Thursday, 7 June, 2012

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Wednesday, 6 June, 2012

Writing an effective tweet

Writing a tweet is easy – after all, what can you get wrong when you only have 140 characters to play with?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

Recently Ben and I did some training at a local authority up in the North-East, and part of it was a quick workshop on writing for the web and for social media. We spent a fair bit of time looking at Twitter as a medium.

We ran an exercise where everyone had a story for which they had to write a tweet to promote it. We went through the process a couple of times, with people rewriting their tweets to improve them, save characters, and that sort of thing.

Here’s some of the learning that emerged:

  1. Make sure it begins with an impactful, information carrying word or two. Tweets may be short, but they still need to grab the attention. Tweets beginning with ‘News’ or ‘Announcement’ are wasting space – we know it;s an announcement, else it wouldn’t be on Twitter!
  2. Use  a URL shortener to save characters – but customise it to make it human readable too, as this adds meaning and can save characters elsewhere
  3. Leave some space for old school retweeters and those who like to add a short comment to a retweet
  4. Formatting on Twitter is limited. Make use of capital letters to add emphasis – but sparingly
  5. Draft tweets and work on them – don’t publish your first go. Instead, go through it a couple of times trimming characters and improving the language
  6. Time your tweets – those posted in the morning tend to get more active attention than later in the day. Also don’t post on the hour – lots of automated systems are set up to do that and you might get drowned out
  7. Don’t be afraid of repeating a tweet so people can pick it up at another time or day – but don’t do it too often
  8. You need to work hard to appear authoritative in a social space so people feel they can trust the information you are providing. Ensure you include concrete facts to reinforce this
  9. A key thing for people getting information from social networks is the idea they are getting something special – use language that enforces the uniqueness of the content they are seeing
  10. Whatever you do, don’t automate this process! There’s nothing worse than those press releases pumped out onto Twitter, with half the tweet filled with “PRESS RELEASE” and then half the title missing on the end… just taking five minutes to think about what you are writing can make a real difference!

If a workshop on best use of social media in your organisation would be helpful – just get in touch! We’d be happy to chat about your requirements and design something that meets your needs.

#Writing an effective tweet

Friday, 1 June, 2012

New Chromebooks – worth the bother?

Google have announced a new model of their Chromebook – the web only laptop that runs their Chrome operating system, which essentially consists of a browser and not much else.

As well as the laptop, there’s now a desktop machine too – which is rather reminiscent of the Mac Mini.

Both look like nice bits of hardware – but just how useful is a computer that only runs web based apps? ReadWriteWeb featured two contrasting views recently – one for, one against.

I’ve never actually seen a Chromebook, and am pretty sure I don’t know anybody that owns one (this in itself is probably telling). I do however have a bit of experience with something similar.

A while ago I blogged about my investment in a Lenovo S205 netbook. After a little while I got bored with it, and decided to replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu as the machine’s operating system. I probably should have been mowing the lawn or something at the time.

Anyway, as part of setting up the machine, I made it boot up Chromium (the open source cousin of Chrome that ships on Linux based systems) automatically, and so I pretty much just use the machine within the web – I don’t run any native programs at all.

The truth is, it’s pretty handy and I reckon I can get 80% of my work done on there. Thanks to Gmail, Google Docs, Evernote, Xero, Basecamp, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, WordPress and so on, I can get an awful lot done within the browser.

The downside comes when I need to do something with an actual file – such as using FTP to get a file online, or formatting a document in Word (Google Docs is fine for bashing in text and sharing notes, but not so good for well presented documents, I find). Editing images is another example of a common activity that right now isn’t fun to do within the browser.

(The other downside of using the Lenovo as a Chromebook-like device is the slow boot time – unlike the official ones, it doesn’t feature a solid state drive, which enables the Chromebook’s to boot in less than 10 seconds. I have, however, ordered an SSD for the S205, so we’ll see if it makes a difference!)

However, when I think about it, there could well be a role for Chromebook style devices, not necessarily for person use, but maybe within an organisational context. I could imagine a company’s sales team, or a group of field workers, having access to all the apps they need through a browser: email, docs, CRM etc, without any of the clutter of a traditional machine that in their roles they just wouldn’t need.

I’d probably prefer to have an iPad though. What do you think?

#New Chromebooks – worth the bother?

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Wednesday, 30 May, 2012

Reputation: not a goal but a measure

I am not Dave Briggs*.

I’ve been following the #lgcomms12 hashtag this week. This is the label for tweets from the LGComms Academy event in Birmingham. It is much more lively than in previous years I must say and it sounds like they’ve been having a really interesting time.

Richard Stokoe from London Fire Brigade has caused quite a stir. He seems to have been arguing that Councils should not care about their reputation. I’ve put a flavour of the tweets in a Storify. Richard refuses to tweet himself.

It is pretty strong stuff for corporate comms professionals. Managing reputations is what PR professionals do. Already under threat from digital comms, from people “just doing it” within their own organisations they now face one of their own turning on them.

Which is all to the good.

I’m pretty sure that Richard Stokoe does care about the reputation of local government. He ran the LGA news team after all.

But he cares more about looking after people. When I interviewed him about how London Fire Brigade approaches social media he was very clear that it is all about stopping fires.

I agree with that approach, communications activity should be about changing people’s lives. It should be about making sure that the vulnerable know what services they can access, it should be about making sure that everybody makes use of the recycling service, it should be about transforming the way services are delivered.

Though I have concerns about where that narrative takes us. If local authorities cease to care about their reputation locally that could take them into some very dark areas.

Local authorities are important. They intervene very heavily in the lives of the most vulnerable in society and they shape the environment and economy for us all. They regulate things, they balance competing needs and wishes, they hold the ring in communities.

If we don’t trust or respect our local authority it will find it hard to deliver services. It may make people’s lives worse. It will become dragged into conflict and a cycle of failed projects and angry customers.

Local authorities should earn and re-earn trust. They should care about their reputation: not as a goal in itself but as a measure of how well they serve their community.

PR in local government should be a tool by which citizens can drive improvements in the council. It should not be a tool by which citizens can be persuaded their services are better than they are.

*This is my first blog on Kind of Digital’s site. I have my own blog where I write about digital comms and emergencies. The plan is that, as I often help Dave deliver projects and training, I may post on this site from time to time about non-emergency comms stuff. But I guess that depends on how many complaints the Kind of Digital team receives.

#Reputation: not a goal but a measure

Webchat – 12 June 2012 at 11am – on webchats!

A little while ago, we ran some webchats here, and they were pretty popular. Now we have the website sorted, I think it’s a good time to bring them back.

So, on Tuesday 12th June at 11am for an hour we’ll be having a webchat here at kindofdigital.com on the subject of… webchats! Nothing like a bit of meta-discussion to get the juices flowing, I think.

Seriously though, there have been some great examples of organisations using webchats to engage people with a policy discussion or campaign. We’ll hopefully be able to get some people along who have been involved in those and share some good practice.

Register for the webchat here – we’re using CoverItLive as usual (although we’re developing a plugin for WordPress that means we don’t have to rely on third party services in future…).

Look forward to chatting in a couple of weeks’ time!

#Webchat – 12 June 2012 at 11am – on webchats!

Tuesday, 29 May, 2012

New website, with added blog

Hello!

If you can see this, it means that Kind of Digital’s new website is now live. We’ve given things a new look, and have organised the content a bit better, to give folk visiting the site some kind of idea about what we actually do.

A bigger change is that my blog, DavePress, is now incorporated into the main Kind of Digital site, and indeed DavePress now is no more. It’s a bit of a wrench, as I’ve been writing on that site since 2008, but the time has come where I needed to focus on the thing which is meant to be where I’m making some money.

In other words, I don’t think people generally associate the helpful things I post on my blog with Kind of Digital, the business through which I earn a living. Maybe I’m over thinking things, but at least having just one website to update will make my life easier.

Don’t worry if you are a DavePress subscriber though – we’ve moved you all over automagically. Likewise, all the links out there to posts in the DavePress archives will redirect to the appropriate posts here. It ought to be seamless. Still, if you spot anything janky, do let me know.

This move, enabling me to focus on this website alone, will also mean some more interesting things in terms of exploring good practice in digital engagement. So, expect more handy guides, video interviews with people doing awesome stuff, web chats and webinars. I’m looking forward to it, and hopefully you are too!

#New website, with added blog

Wednesday, 16 May, 2012

What I’ve been reading

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

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

#What I’ve been reading

Tuesday, 8 May, 2012

What does a councillor’s website need?

Not one of my more informative posts, this one, more a cry for help.

I’ve been approached by a couple of councillors to develop a website for them, and I’m interested to know what sort of features would be required for such a site to be considered best of breed.

For example:

  • Blog style layout
  • Events/meeting listings
  • Local maps
  • Easy methods of contact
  • Feedback through comments, etc

None of these seem particularly exciting to me! Anyone got anything really good that ought to be included – or great examples of Councillor websites?

#What does a councillor’s website need?

Thursday, 3 May, 2012

Tuesday, 1 May, 2012

What I’ve been reading

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

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

#What I’ve been reading

Two cool tools for knowledge and learning

Neat applications for sharing knowledge and learning are like buses, it turns out.

Icon

Icon is a new app from Spigit, who are the leaders in innovation management software. It’s a really simple concept (which is good) – the online question and answer format, but for an internal audience.

So, what Yammer is to Twitter, Icon is to Quora.

It’s a fab idea and to be quite honest I have no idea why nobody has done it before.

Icon is free to get going with, and could be an incredibly easy way to build up a useful internal knowledge base. For those using Yammer already, there seems to be a way to integrate them, which is a good idea.

Lore

Lore is an online course platform. Unlike than big systems like Moodle, it focuses on making it really easy to make single courses, and to just get them out there.

It provides a place for discussions to take place between learners and teachers, accept and grade assignments, share resources, and to have a calendar for real life get togethers and webinars.

What’s remarkable is that it is free!

I’m going to be having a play with Lore to see how well it works, and perhaps put together a test online course about digital engagement, if folk would be up for it.

Thanks to Rich Millington for bringing Lore to my attention. Rich and his colleagues are running a free course about online community management using the Lore platform, which will be well worth signing up for!

#Two cool tools for knowledge and learning

Monday, 30 April, 2012

Going hyperlocal

I had an enjoyable time on Saturday at the Talk About Local unconference, where lots of people involved in hyperlocal websites get together to share stories and experiences and to figure out answers to tricky questions.

There tends to be two angles with hyperlocal – the future of local journalism stuff which I tend to find rather dull; and then the community activist side, which is a bit more interesting.

I enjoyed the session organised by Vicky Sargent on neighbourhood planning and hyperlocals. We’re supporting a local neighbourhood plan initiative with web stuff – see A Plan for Holbeach – and of course there is our site for NALC too.

Vicky has a web tool coming out soon to support local groups in putting together neighbourhood plans – which ought to be pretty useful and I’m looking forward to seeing more on that.

Philip John – a Kind of Digital team member – ran a session proposing the Hyperlocal Alliance, which sounds like a great initiative and you can find out more about that here.

I didn’t run any sessions – I’m not really a hyperlocalist myself and was mainly in listening mode – but I have kicked off a project to openly collaborate on a hyperlocal handbook. Do join in!

#Going hyperlocal

Sunday, 29 April, 2012

Tools for writing

I use a ridiculous number of apps for writing stuff down digitally. It all depends on the context!

Rough notes, ideas and that sort of thing tend to be stored in Evernote. It’s easy, and ubiquitous and everything gets kept in one place.

Blog posts are written in MarsEdit, an offline editor. My local drafts folder is full of half-written, half-baked posts which occasionally get resurrected later on.

Any coding I have to do usually happens in BBEdit, or occasionally something like Nano in a terminal window.

Proposals and other documents which I’m the only person likely to ever edit are done in Pages, and then exported to PDF for distribution. I just like the way Pages works in terms of laying things out and so on.

Documents and reports that I need to share in an editable format with colleagues or customers have to be written in Word. Since upgrading to the 2011 version on the Mac I have found myself getting angry much less!

Longer documents, such as various guides and handbooks I am working on tend to be planned using an outliner tool. My favourite at the moment is OmniOutliner.

I sometimes use a mind mapping tool to plan a document though, which is a bit more visual. My favourite mind mapping app is MindNode.

(As well as for documents, an outliner or mind mapper is really useful for planning presentations.)

For the actual writing of bigger documents, I use Scrivener. This lets you break down the document into smaller bits, which can then be dragged around and re-ordered. Scrivener then sticks it all together into one document for you when you’re ready to publish. It’s great!

Whether using OmniOutliner or MindNode, I can import my outlines into Scrivener by exporting them to an OPML file, which then loads into Scrivener, giving me all the headings under which I need to bash text.

One type of editor that I don’t find myself using are the stripped down, distraction free apps like Writeroom or Byword.

What apps do you use for writing?

#Tools for writing

Wednesday, 25 April, 2012

Planning for Councillors

A nice little project this, that we developed for our friends at NALC. It’s a site introducing some of the issues around planning, particularly aimed at parish councillors.

We did the design and built the WordPress template, while the guys at NALC provided the content for us to build the pages.

The purpose of the site is really to drive traffic to NALC’s e-learning platform (provided by my good chums at Learning Pool) as well as to other online learning resources about planning.

We wanted the site to have a nice and bright, informal feel that perhaps not many websites in this particular sector tend to feature, and are pretty pleased with the results!

#Planning for Councillors

What I’ve been reading

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

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

#What I’ve been reading

Friday, 20 April, 2012

Monday, 16 April, 2012

Share your own knowledge, bring your own app

Interesting post from Steve Dale – taking a slightly different approach to the use of social tools within the workplace (see ‘social business’ or ‘enterprise 2.0’ ad nauseam) where he focuses instead on the concept of ‘personal knowledge management’.

In order to develop a true learning organisation, staff need to be given much more freedom to use the tools, facilities, applications and networks that they have chosen. After all they are far closer to the issues, problems and potential solutions associated with their work than a CIO, a CFO or head of L&D. It is my firm belief that social learning and personal development requires a shift from hierarchies to networks, and empowerment of the workforce to choose the tools they need to do the job. Organisation that can’t or won’t grasp this paradigm shift will struggle to attract and retain talent, and will struggle to survive against more agile and adaptable businesses that do.

It’s interesting that it’s Steve saying this – because he was the guy who did such great work designing and promoting the LGID’s Communities of Practice platform – and it’s such a shame to see the momentum that project created being lost in the transition to the supposedly superior Knowledge Hub.

Steve’s thinking in this latest post seems to be that perhaps the community based approach to learning doesn’t work so well in an age of smaller and more personal technology. I agree.

How do I know which community I should join to share a certain bit of knowledge? Better surely to just share it, using the tool I am most comfortable with, and let people find it who need to.

This ties into what I said in a post a little while back on why internal use of social hasn’t really kicked off:

Much is made of the fact that due to the consumerisation of technology, workers are more likely to expect that social tools are available to them at work. I’d agree with this, but I think it is more likely that they expect and desire to use tools of their own choosing and not some corporately imposed knowledge management solution.

In other words, I suspect in this area employees would want to use the tools they like using, for their own purposes. There’s nothing wrong with this – I’m not suggesting that people just want to waste time, or spend their working day expanding their LinkedIn network – but I do think it more important that organisations allow staff access to the tools they want to do their jobs, and then find a way of managing it all – as opposed to procuring a big system to do ‘social’ and assuming people will want to use it.

I can’t help but think that it is a shame that so few organisations within the sectors I hold dear have taken up the baton of using new technology to foster knowledge sharing, more effective management of projects and generally smarter working.

Perhaps in an age of ‘bring your own device‘, bring your own apps isn’t far behind.

#Share your own knowledge, bring your own app

Saturday, 14 April, 2012

iPads and apps

I’ve been playing with a new iPad recently – and I love it. The screen resolution on these things literally has to be seen to be believed.

I had an original iPad before – the one without a camera – and it was also a wifi only one, without a mobile data plan. The result of this was that I rarely took it out of the house. My new one has a 3G connection, which means it’ll get online anywhere with a decent mobile signal.

This latter fact means I’m more likely to break Briggs’ Law – which states that it’s impossible to use a tablet computer in public without looking like a twerp.

Anyway, here’s my home screen with my most used apps. Let’s have a look at what I’ve been using, going through the rows from top to bottom and left to right.

WordPress – mainly for managing this blog, and if I’m honest for moderating comments and so on, rather than writing posts.

Calendar – I occasionally look at this, it seems to sync reasonably with my Google calendar.

Maps – handy for planning trips and so on.

Basecamp – not a native app but a web app whose bookmark I’ve saved to the home screen. Helps keep on track of projects.

Evernote – my favourite note keeping app which syncs nicely with the website and the app on my laptop.

Articles – a client for WikiPedia which seems to work quicker and formats more nicely than the website.

Remote – I can control my stereo in the lounge using this app.

WriteRoom – a lovely distraction free text editor. great for bashing in text, but if I’m honest I tend to just use Evernote.

Photos – for, you know, looking at photos.

RTM – Remember the Milk is a dead simple app for managing and syncing to do lists.

Camera – takes photos.

Draft – very simple app for drawing things with your finger, particularly outlines for website wireframes and so on.

iPlayer – it’s brilliant being able to watch BBC shows on this. It upsets me sometimes that my son doesn’t realise how magical it is!

iAnnotate PDF – I tried a few apps for annotating PDFs and this seems the best. Great for meetings – no printing required! I can type notes, highlight bits, scribble and doodle to my heart’s content.

Instapaper – if I see something online I want to read later, I can save it to Instapaper and pick it up later on, formatted beautifully for the iPad.

Mindnode – simple way of drawing mind maps.

Dropbox – the easiest way of getting documents to and from an iPad in my experience.

Reeder – my RSS reader of choice. Beautiful design and easy to use – and syncs with Google Reader.

OmniOutliner – I don’t tend to type too much on the iPad but I do like to plan documents using it, and an outliner is a great tool for that.

OmniFocus – the Rolls Royce of iPad todo list apps. Having played with it, it’s too much for me and RTM suits me better. To be replaced on my home screen by something new, soon, I’m sure!

#iPads and apps

Thursday, 12 April, 2012

What I’ve been reading

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

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

#What I’ve been reading