Social Media

Digital mentoring for public servants?

Ingrid has a very nice post about the training my good friend Steve Dale and I provided to some folk at the Local Government Association and the Improvement and Development Agency today.

I think people left the room enthused.  A colleague whose arm I twisted to attend the course (when I was worried it wasn’t full – in the end it was overfull) thanked me for getting her along.   I’m planning to meet with another colleague in the near future to take some of the training into real concrete action.  And that’s the best feedback of all.

Which is very gratifying to hear.

I think there is a real need for fairly basic overview sessions like this one, introducing people to some of key aspects of this social web thing: not just what the tools are and what they do, but some of the philosophy behind it all.

Digital mentoring for public servants? Quite possibly. Maybe a topic for Barcamp?

Learning from Obama

Edelman have published an interesting white paper on what lessons can be learnt from Obama’s use of the social web in his campaign. It’s worth a read.

Here’s the headline list of learning points:

  • Start early
  • Build to scale
  • Innovate where necessary; do everything incrementally better
  • Make it easy to find, forward and act
  • Pick where you want to play
  • Channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further the campaign’s goals
  • Integrate online advocacy into every element of the campaign

This seems to tie in rather nicely with some of the messages I have been banging on about of late, including the emphasis on prototyping, ‘worse is better’, etc.

ReadWriteGov is this Wednesday!

This Wednesday sees the first of hopefully many ReadWriteGov events taking place at Peterborough City Council.

It’s going to be a great day, with some excellent speakers, all of whom are working within the public sector trying to get things done. They are:

  • Dominic Campbell who will be speaking about the work Barnet Council are doing to better connect with their citizens
  • Steph Gray from DIUS who will be talking about making social media projects happen in government
  • Hadley Beeman from the London Deanery who will be discussing her project to get social networking and collaboration happening in the health sector

If you would like to come, there are still one or two places available – find out more here. Tickets are jolly cheap for this sort of thing, at just £25 for public sector folk.

Even if you can’t make it though, you can still receive some ReadWriteGov love. For instance, you can visit the blog, where after the event we will be posting content from the day, including presentations from speakers, audio, photos and maybe some video too.

We also now have a Twitter account, through which you can hear about what is happening and pass comments or ask questions during the day. Unlike a lot of events that offer this kind of thing, I really will be tracking what people are saying and making sure the less offensive questions get asked!

Just follow @readwritegov to join in!

Social media step 1: join a social network

This post is part of my ’10 Social Media Steps’ series. Find them all here.

Introduction

The first step in the social media journey is to go and find what other people you might know are up to. As well as discovering how other people are using the social web, it will allow you to start establishing your online social group.

Social networks are sites which link you to other people you know, and help you find people that you don’t know but who you might get along with. They tend to make it possible to create a profile for yourself, explaining who you are and what you are into, send messages to people, easily share things like photos, videos and weblinks, and form groups with like minded folk.

Here’s a great little video from Common Craft telling you what social networks are all about:

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Where to start

There are a number of social networking sites out there. Which one you choose depends on what your main areas of interest are, and which ones have most of your existing contacts on. The big three, for example, are:

  • Facebook – generally an older membership of people in their late teens upwards. The favoured choice of social media types, I would say.
  • MySpace – a younger audience than Facebook, with a definite musical slant
  • Bebo – younger again than MySpace

There are others though, too:

  • LinkedIn – a ‘professional’ social network, geared towards work and job opportunities
  • Orkut – Google’s social network which is very popular in latin america
  • Friendster – was very popular before Facebook came along and stole its thunder

There are also a number of social networks that focus on specific issues, such as:

  • UltdWorld – for social entrepreneurs
  • Footbo – a social network for football (soccer) fans
  • Care2 – for those interested in the environment and green living
  • Dogster and Catster – social networks for pets
  • TuDiabetes – a network of diabetics, sharing experiences and supporting one another

There are literally thousands of such networks out there. Just do a search with the words ‘social network’ along with the topic you are interested in and you should find one. If you don’t it might be nice to start one of your own – some tips on how to do this will come later.

How to start

The first thing to do is to register with your social network of choice. My tip would be to have a go with a few – that way you can test them out, see who else is using them and decide where you want to spend most of your time.

When you do register, you’ll be given a chance to find people you already know who are on the network – often this is done by giving the social network access to your email contacts list. You get to mark people as friends, or contacts and depending on the network, you may have to wait for them to confirm that you both have heard of each other.

You will also be invited to add details to your profile. This will include contact information, stuff about your likes and dislikes, and whereabouts you are based. This will make it easier for other people who are interested in the same things as you are to find you – as well as the people you already know.

What to do

Once you have signed up with a social network, and found some friends, it’s time to do some digging! Click on your friends’ profiles, and find out what stuff they are doing. They might be uploading photos or videos, or sharing web links. You can usually post public messages to them (on Facebook it’s called a ‘wall’) and have conversations out in the open that others can join in too. Otherwise, you can contact them using a private message, or email.

Some social networks gives you a space to people know what you are up to – on Facebook it is called your ‘status’. It’s a good idea to regularly update this as it will alert people if they can help you out in some way, or just reminds them that you are about!

If you have some digital photos or videos of your own saved on your computer, you might want to upload some of these to your profile too. Social networks are a good place to start sharing stuff online, because – in most cases – what you put online can only be viewed by people you have marked as friends. This means you should feel pretty safe about it.

Have a look through some of the groups your friends are members of – if you can’t find any that you’d like to join, you ought to be able to search for groups you might want to be a part of. Groups are another great way of meeting new folk to connect with. If you still can’t find one that does what you want it to, why not create a group of your own? You can fill it full of details and invite people to join who you think might be interested. Starting a group on a social network is a fantastic way of gathering people around an issue – just take ColaLife as an example.

Limitations

After you have been using your social networks for a while, you might start to get a little frustrated. One of the reasons is that many social networks are what is known as ‘walled gardens’ – you can upload all the content you like to the website, but getting it out again is pretty hard. So, if you upload a photo to Facebook, it is then difficult to then share it on other sites, unless you re-upload to them. Also, what about the poeple you know that aren’t members of the same social network as you? Again, this can lead to duplication of effort, and a fragmentation of your network.

Groups present another challenge. Whilst they are great at building a buzz around a issue, it’s often pretty hard to move things onto the next stage, where collaborative action can start. This often means having to move the group out of the social network and onto another platform, which can means losing an awful lot of members.

Summing up

Social networks are therefore great for:

  • Building up contacts online
  • Finding new people to talk to
  • Discovering what sort of things people share online
  • Joining and starting groups around common interests

In the next step, we’ll be looking at how you can find and read the content that is important to you, using RSS.

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