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. 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 … Keep reading

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 … Keep reading

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 … Keep reading

The biggest mistake councils made with online engagement

It’s frequently costly. It almost always achieves little. It lets people tick the “use the internet to engage with the public” box without actually achieving much. I am, of course, talking about webcasting council meetings. The idea has honourable roots. But the world has moved on. Both print and broadcast media have steadily moved away … Keep reading