local government

See, local gov *can* do Facebook

One of the highlights of last Wednesday’s LGComms event was hearing about Coventry City Council‘s Facebook page.

Coventry on Facebook

If you click to see the larger image, you’ll notice that the page has 11,321 fans (as at the time of writing).

11,321!

Remarkable stuff. As I wrote, quite a while ago now, it’s tricky to use Facebook when you are the sort of organisation nobody loves to love. Who wants to be a fan of their local authority? No-one I know.

How did Ally Hook and colleagues manage this feat? Pretty simple. It’s not the Council’s FB page…it’s the city’s. Tapping into civic pride is a great way of getting people to engage. Using your Facebook page to provide up to date information on weather related issues during snowpocalypse probably helps too.

In other words:

  • be relevant: don’t try and get people to want to join a weird club for the council, tap into what people want to belong to
  • be useful: use the space in a way that actually benefits people, rather than as just another comms channel

Facebook will continue to be incredibly useful for those wishing to engage with citizens. It’s where the people are, and the numbers keep growing. Just because it has been around for a while shouldn’t mean us social media geeks look down on it. Is it time you took another look at Facebook?

JFDI vs Being Boring

Light blogging recently, I’ve been gadding about talking at a load of events – which is fun and rewarding in its own way, but doesn’t really help with getting any work done, nor with writing here.

Last Wednesday I was at the LGComms seminar on digital communications, and had the opening slot explaining why all this stuff matters. I was on slightly shaky ground as I don’t really know all that much about digital comms, just the social bit. I’ve no idea how to run a proper corporate website, for example. Anyway.

My slides were the usual concoction, and they’re on Slideshare if you want them. My general message was that while the internet is undoubtedly important for communications, it’s a mistake to put all of this stuff in a box marked comms and assume it doesn’t affect or benefit other parts of the organisation and the way they work.

One slide I included was pretty new, and it featured a pretty crappy graph I threw together in Powerpoint:

JFDI vs Being Boring

Click it for a bigger version. The point here is that by taking a JFDI approach – to any innovative behaviour, not just social media use – you get a lot done quickly. The trouble is that it isn’t terribly sustainable, because it is often the work of one or two enlightened individuals and it isn’t terribly well embedded in corporate process, systems or structures.

The alternative is to be boring, and go down the route of getting the strategy and procedure sorted early, and developing activity in line with that. This is a lot more sustainable, as everyone knows what they are doing and what they are responsible for. There is a problem though, and that is that being boring is slower than JFDIing – your innovators might get fed up and leave, and your organisation might be perceived as doing nothing, when in fact it’s just moving rather slowly.

My take is this: it isn’t an either/or choice – do both. Just get on with it, choosing some small projects to prototype and feed the findings from that activity into the longer term process and system building approach. Keep the innovators happy by giving them some space to experiment, whilst building the foundations that will help the rest of the organisation understand and feel comfortable with.

Don’t let strategy and process get in the way of doing good stuff. At the same time, don’t JFDI and find yourself exposed.

On leadership

Light blogging recently, mainly because I’ve been busy talking to people and haven’t had much spare time to write here. Apologies.

One of those talky things was at the Cllr 10 event, organised by the Local Government Innovation Unit, expertly led by Andy Sawford.

My session was somewhat pompously titled: Leadership 2.0: why local authorities need to become learning organisations. It was my usual hotch potch of ideas, snatched magpie-like from thinkers far more original than myself.

Big props go to Jemima Gibbons whose book, Monkeys with Typewriters informed a lot of what I said and is a very worthwhile read – as is her blog. David Wilcox has extensively covered Jemima’s work.

Here are my slides, for what they are worth:

Many thanks to Carl Haggerty for providing a screenshot from the internal business networking tool currently being piloted by Devon County Council.

Broadly speaking: the new online social technology changes the way we behave, and makes open, collaborative working methods much more likely to work. It’s also probably true that organisations need to be able to have proper grown up conversations internally before they can converse effectively with external people. New ways of working means new ways of leading, and in the local government context councillors can provide that leadership.

This is still half baked thinking on my part, and the bits that work are the bits I have stolen from others. But I’d welcome any feedback.

Moronic reporting of non issues

Take a look at this story, excitingly titled on the BBC News site “Council Twitter users face rebuke“.

Councillors in Cornwall could face being reported to the authority’s standards committee for using social networking sites.

The trouble is, no they’re not.

Later in the article:

It follows claims that a number of councillors used Twitter during a meeting and mocked other members.

If a councillor is found to breach the code of conduct for inappropriate comments, they could be suspended.

So this is about councillors saying naughty things, and not about them using Twitter, or whatever.

Another example of the easy fixation on technology as being the story, when it isn’t. The story is behaviour: people and the relationships they have with others.

We really don’t need anymore Twitter scare stories, it isn’t productive and it helps nobody.

More ukgc10 stuff

UKGC10 Wordle

Thanks to Graham for putting together this Wordle produced from the text of all the tweets at Saturday’s govcamp. I like that ‘people’ is the second biggest word, and that ‘good’ is nicely central.

He has also made this spreadsheet available so you can follow all the tweets from the day – it’s like you’re there all over again. you’ll need access to Google Docs to be able to see it.

A quick reminder that content from the various sessions is being put together at http://ukgc.wikispaces.com/ – check to see if sessions you ran or attended have notes – if not, add them!

Where next with all this? Anthony at the Democratic Society has some ideas.

Update: great post from Pubstrat.

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