local government

Friendless council

A tweet from the Public Sector Forums Twitter feed alerted me to this story of Stockport Council’s Facebook presence, which, at the time the article was written, wasn’t particularly popular:

A LOCAL authority which reached out to the Facebook generation has suffered an embarrassing snub.

Stockport council set up a page on the social networking site with the aim of spreading the word about its services.

But six months on, the authority has been exposed as an online pariah – after it attracted only six ‘fans’.

I’m delighted to say that as a result of this publicity, the Council now has 46 fans – almost as many as DavePress!

What can be learned from this? That if you build it, they won’t come.

Anything that a council, or any other organisation, does on the web needs to be pushed, promoted and managed. These are the human elements which are so important in engagement excercises. An online project like this will not succeed if you just put it together and then sit back expecting people to join in droves.

This is partly an online marketing issue, and partly one of community management. I doubt there are many in local government who have these skills listed as being required for their jobs, but they are becoming more and more necessary.

There is another issue, peculiar to Facebook, which is one of vocabulary. Does anyone really want to become a ‘fan’ of their local council? Surely there is some more appropriate wording that could be used…

Visit Cambridge site hacked

Cambridge City Council’s Visit Cambridge tourism site has been hacked, with various unsavoury pictures and links added, reports the Cambridge News:

CAMBRIDGE’S official tourism website was still offline today after pornographic images were posted in place of pictures of the historic city…

It comes after horrified bed and breakfast owners were shocked to log on to the site, run by Cambridge City Council, to find hardcore images of couples having sex and people exposing themselves for the camera.

Ooops. Here’s a screenshot from Cambridge News’ site:

CIT0536356adjusted.jpg

What should a council’s website look like?

Simon Wakeman presents a nice roundup of some of the new websites being launched, comparing Barnet and Cheltenham‘s latest efforts with the current poster-child, Redbridge.

Generating an environment for residents to interact online with their councils will generate more engagement with the democratic process and council work in general – but it needs truly interactive platforms, a supportive culture within the council and a drive from officers and members to create genuinely two-way conversations.

Simon is right to call out Redbridge for the lack of interactivity in his post. Some basics have been missed: no RSS, no home page box for me to enter my email address to get news updates straight to me.

I think Redbridge and other sites like this are missing what the web is really about these days.

What local authorities (and government generally) need to understand is that they need to stop thinking about their websites as a destination. They should provide people with the information they want, where they want and in the format they want – not force them to spend hours personalising a site in which they have very little interest other than finding out when their bins get collected.

In fact, here’s a (only slightly stupid) vision for council websites. Make them look like Google. Not iGoogle, but the actual Google homepage, with just a search box on it. Make sure the search works, so people can actually find what they want, and then add an option to receive an email when that content changes.

Sorted.

Making Council meetings social

Council meeting room
Image credit: tricky

Tidying up a few bits on the IDeA Performance site, and seeing Steven Tuck’s comment on my previous post about it, I thought about how these techniques could be used in different situations within local government.

After all, here is a way of making a face to face event more accessible for people that can’t attend, and as a way of drawing together all manner of online resources for people to share and use.

How about using this kind of online social interaction in council meetings? I’m thinking it could probably be best applied to Overview and Scrutiny meetings, perhaps, but any kind of meeting where taking in views and submissions from people with an interest would work well.

What do people think? Could this work?

And does anyone out there fancy trying it out?!

Social networking and other tools of engagement

Here are the slides from my talk at Public Sector Forums in Birmingham yesterday. Hopefully they make some kind of sense…

Engagement through social networking

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: psf)

It was an interesting day and I had some great conversations with delegates. The main issues seem to be – as you might be able to guess – the blocking of social web sites in the workplace, and convincing managers and politicians of the value of this type of work.

Some of the other talks were fascinating – not least Dan Champion‘s accessibility assault on web 2.0, which also provided solutions to some of the problems; and Lincolnshire County Council’s use of advertising on their corporate website as a revenue stream. There are plenty of arguments to be had about that one, I’m sure.

It was also a real pleasure to meet one of the other speakers, Medway Council’s Simon Wakeman, whose excellent blog I have been following for a while. Simon spoke with a good deal of knowledge and authority about how Councils should be approaching the use of the web on mobile devices – which will be an increasingly important channel in the future. You can find Simon’s slides here.

Thanks to Ian Dunmore, Jack Pickard, Ian Cuddy and others for laying on such a great event.

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