Al had some interesting experience and innovations to share around communicating quickly information on school closures, road gritting and any affected services.

The group talked about how in a rapidly occurring situation online communication was best placed to deliver information first and respond to any inquiries from the public. Indeed, in some councils the online communicators were delivering information out of hours before press officers and others were even aware of a developing situation.

This way of working was also discussed – online communicators working in isolation are an unsustainable plan for crisis communications. Too often they are left out of the loop and get information too late or not at all meaning the benefits of the online channel are lost.

Al shared his experience of being able to work out of hours with a line to chief officers and the on-duty press officer. He is also involved in emergency planning so the online work can be included in the plan but also he is aware of where the authority is at in terms of response.

The discussion strayed further into the territory of emergency planning bu eventually came back round to how online could be used to gather information into the council as well as disseminate outward. I briefly outlined a change we were planning on making to how headteachers report school closures, using our secure schools’ extranet to which they all have access. Bringing the information in from this source would mean we could repurpose and quickly send out by RSS, by SMS, and across a number of online channels.

We’re not the only council looking to make changes in this area. Along with us there are many others who are looking at making content delivery not just through the online channel but also make it mobile (I blogged about our stats on visits from mobile and other devices during the January snow). From this a discussion on digital inclusion began with differing views across the participants about whether online was a waste of time or not given how few people can access it well. Ally Hook gave some interesting information about the number of people joining the council’s Facebook page when an unexploded WW2 bomb closed parts of the city.

There were a number of interesting points I took away from the session in terms of developing our online communications in the face of a crisis as well as integrating more fully with the council’s general contingency plan. There were some great social web innovations around reporting the uksnow but these ideas could be applied to other situations. It has also helped consolidate the thoughts floating around my head about not just thinking of online as web, or social media, or mobile – it is all of these, none of these and more.

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The snow which had made a white Christmas a fun-filled festive treat turned the return to work flicker between tedious and treacherous on the disruption scale.

There have already been posts about how council services and comms coped with the bad weather – there is a good round-up of those by Kev Campbell-Wright.

In the last week, since the weather started cheering the heck up, I’ve been having a look at our visitor stats for the period. Yes, we got more visitors than usual, to the relevant areas of the website (latest update, gritting and school closures pages) and lots of them were coming via our social media channels (mainly Twitter).

What was interesting to me, and something I hadn’t fully anticipated, was the devices which people were using to visit the website.

While a massive 97% was coming from computers ( 92% Windows OS; 4% Mac and 1 % Linux) not so much the volume of traffic but the diversity of devices making up the other 3% was slightly surprising and certainly a big change for us.

Smart phones made up lots of of the list – following in the next four places in the chart were iPhone, iPod, Symbian and Android. Further down the list with under a hundred visits from each are Sony OS, Blackberry, Playstation 3, Samsung, Nintendo Wii, Nokia, LG, Playstation Poratble and Sidekick.

Plenty of mobile phones of both the smart and, erm, not-so-smart phones. I expected this although the range and the percentage, while still small, was higher than we’re used to seeing.

I hadn’t anticipated the traffic from gaming systems (and the iPod). I’d like to know more about who these visitors are.

We’re reviewing the online response we made in the cold snap to see what we could improve on in preparation for a repeat (or some other situation) and delivering content and information in a way suitable for mobile and other devices will have to be a part of that.

Has anyone else looked at their visitor traffic by device / operating system?

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This session started with a discussion about whether council’s should use Facebook or whether people are going to Facebook for purely social reasons and therefore council services are irrelevant. This lead to a brief spin around whether council services are social or not – certainly for county and unitary councils there are more ’social style’ services (cultural for example) that would fit more neatly with the idea people are only using Facebook for this sort of activity.

There were some interesting examples of how councils are currently using Facebook – a portal page for the whole council to sign post to information elsewhere online, for disseminating emergency information and specific pages for specific services. In all cases the people in the session were advocating using it as an additional channel rather than a replacement for existing online information.

The talk moved on to how it might be run in the future – would services take responsibility for their own pages? Would it be a centralised web team task or fall into the remit of the contact centre? How much time was needed to run, manage and engage in social networks and was this attainable / correct resourcing given the current numbers of people choosing these as their preferred contact channel?

The conversation moved on now, with Paul Canning asking whether councils were going for the low hanging fruit by joining social networks rather than implementing RSS on their sites (for example). The facts were stated that there are more councils on Twitter than have basic RSS feeds running from their websites and the question asked to why this is. The Mash The State campaign was referenced and a few people offered forth their opinion on the matter.

There seems to be a lack of understanding about RSS and its importance. This may be why Twitter is proving more popular with councils at the moment – it is easy to set up, the audience is clear and it is a direct channel. RSS needs some technical knowledge and access to the set up of your website in order to implement, it’s also more about making data free for anyone to use or re-use rather than a direct channel between organisation and citizen.

Again there seemed to be a general consensus in the group that RSS was important and something we all felt our councils should be doing or could be doing better. However, saying and doing are two seperate things and I do hope that from discussions such as this one greater understanding and therefore wider implementation will happen.

Moving away from the social web now to email – still one of the biggest entry points to online information and there aren’t many council’s using it correctly as a communication channel. There is an untapped efficiency to be made in publishing once and letting the information flow – and this includes re-purposing information through email newsletters (and RSS can help here to).

This lead to the session turning their attention to social networks for internal communications. This is particularly interesting to me as I’ll be looking at the issue for my dissertation next year (or will I? My topic is currently under review!) – at the moment the research will be along the lines of whether employees are looking for information or interaction.

There were questions raised about whether internal communications and intranets really need social web tools and to some extent I suppose this depends whether you are using your intranet as a document store, a communication or a collaboration tool. I am really interested at the moment on how councils are preparing for the workforce of the future and optimising their efficiency by tapping into the collective knowledge of the workforce through a social intranet. A internal serendipity engine could help an organisation make leaps and bounds forward while also engaging the workforce in a positive way – it could, maybe not yet but it could.

Some interesting points were raised by Helen Williams about some of getting this type of project underway was down to how it is ’sold’ internally. She said Carl Haggerty of Devon County Council had re-branded social networking as business networking in order to get chief officers to look past what they thought they knew toward the potential of such a system. More about the pilot Devon has run here.

Time to sum up then – most of the conversation today has been about the big, media darling networks of Facebook and Twitter but there are many more and some may be more appropriate to council services than others. Chris Schubert has done a piece of work to list more than 300 networks including details of the age group and whether membership is open or not. Hopefully this is the sort of information which can be shared across the sector with Knowledge Hub. In the meantime it is certainly worth remembering that there are networks beyond the obvious and a proper channel analysis should be carried out before launching in any online space.

And there is more to choosing and launching on a network. You’ll need proper monitoring and sometimes this might mean paying for the depth of analysis needed to report back to chief officers and service areas. It is also about reputation management and if each service area is acting independently without any central involvement this task will be increasingly difficult.

There was lots more to talk about than we had time for in this session but it was really useful to hear how other councils are thinking about or already getting involved with the social web. The emphasis at the moment seems to be on internal communications but there could be real benefits and more efficient working to come out of using some of the tools as internal implementations. And there is still a lot to learn about the number and type of network out there, how this relates to council services, how we monitor before and after launching and how we manage an organisations reputation when there is no longer a central publishing team but real devolved authorship through services managing profiles across a number of different networks.

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It’s early days (it’s only in preview, not even Beta yet) but having had a couple of Waves now I thought I would blog some initial thoughts. I’m not going to try and explain in detail what Wave is or does – there is a introduction video you can watch.  It’s been variously described as what email would be if it had been invented now and a collaboration tool bringing together functionality from email. instant messaging, shared documents and multi-media resources across the Internets.

It may turn out to be all or none of the above but time and a significant number of users, and therefore innovation, needs to happen before the verdict is returned. For now it is the latest geek toy to emerge from the Google stable and it is packed with potential.

At the moment it is mainly a live chat interface. Multiple-participant conversations where you can watch the others type and mispell and corrent themselves in real-time. A bit like ICQ, IRC or Netmeeting back in the day. You can add a map and collaborate on sticking pins in it, you can take a vote or you can search and link stuff. Well, sort of. The last bit doesn’t seem to be hooked into the ‘real’ Google search yet so the results are not great.

You can play back a Wave so you can watch the discussion (and spelling mistakes) unfold again and that appears to be about your lot at the moment. Eventually Google Apps and Docs will be integrated which will bring in some potentially powerful collaboration functionality.

But we can’t wait for that, we need to test this thing now and see what use we can get from it as individuals and for local government / public sector.  So, Alan Coulson set about using it as his primary way of covering the goings on of the SocITM 2009 conference.  A few of us jumped on to watch and Wave with him while also keeping an eye on that other favourite back channel for events – the Twitter hash tag (#socitm09 for this event).

The primary difference at the moment is that Wave is a private chat room with invited individuals and Twitter is open to all. As Wave goes forward this won’t necessarily be the case. Al did a stirling job of covering the conference in great detail on Wave as well as adding links in where he could to slideshows posted online. Not only that but he engaged with the rest of us who were in the Wave but not at the conference.

There were several discussions which took place in the Wave sometimes at the same time that Al was documenting a presentation. This is where the playback feature will come in handy as if these activities happen too far apart in the Wave you simply can’t keep up. So how else does it differ? Well, in this example the coverage on Wave was from one person whereas Twitter is a variety. Where that falls down on Twitter is that often multiple tweets contain the same ’soundbite’ and engaging with the tweeter is harder than in the direct interface of Wave.

But the potential is there – Sharon O’Dea and I discussed how powerful it could be as a collaborative real-time reporting tool for events such as 7/7. The story could certainly unfold graphically and comprehensively on a public Wave. As Sharon said this could be the evolution of the way Wikipedia was used on 7/7. As she also pointed out you can’t sustain or develop a platform just to come into it’s own for massive but occasional events.

The potential is also there for use by local government. Once you overcome issues such as Wave needing a Chrome plug-in to work in IE and pretty up to date browsers with public sector handcuffed to IE6 or that many council IT departments block access to Google products beyond search. But leaving those issues aside there could be some pretty amazing ways local government could use Wave.

Michele Ide-Smith mused on how it could be used in a planning meeting and certainly as a consultation tool then it has, you guessed it, potential. The ability for multiple participants to work together in debate while also adding in relevant resources could really move digital engagement forward.

Something needs to happen first though, namely digital inclusion. Wave is resource hungry and as well as needing the latest browser it also needs a fast, stable connection and that is something that much of Britain is lacking at the moment. The potential of Wave isn’t going to be fulfilled as a local government communication, collaboration or consultation platform without the digital infrastructure to support and sustain it.

What Wave also needs is time. It has the familiarity of being part of the Google family but once it is up and running it will be a vast and pretty complicated system if used fully. At the moment that makes it a great toy for geeks and those who are comfortable with online platforms but that isn’t the vast majority of people who want to engage with a council. In time that will change as digital natives grow up and move into the demographic who need to use more council services. Immediately though, Wave may be too busy for what most people want to do.

It may also not be accessible. It’s hard to tell how much of this potential would be realised using assistive technologies. With queries over usability and accessibility, uncertainty over the system requirements and connection needed Wave has a lot to do to prove itself as a valuable addition to the way local government is communicating online (but let’s not forget it is only a preview version at the moment so all these questions and more may be answered as the full product is developed and deployed).

On a personal level I am really excited about the potential of Wave. And there is one thing it does better than any other platform for me – when it throws an error message it does so by giving you a Firefly / Serenity quote. It’s a nice little nod to Wave being the way people communicate in the Firefly ‘verse and has proved, for me, to be the quickest way to turn the frustration of an error into something, well, shiny.

Professionally, I think right now we need to explore further and assess as the functionality is added and more people invited in. We need to be aware of the potential and watch this system develop so as a sector we can meet the needs of our citizens, now or in the future, through it.

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I have, on occasion, asked myself the same question – why do I participate? Broadly (and a bit lazily) I usually summarise with a) It’s useful and interesting b) It helps me and is essential to my work c) for my studies d) I enjoy it. Those points are always organised in that order.

Carl’s post was interesting though as he described why he was participating in the online spaces he currently occupies. This is, again, something which has been skimming the surface of my mind (Dave Briggs posted a similar sort of list / description on spaces, software and hardware he was currently using).

So, inspired to stop thinking and make a note of this myself, here is what I am currently using and why:

Twitter

Twitter is currently at the top of my attention stack in social media terms. It is the network I look at most, turn to first and get the most value from. I’m not going to be coy – this network has had the biggest impact on me since the thrill of ICQ. Heck, let’s just say it, Twitter has changed my life.

Through this network I have been able to build an amazingly valuable professional network which has helped me, inspired me and really got me thinking about the bigger picture in local gov online as well as the nitty gritty of projects I am directly involved in. But the people who I found and followed on Twitter initially because of the common ground with our work have also become friends in a lot of cases.

The value of the hive mind has shown itself in relation to my work, to my university studies, to my continuing exploration of the internets, to discovery and recovery and manages to be both interesting and fun. I guess it is the people I follow but my stream is anything but this network’s stereotype of banal.

However, it’s also made me have to work harder at keeping my attention span up and I’m careful not to let myself rely on collective knowledge for my answer to everything (after all, where would that leave search?). Recently though, and I’m a little sad at the realisation, my love for Twitter has wibbled – I’m just not sure why.

I’m under no illusion that one day something will take over from Twitter at the top of the stack – after all I have a long list of platforms, networks and toys that were once mighty and now don’t get a look in. For now though – Twitter gets to be Number One.

Blogging

I’ve blogged in various places and under a number of avatars since 1999. This is my main blog at the moment and my reason for beginning one related to my work and studies (initially over at Blogger in 2008) was to keep track of my thoughts and add my voice to discussion about local government online. Partially vanity publishing and I do like it when people read my blog and find it useful but it’s primary function is to be an offboard memory for me.

I also keep a less formal blog over at Mirror of the Graces. This is used sporadically now for me to review things – mainly music and gigs. Again, there is a big scoop of vanity in that blog with a side order of self-indulgence. I like giving myself the space to keep in touch with my first love – music journalism. I guess, if I wanted to try and justify it further I could say it gives me an outlet to write in a more creative style and therefore improves my writing overall.

Facebook

I think of this as the network for my personal stuff – I mainly linked to family and real-life friends. It is only recently that I have ‘friended’ colleagues and contacts from the sector. I tend to post random updates and lots of pictures. I don’t do quizzes, throw sheep or indulge in poking of any kind. I run a few groups / pages on there and am members of many more – most of which I have read the name of, laughed, joined and never gone back to.

About a year ago Facebook was top of my online chart for attention but it has been ousted by Twitter and a return to blogging. I think my presence on the network will diminish over the next few months as I move photographs off somewhere else (possibly Flickr). However, I’ll still be checking in as it is the main online space for many of my non-geeky friends and family.

email

Yeah, I still use email although the length of time between checks is getting longer. I have realised that sometimes I forget about it completely for periods and then think ‘ooh, email, better have a look’.

With messaging built in to the other networks having a separate account that doesn’t really do anything else and isn’t always synchronous seems a bit, well, old-fashioned and chunky. I use a couple of accounts as spam / marketing catchers but email is still getting a big proportion of my time, probably more than I think it deserves.

LinkedIn

I use LinkedIn for professional networking and may at some point want it to start really working for me in opening up opportunities. Basically LinkedIn promotes the professional part of my identity where Facebook supports the ‘at play’ part.

I’m not sure I’m using it to its full potential and I have a suspicion towards it as the functionality seems to move around a fair bit. In my mind I see it becoming an index for my online portfolio more than just an online version of my CV so I keep chibbling away at it and finding more features as I go.

Nurphy

I’ve been trying out Nurphy for two or three weeks now. It’s sort of like email or email groups with the real-time and conversational aspect of Twitter. Although there aren’t huge numbers of people over there I’ve found it useful to continue conversations which begin on Twitter but need more space (no character limit on Nurphy). I’m still getting my head round some of the possibilities and usefullness over here and I’ve yet to really find the serendipity element of discovering people / conversations (perhaps there isn’t one?) but I’m having enough conversations for it to make this list. Not tried it yet? Come and join me in a conversation.

What are you using? Anything new or fun (do not mention Google Wave as my invite still hasn’t processed)? Anything really useful that you think might be game-changing? Anything you think I am missing from my list?

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Generally I think the presentations were well received and hopefully will help us make some moves on updating existing policies and making use of relevant social media to evolve our online communications. There were also some really interesting discussions in both of the groups and I wanted to make a note about these.

Presentation:

Explaining what social media is was a fairly wide remit so I decided to give a very quick explanation of some of the terms commonly used, see who in the sessions used social networks and then look at online as a communication channel.

The majority of people in the sessions were members on Facebook, a few were on Twitter, a couple on LinkedIn. There were some who used Flickr and had watched videos on YouTube. Everyone used Google Maps but didn’t really customise them, no-one had heard of Ning, no-one blogged. I found this really interesting and it was useful to have discussions about preferred communication channels and why they did / didn’t use online networks.

I borrowed heavily from Al Smith’s presentation from PSF Buzz NE (find out more on his blog) and also from Dave Briggs‘ Four Steps to Social Media success presentation (which you can find out more about here). This got the groups thinking and in the first session we had lots of discussion about how / who and why was going to monitor online conversations about the organisation online.

In the second group the discussion was more focused on the need to develop policy / strategy and we’ll be having more conversations about this soon. In both sessions we talked a lot about demographics of online use, the way this might change and what that means for us as an organisation.

I very briefly touched on augmented reality with both groups and they were interested and excited by this.

I think this was a good start to getting others in public relations more confident with online and I’ve had some good feedback (and some excellent ideas and questions) since this morning.

I must also thank Al Smith for sharing with me his anecdote about turning round some negative sentiment in a Facebook group while we were chatting at googlelocalgov. I regaled the group (well, I repeated the story) as part of my presentation this morning and it really helped to give a real example of how we could be working between online and offline. In a coincidental act of synchronicity while I was telling the story Al was writing it up as a case study so you can read the detail on his blog.

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Things have progressed quite quickly and Tim Cooper, Paul Cole (who I discovered were also thinking about this when we chatted at localgovcamp) and myself have been doing bits and bobs to get this off the ground.

Quad Derby have agreed to host us in their cafe bar and there are now a few online spaces to find out more and sign up for the event. You can find the cafe on:

• Facebook – a group about the cafe as well as event listing where you can sign up if you are interested generally or intend to come along

• Ning – similar to the Facebook group and listing just in a different space!

• The social media cafe blog – a dedicated blog and web pages about the Derby and Derbyshire cafe

You can also follow the latest on Twitter through the #smcderby or #ddsmc hash tags.

There has been lots of interest so far and I’m confident we’ll have a great event come 1 October so if you’re interested in social media and you’re in the area why not sign up at one of the online spaces and then come along for coffee, cake and a chat?

Additional: Plans are already underway for the second event! This will be held in Matlock (venue to be confirmed) on Thursday 3 December 2009.

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In reality this bit of my history happened in a caravan near Paignton with precisely no members of Blur present. So what am I rambling on about? Well, the first time I got a text message to my mobile phone of course.

I’d been given a mobile for my birthday back in 1997. I was the only one of my friends to have one. It was massive. And clunky. And I was only supposed to use it in an emergency. It made me feel very jet set.

It was a full year before I got a text message though. I had to wait for someone else I knew to get a phone first. The great event happened while on the annual holiday on the English Riviera with my best mate and her family. The brick of a phone made a strange noise. There was an odd message about ‘Incoming SMS‘ on the screen. I was excited but also already planning how I could break the news to Bill Payer (my dad) that the phone had spontaneously broken itself.

Anyway, with friend peering over shoulder we accessed the message. It looked like it had come from a phone number abroad. This was getting more exciting and mysterious. What did it say?

Well, something along the lines of ‘Thinking of You!” It might have been miss you. I don’t think it was as profound as love you. The memory of the message is lost in the excitement of the thing.

It was the cause of much discussion and exploration of possibilities as we mooched about in rock pools and got ready for karaoke at the on-site pub (we did Relight My Fire if you’re interested). My wild imagination was abruptly harnessed when the boyfriend-of-the-time called that evening and asked ‘did you get my message?’. This was still wonderful – we were / are both geeks and he’d found a new gadget-type activity. It wasn’t as exciting as the story I had built up which was near to last night’s dream about Mr Coxon and the library of the naval destroyer.

But that was it. The first SMS. And now, somedays, I send and receive up to 50. There are some people I only really communicate with by text. I certainly text more than I use my mobile to call. It’s everyday. In 10 years it has gone from being the alien to natural. Then I thought my phone was broken because it was trying to show me a message, now I think it is broken if I don’t get one. That quick transition into everyday life and parlance is yet another reason why I am in awe of online, and in this case mobile, communication.

Anyone else remember the first time they got a text? Or would you rather share a weirder dream than mine? And Graham, we really need to switch to the Dewey decimal system because a lot of the problems we are having on board are because we’ve created a totally mental categorisation scheme (but the thing we were asked for was in Archive 2 – you’d disappeared from the dream when I found it).

(Aside: This is the second night running a blog post has come to me in a dream. What is wrong with me?)

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