Dave Briggs – Page 182 – An online notebook

Local digital impact

March 7, 2011

I’m increasingly interested in how creative collaborations between small suppliers, public services and organisations from other sectors can come together to solve problems in an open innovation-y sort of way.

The digital arena is probably one of the best places for this type of thing to happen, and a useful post has appeared on one of NESTA’s blogs about it.

In the post, they provide a list of things that government can do to foster local digital activity and collaboration:

Encourage the take-up of broadband and internet access more widely so that we can all participate in this world. Let’s not leave anyone behind.
Find new business models to balance freely available broadband in cities with ISP’s right to recoup the costs of putting in a next generation infrastructure.
Open up local data at a very local level, and then find ways of encouraging engagement between the private creative businesses and our public sector. Our Make it Local programme is trying to do this, but we need much more of it.
Remember that most digital developers still need to make real-world connections to get business and the role of local and regional agencies – both trade associations and screen agencies can be tremendously valuable in helping digital SMEs to win business.

There’s another post to be written at some point about the different aspects of digital activity in an area, and what the role is of government in supporting and nurturing that. But it’s certainly more than just subscribing to local bloggers – important though listening is.

I’m going to be writing a few posts about this in the future, I think, so have created a category – ‘digital local‘ – for them to sit in.

Pulling, Not Pushing: How To Make Me Pay Attention

March 4, 2011

In my previous post about online listening, I mentioned RepKnight, a soon to launch lightweight tool for tracking keywords across social media services. In this guest post, RepKnight’s Lyra McKee talks about getting people’s attention online without irritating them.

Social media is like the Internet in 1999; no one’s quite sure how best to use it or what exactly it should be used for. This tends to lead to a lot of bad behaviour, mainly by those trying to engage or market to citizens. At times, it verges on spam, with scheduled marketing messages and PR copy blasted in your ear like a trumpet.

The marketing spin gets our attention but it doesn’t make us “pay” attention; like the man being scolded by his wife to clean the living room while watching the Arsenal match, we’re listening but tuning the noise out so that the message doesn’t get through anyways. So how does someone make us “pay” attention on social media? And how can you get those you want to engage with to pay attention to you?

In the Web 2.0 world, marketing and adverts no longer impact us. We’re no longer wowed by the glossy billboard or TV ad. The only messages getting through are those that contain value. They are the ones that make us “pay” attention.

I separate the value providers in my Twitter and Facebook streams into 3 categories:

The Influencers: These people are like the parents of teenagers who actually do as their told. In our eyes, they have credibility so we listen to their every word. Generally, they’re either celebrities or industry thought leaders.
Friends: Our peers bring us value by satisfying our need for social approval (and sometimes making us laugh).
Founts of Knowledge: These are the folks who tweet links the rest of us find useful, like marketers who Tweet links about how to use Facebook and Twitter properly. We visit their social network profiles again and again to see if they’ve tweeted any news or info we’ve missed.

If you’re not the first or second one, you need to be the third one.

The important thing when pushing links and information is to be aware of who your audience is and question if it’s relevant enough to them. Try to add an element of engagement to the information; ask a question, like “What’s everyone think of the latest news *insert link*”. Use a tracking tool such as Bit.ly that lets you monitor how many people click the link.

Most of all, add to the conversation – not with your opinion (unless asked for it) but with useful tips and hints. You must constantly be bringing gifts to the table. This will get you noticed and make your target Tweeters and Facebookers pay attention.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to Tweet or Facebook me at @RepKnight; alternatively, follow me on my personal Twitter account @LyraMcKee or email me at lyra@repknight.com.

Comments – is Facebook the answer?

March 2, 2011

Commenting on websites is a funny thing. Luckily for me, DavePress is sufficiently niche not to attract too many readers, so the problem of being inundated by moronic comments has never really been an issue for me.

For big, popular sites though, commenting can be a real issue. You just need to take a look through the comment threads on posts on Guido’s blog, for instance, to see how ugly things can get.

It’s not just the offensive, though, it’s the irrelevant that can be just as annoying. People leaving meaningless comments just to draw attention to themselves, or their own websites.

Part of the issue is the ease of anonymity with website comments. With a system like WordPress, all you need to do is enter an email address and your name, and you can submit any comment you like.

There are solutions, like Disqus and Intense Debate, which go a bit further to enable commenters to tie their contributions to existing online identities. This goes some way to improving the standard of comments, but it’s still relatively easy to subvert this and go anonymous. It’s part of the cost, I guess, of keeping barriers to entry low.

One new opportunity here though is using Facebook to power your comments – the page explaining it is here.

The technology blog TechCrunch has already implemented it as an experiment, and interestingly, with comments being tied to personal identities, the standard of commenting has risen:

In the past few hours, most of the anonymous trolls who have come to call TechCrunch comments a second home are gone. Of course, some people don’t want to comment with their real names for good reason (they want to speak freely without fear of reprisals), but for the most part in practice anonymity was abused. It was used mostly as a shield to hide behind and throw out invective…

The other main benefit is social virality. When you comment on TechCrunch, your comment also appears in your Facebook stream with a link back to the post (unless you opt out of that option in the comment box).

Seems good, but it isn’t perfect. Some of the issues:

Not everyone has a Facebook account, so won’t be able to comment
Facebook is banned in many workplaces, so people won’t be able to access or contribute to comments
There doesn’t seem to be a way at the moment to extract your site’s comment data out of Facebook
There probably are instances where anonymous commenting is a good thing, and Facebook comments makes it pretty hard to do

So, as always, the answer as to the best way of managing comments on websites is ‘it depends’. Having the Facebook option is a useful addition to the toolkit, though, and it will be interesting to see if any public service types use it in the future.

A Masters in Public Technology?

February 27, 2011

Tom Steinberg:

There is barely a not-for-profit, social enterprise or government body I can think of that wouldn’t benefit from a Duncan Parkes or a Matthew Somerville on the payroll, so long as they had the intelligence and self-discipline not to park them in the server room. Why? Because just one person with the skills, motivation and time spent learning can materially increase the amount of time that technology makes a positive contribution to almost any public or not-for-profit organisation.

I agree, though Tom’s developer-centric view of this should probably be widened for it to be a bit more inclusive.

Listening online

February 25, 2011

I’ve stopped saying it quite so much now, but the four point plan I used to trot out all the time when talking to organisations about their approach to the web was always:

Listen
Acknowledge
Create
Share

The only reason I don’t say it so much is that I got bored of repeating myself, rather than deciding it was the wrong way to go about things.

The first step, to listen (not monitor! that always sounds a bit big brother to me), is the most fundamental, but strangely it is also one of the hardest to get right, because it needs people, process and technology. Usually when this is the case the technology is the easy bit, but I’m not so sure in this instance.

Listening online is a case of tracking keywords and where they are used on the web. These keywords would be things like:

The name of your organisation
The names of the local area
Names of key people in leadership roles
Names of campaigns and issues, etc

You need to be alerted as to when they are used online, so you can respond if necessary, or just note it.

Why would you want to do this? Let me count the ways…

You want to be alerted immediately when people are saying bad / good things about your organisation
You want to quickly respond to online customer service queries
You want to quickly see who is talking about key issues and campaigns and join the conversation to raise awareness of your organisation’s activities.
You want to easily identify people active online in your local area and connect with them and involve them in what you are doing.

There are probably others too.

How to do this though? There are 3 approaches I think:

Cobble your own – using Google alerts, Reader, Yahoo! Pipes, maybe iGoogle or Netvibes and a bunch of other tools (SocialMention, BoardTracker, Addictomatic, Icerocket, etc) you could put together a pretty decent monitoring dashboard. Downside is that they are a pain to set up and even more annoying to maintain. Plus, any one of those services could disappear at a moment’s notice.
Use a tool – such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Hootsuite, for example. These tools have grown from being purely about tracking Twitter to allowing you to manage multiple accounts across multiple channels, such as Facebook Foursquare and others. They tend to be pretty cost effective, even for the pro versions, but are limited in terms of the data sources they pull content in from, such as blogs and forums for instance.
Buy a service – there are plenty of social media listening and tracking tools out there, each with their own unique features. Many offer deep data and sentiment analysis tools, telling you how much of the online chatter about you is positive, etc. These systems can be pretty expensive though, and for those organisations that just want a simple listening tool, can be very much in sledgehammer and nut territory.

(The apparent lack of a decent option somewhere between the free and the quite expensive is why I am so excited about the potential of RepKnight, which promises to be a simple, straightforward and cost effective tool to track keywords and to follow up results as necessary. I got to have some input into the specification for the product, so am hoping it will meet the needs of the public sector dead on.)

Once you have the technology in place you can think about the process and the people.

In terms of process, it comes back to Steph‘s neat little phrase that ‘interactive websites need interactive organisations’. What I mean here by listening is active listening, taking into account what people are saying, and acting upon it.

This means acknowledging what people are saying, answering questions and following up on queries. Most of the time it should be possible to reply using the same medium, but obviously occasionally communication will need to be taken offline. Sometimes – but certainly not always! – you might even have to document an interaction using your organisation’s CRM system.

None of this is particularly risky or difficult stuff – it’s just a case of getting the procedure in place and ensuring staff are trained to follow, and adapt to it.

I’d be interested in hearing from folks about the way they are doing online listening, or perhaps the reasons why they don’t! What are the issues you are facing?

Load more posts!