, 9 August, 2009

GoogleLocalGov review

Here’s a list of some of the coverage of Friday’s event… I’ll keep it updated with everything I come across:

Ingrid Koehler:

Despite all the slickness and the fabulous hospitality, the day was kind of a near miss. Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale.

Michele Ide-Smith:

I have no doubt that the migration to the cloud won’t be driven so much by business strategy so much as by social needs and expectations. As time goes by our experiences of computing in our personal lives will be drastically mis-matched with our computing experiences at work.

Sarah Lay:

We asked for Google to keep speaking to us and get to know the specific issues and challenges we’re facing in local gov and for a space where we can store the developments we’re working on. It was suggested that the /localgov website was expanded to include this sand box and perhaps forums too where we can pitch questions and ideas and Google can get a feel for us.

Alice Ainsworth:

The local gov day at Google’s London HQ this week (#googlelocalgov) definitely gave me some food for thought. No, they didn’t have all the answers, but as a group we do tend to have a LOT of questions.

Sharon O’Dea

Overall, I was a little disappointed that the day wasn’t more of a constructive, two-way session, but nonetheless it was a useful overview of their products. The key is in what happens next. I love Google, and I’m sure there’s potential for them to help us achieve our aims of communicating better with residents while bringing down costs. But this was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see.

Al Smith

So that’s what happened. We came. We listened to a (slightly off-topic) sales pitch. We went home.

But it’s a start as I say. Google got plenty of feedback from the day and hopefully there are a few things people can take away and build into what they’re doing.

Carrie Bishop

It was a pretty intense day of presentations by various Googlers about their products, much of which was interesting and applicable to local government, though there wasn’t much talk about local government until the end of the session.

Paul Canning

As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government’s needs and issues are very different, it’s hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.

Permalink

Friday, 7 August, 2009

How to make websites work

From Google’s LocalGov event today, Alex Nurenberg talked us through the steps you can take to make sure your website works – in other words that visitors find what they want quickly, especially when they come in via a search engine or advert.

Bring me to the right page
Make your homepage useful
Help me navigate
Give me the right results when I search
Display services clearly
Give me the detail I need
Make registration optional
Make it easy to enquire
Reassure me
Let your users design your website (it’s all about testing)

Also:

Use Adwords to drive the right traffic
Use Analytics to monitor performance
Use Website Optimiser to optimise content

Permalink

Dave @ Learning Pool

I am rather pleased to be able to let everyone know that I’m starting work for Learning Pool this month.

For those that don’t know, Learning Pool provide e-learning services to the public sector, with a focus on local government. Subscribers to the service get access to a whole library of e-learning materials, and can also buy a system known as a dynamic learning environment to run their training on.

But it’s more interesting than that, because the notion of community is at the heart of what Learning Pool do. So, any training designed and developed by a subcriber to the service can be uploaded to the pool for any other members to use, edit and reshare. Awesome!

What’s more, Learning Pool have also started to use their experience of this kind of collaborative working to great effect in building knowledge sharing networks, with one particularly successful one running in the south-east of England with several councils involved.

I’m going to be helping Learning Pool in a number of ways:

Developing a thriving online community for e-learning at learningpool.com, for anyone with an interest, whether a customer or not, to chat with like minded folk about e-learning and related issues
Making the most of the various social media channels to enable Learning Pool’s messages to be disseminated in a conversational style
Developing some e-learning for the public sector on social media: the background, the tools and their application
Special projects – where councils or other organisations need some help on a social media type project, I and the Learning Pool crew can offer a great mix of enthusiasm, inspiration and innovation as well as organisation and reliability

It’s going to be a blast. If you want to know any more, just drop me an email.

Permalink

Thursday, 6 August, 2009

GoogleLocalGov tomorrow

The GoogleLocalGov event is taking place tomorrow, and by the sound of things it is going to be packed to the rafters with attendees and great content.

Here is what topics will be being discussed by Google’s team of experts:

Google Adwords
Site Conversion & Analytics
Google Adsense
Enterprise Solutions
YouTube & Creative Options
OpenSocial
Android
Google Maps

There is also a nice little site leading local gov folk through what Google can offer, which is well worth a look.

If you can’t make the event tomorrow, fear not, you’ll be able to follow it all on our friend Twitter – just keep an eye on the #googlelocalgov tag.

Edit: another bit of fun will be carrying on after the event for drinks and more nattering in a boozer near Kings Cross, McGlynns to be precise. If you want to come to the drinks but aren’t at GoogleLocalGov it is probably best to aim for 5.30-6ish as that is when the Googlers will be arriving. Thanks to Dan for organising.

Permalink