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digital engagement

Don’t assume everyone is offline

May 3, 2011

When I’m talking at events or to meetings of people within an organisation about the benefits of moving communications and engagement activity online, I often have someone put their hands up and say:

I totally get what you are saying, Dave, but the problem is that we can’t move all this stuff online, because not everyone has access to the web.

Which of course is true, and something I experience more and more these days, living in a rural area myself.

There are two responses I usually give here. One is the most obvious and slightly boring, which is that online engagement is an as-well-as, and not an instead-of. Keep doing the offline stuff for the offline people!

I might also ask at this point, however, ‘what are you doing to fix this?’. In other words, if a large number of people in an area haven’t the access or the skills to use the internet – what are local public services doing to get this fixed?

The second response is the title of this post. Just as not everyone is accessible online, the reverse is also true – but few people seem to consider that!

Take me as an example. I don’t have time to go to meetings. I’d rather read a book than a council leaflet when I’m sat on the loo. I have an aversion to surveys or questionnaires.

I know lots of people like me. It’s not that we don’t care, or that we’re lazy. Our lives just don’t really have any room for some of these traditional mediums. I guess we’re into micro-participation territory again.

So people who are concerned about excluding those who don’t have online access might also want to think about how the way they do things now excludes people who find offline a turn off.

Categories Social Media Tags digital engagement, microparticipation, offline, online 3 Comments

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:

  1. Listen
  2. Acknowledge
  3. Create
  4. 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…

  1. You want to be alerted immediately when people are saying bad / good things about your organisation
  2. You want to quickly respond to online customer service queries
  3. 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.
  4. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?

Categories Social Media Tags digital engagement, local government, monitoring

Digital engagement in South Holland

January 24, 2011

South Holland District CouncilSince moving house back in October, my local government district is South Holland, in south Lincolnshire. I’m no stranger to it – this is where I grew up, before leaving to go to University.

It’s good to see the local council is engaging in some online engagement activity in the near future.

Firstly, they are running a YouChoose-based budget simulation exercise.

Second, with help from the nice folk at Public-i, they are webcasting a Q&A session with decision makers which is taking place in the council chamber. People engaging virtually can also send in questions via email – it would be good if other tools could be used like Twitter – although this is hardly a hotbed of social media activity if I’m honest.

South Holland is also lucky to boast a blogging Chief Executive in Terry Huggins, who is also present on Twitter. We share him with Breckland Council in Norfolk.

As well as a shared Chief Exec, the council has a shared back-office arrangement with East Lindsay council, further north in Lincolnshire.

Categories Social Media Tags digital engagement, local government, southholland

Engaging using LinkedIn

October 15, 2010

I’ve long considered LinkedIn to be one of the most boring websites in the world, and as I described here, I rarely use it when not prompted to by an email alert demanding my attention.

However, the first rule in any digital engager’s book should be “don’t assume everyone likes (and dislikes) the stuff you do”. Just because you think a certain site sucks doesn’t mean everyone else does!

This is definitely true of LinkedIn, which is seeing considerable growth and large amounts of activity, especially amongst the business community.

Here are some examples of how public sector organisations are using LinkedIn to engage.

1. Ken Clarke

Ken Clarke on LinkedIn

The Secretary of State for Justice is using LinkedIn’s Answers function to find out what business owners think “what one thing could the Government do to help your business in the current climate?”

There have been 171 responses so far, which isn’t bad going, I don’t think.

Thanks to Steph for the tip on this one.

2. UKTI

UKTI

The UKTI group on LinkedIn is remarkably active, with people working in business and government having regular discussions with one another, and those working in government.

As Cass Martin – erstwhile member of the digital team at UKTI – tweeted, “the UKTI group on LinkedIn now has 5000+ members. Customers, exporters, investors, staff all chipping in. Lively debate!”

3. Walsall Business and Economy Forum

Walsall Business and Economy Forum

Dan Slee – local government innovator par excellence – pointed out a new forum on LinkedIn started by his employer, Walsall Council. It provides

an opportunity to reflect on the performance of the Walsall Economy, and to shape the future direction of economic development in Walsall.

Early days yet, but a great example of informal consultation done in the space where those who would be interested are already hanging out.

4. Destination Growth

Destination Growth

EEDA created this group for networking before and after a conference they ran, called Destination Growth, in 2009. That it is still going strong now goes to show how much desire there is out there for conversations between business people and those in the public sector working on their behalf.

Any more?

Four is a rather odd number, but as I said at the top, I find LinkedIn quite dull at the best of times. If you have any further examples, pop them into a comment!

Categories Social Networking Tags business, digital engagement, linkedin 9 Comments

In praise of forums?

July 13, 2010

In my recent soul-searching post on where digital engagement is heading next, I mentioned that social media needs to embed itself back into digital work as a whole.

This is in part for protection – if ‘playing around with Facebook’ is a separate team or activity, it’s ripe for being cut, frankly (I worry for those few social media officers out there).

But it is also for the reason that an integrated approach to digital, including traditional web stuff, plus email, plus the interactive bits, probably makes sense. Of course, there is then the next stage of integration, which would be into other, non-digital comms and engagement activity – but I’m even less of an expert in that sort of thing so won’t talk too much about it.

A direction that this line of thinking took me in the other day was towards forums: pretty traditional bulletin board style sites that feel like they have been around forever.

In case you were wondering, forums are online discussion sites, where threaded conversations are organised into topics. Users can quote and reply to one another in a fairly linear way.They’re most un-social media like, for a number of reasons, some techie, some not.

For example, the technology is not always the most sophisticated, and it doesn’t tend to integrate too well with your other online profiles. Also, unless the people running the forum manages it really tightly, they can quickly degenerate into bickering bear-pits where nothing constructive is ever discussed. It’s also pretty hard to keep conversations on track and to make it easy for people to find information – topics are often repeats of those already discussed, which can frustrate everyone involved.

But it strikes me that despite Facebook’s huge numbers, and the growth of Twitter and blogging (all great things, by the way, and I am not suggesting anybody stops being involved with them!), an awful lot of mass engagement online is with the forums.

Think about some of the big online communities, and what technology drives them. There are the communities of interest, like NetMums (and MumsNet), Money Saving Expert, the Student Room. Also the communities of place, like the Sheffield forum, the East Dulwich forum – and smaller ones like Around Ampthill. The number of active members and posts on these sites can be frightening.

Support communities around software or services are almost always traditional forums, and despite some of the drawbacks of the medium, they thrive, and are full of great content, interesting conversations and detailed information.

Also, those spaces which include forum-type elements are pretty much always the most popular. Think about the Ning sites you belong to, or the Communities of Practice. Try as you like to get people to blog, or contribute to wikis, it’s the forums they always gravitate to first.

There are also some other online communities, which have a rich culture and an insanely dedicated following – but where government folk should generally fear to tread, like 4chan and b3ta for instance (I’ve linked to their Wikipedia entries rather than the actual sites to save your jobs). These are fascinating examples of genuine communities of quite remarkable levels of online influence – and they have pretty simple bulletin board style technology at their heart.

What’s interesting especially about 4chan is the fact that it is anonymous – the very opposite of what social networking online tends to be about. I’m always happy to lecture people on the need to use real names in online spaces to build trust – and I think it is true as a general rule – but sites like 4chan, chaotic and anarchic as they are – seem to succeed without the need for this.

So what’s the point of writing about all this?

Well, when thinking digital engagement, don’t just think social media or social networking. People coming together online has been happening for a very long time and it is vital to focus some of your attention on some of the older-school communities, as well as Facebook groups and Twitter streams.

Second, the best thing about these forums is that they already exist – building them can be very time consuming. It’s a great example of the use of cognitive surplus, with a bit of big society thrown in for good measure, that volunteers are running these spaces (ok, some make money, but not many). Approach those behind these forums and see if there is a way you can work together – they often have a loyal band of motivated and enthusiastic people who care about stuff ready and waiting to contribute.

So are forums the cutting edge of technology? Not really. But they aren’t going away any time soon, and right now they are, I think, one of the most dependable sources of interested, web-savvy people to get involved in digital campaigns. Don’t ignore them.

Categories Communities Tags digital engagement, forums, technology 21 Comments
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