Why chief executives should blog

I was delighted to have the opportunity to interview Mark Lloyd, Chief Executive of Cambridgeshire County Council, recently.

Since taking up his post, Mark has written a prolific internal blog about his work at the Council to inform and engage with his colleagues at all levels of the organisation.

This is exactly the sort of thing I have been talking about for the last couple of months – that really effective use of social media behind the firewall should be a priority for local councils. Mark’s experiences should hopefully encourage more of this activity across local government.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAOQ1Pnr36M

Many thanks to Michele Ide-Smith for arranging this interview.

I’m keen to do more videos like this – if you or someone you know would make a good subject, do get in touch!

Big conference

Social Media World Forum Europe

On Monday (14th) I will be attending the Social Media World Forum Europe conference, at London’s Olympia venue. It looks like quite a big do.

I’m also going to appear on a couple of panels, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The morning’s panel – at 10:30 – is a workshop on ‘What are Politicians doing in Web 2.0?’ focusing in on:

  • What tools Obama and his team used to gain success in social media space
  • Who’s tweeting?
  • Number 10 – how the prime minister’s office are embracing social media

I’ll be sharing a stage with Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), Scott Redding of the Green Party and my good pal Simon Dickson off of Puffbox.

In the afternoon – at about 5pm –  I’ll be discussing the use of social tools behind the firewall as part of the Enterprise Social Media Forum, in a session called ‘The integration of social business software with Social Media feedback to building your business and brand’.

With me on the panel will be luminaries of the enterprise 2.0 scene David Terrar, Andy McLoughlin and Per Rombouts.

Other sessions I’ve spotted featuring friends of DavePress are Ingrid Koehler, who will be on a workshop panel discussing the impact of social media on elections, at about 11am, and Jemima Gibbons, who is discussing how to write the case for using online communities in business, sometime in the morning (it’s not quite clear on the agenda – PDF warning).

Bookmarks for March 8th through March 13th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Transformed by you

Optimus PrimeSimon Wakeman has blogged about the upcoming Transformed by You event in Medway, jointly organised by Medway Council and Kent County Council.

It’s a cross between LocalGovCamp and SIcamp, and looks like it will be a really cool day. Not least because of the involvement of Simon and also Kent’s Noel Hatch – two real innovators and thinker-doers in local government.

A Uservoice forum has been set up to canvas ideas for how people’s local areas in Kent could be improved – perhaps by using the internet, perhaps not. You can then vote on the ideas you think will work best, and the top ones will be taken forward on the day, where they will be discussed and where real life geeks will put some prototypes together.

Simon writes:

Public sector organisations face growing pressures to deliver bigger and better services with far less money. Kent County Council and Medway Council recognise that by tapping into local creative thinkers they could go someway to resolve some of the issues that are emerging.

Digital technologies are effective at doing just this. More people are talking and sharing ideas online in ways that weren’t possible before. Technology also provides opportunities for individuals, businesses and other groups to create innovative models to meet these new demands.

You can sign up for a ticket for Transformed by You on the Eventbrite page. There is also a Ning site with some conversations and further information on it and the opportunity for some pre-event networking.

I’ll be there, and I think it’s going to be a very interesting and productive day.

SnapGroups

I don’t seem to write much about new tools very often, which is a shame, as playing with stuff is one of my favourite things in the world. Anyway, here’s one I cam across this morning.

I was alerted to SnapGroups thanks to ReadWriteWeb. It’s a neat little service that mashes up real time status updates – in other words, Twitter – with traditional forums.

So, rather than just posting your message out into the big list of what everyone is writing, instead, you post to specific groups, which either you have created, or where you join one created by others. You can’t, as far as I can tell, post one message to more than one group. Probably good for spammy reasons, but it could get annoying if something you have to say is relevant to several groups of people.

My SnapGroups profile is here, and I created a group called govstuff here to have a play. Feel free to join in!

So SnapGroups is pretty neat, but probably not, to my mind, sufficiently better than what is already out there to disrupt people’s established patterns of behaviour, which is to go to Twitter.

However, the guy behind the service, Mark Fletcher, has some serious background – he built the software that turned into Yahoo! Groups, and was also responsible for Bloglines before Ask bought it a few years ago. So maybe there is more to this – I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it.

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