web

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?

UK GovCamp 2010

The UK govcamp event is happening on the 23rd January. Everyone should have had an email who has a ticket to come – if you think you ought to have had something, but haven’t, please let me know!

It’s an unconference, so if you are coming, please do come prepared to talk about something. Discussions are taking place on the event network, so dip in there if you are feeling low on inspiration.

For those that can’t make it, we’re hoping to have a bunch of active social reporters there on the day, recording words, pictures, sounds and videos. We’ll find a way of pulling them all together for your multimedia pleasure – probably again on the network site.

Government 2010

gov2010

Government 2010 looks like it will be a lot of fun.

It’s a conference about the future of government:

Government 2010 is about improved government communications and more rapid delivery of services to citizens via the web, and web-enabled channels.

It also features some people I really respect on the speaker list:

…amongst a host of others.

Another great thing about this conference is the lengths they are going to to make it accessible – including the live streaming. Having a company like Switch New Media involved certainly helps – their streaming of Aprils Digital Inclusion conference was superb. As I can’t make it, I will certainly be making the most of this live feed.

LocalGovWeb – an exercise in aggregation

I put a tweet out last week pointing people to a new domain, www.localgovweb.com, asking people to complete the form it contained.

I asked for people’s:

  • Blog addresses and whether they would like their posts to appear in an aggregated list
  • Twitter names and whether they would like their tweets aggregated with everyone else’s
  • Whether people would like to contribute original content to a group blog

If you haven’t already, please do visit the site and complete the form.

You’ll notice I have added some neat Google Friend Connect features to the site after the exciting trip to the UK Googleplex last Friday. This seems an easy way to add interactivity to a site – do have a play.

Here’s what I am planning to do. Firstly, localgovweb.com will be a place where blogging and twittering about local government and the web is pulled into one place. This will be through a blog aggregator, just like Public Sector Blogs, and a similar thing for Twitter.

The third strand will be an aggregation of delicious bookmarks tagged localgovweb – similar to DigitalGovUK or WP Sauce.

Once these are up and running, I’ll start to look at putting a blog in place where the original content can be posted. I’m hoping this can become a proper group blog, with plenty of contributions from people across local government, writing about the issues that are important to them.

So, thanks to everyone who has signed up so far. I’ve already got a couple of the elements of the initial aggregating activity up and running, so please do submit your details and starting tagging relevant stuff in Delicious with localgovweb.

More updates soon.

Cheltenham go for search

I wrote a little while ago about how council’s websites might look, and ventured the idea that perhaps all that is needed is a big search box.

Look what Cheltenham Borough Council have got now!

OK, so it isn’t the home page, but it has extra use as it searches other local sites too.

Great work. If anyone knows the folk behind this stuff, can you make sure they come along to LocalGovCamp? 😉

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