Well, we’re currently advertising for just that – on a 12 month contract. This is mainly because myself and another of the officers have both got maternity leave coming up.

You can see the advert on the Jobs Derbyshire website as well as a job description and person spec – you can even apply online! The JD is, well it’s a job description and doesn’t go into the minute detail of the job.

If you’ve read anything on this blog or work or follow digital comms and engagement for local government you’ll have a good idea of what it might involve: content and task management for websites, digital development, reputation management etc etc etc. You can of course drop an email (as per the job ad – not to me) for an informal chat.

So if you fancy seizing the opportunity to continue developing our digital portfolio for the good of citizens and the organisation I urge you to apply!

Closing date is 26 September.

Related posts:

1. Getting the conversation started

We’re currently gearing up for the project to redesign / rebuild our public website and I tweeted a couple of people at other authorities I knew were a little further down the line or recently relaunched. Within a day we’d gathered a number of like minds and Liz Azyan had suggested we find a space to share more fully.

From this Ken Eastwood set up a Huddle for us all to join, discuss and share our experiences and knowledge around redesigning council websites.

There are already some interesting and useful discussions happening around user research and testing, technology, information architecture and content migration.  Potentially this could help share good practice, hints and tips between authorities and somewhere in there is a saving I’m sure

If you work in local government and have experience to share or questions to ask about redesigning a council website contact me or Ken Eastwood for an invite to Huddle.

Related posts:

1. Crisis comms online
2. Do councils need websites?
3. Getting the conversation started

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.

Related posts:

1. So this is Christmas
2. Getting the conversation started
3. Do councils need websites?

I did. Bridesmaid for my friend on the 22nd and then the joy of my nearly-three-year-old bouncing off the walls with seasonal excitment. I had the whole of Christmas week off for these two landmark events. I didn’t think about the corporate twitter account at all.

But Boxing Day is pretty boring isn’t it? So I nipped on to see what had happened during my week off. And what had happened was that at least one person found it wholly unacceptable that there had been no corporate tweets during Christmas week.

I do agree. If we used RSS for our news / events etc there would have been one tweet. Or if we used something like Hootsuite I might have scheduled a couple of things in. However, we do it all manually here because we like the human touch. That did work against us last week though.

The question of whether we were the exception or the rule  roused my interest though. Who else had been tweeting to their corporate Twitter charge over Christmas? Well, Dan Slee at Walsall Council had for one. This account’s Christmas service was highlighted to me by several others on Twitter (thanks guys) and he had indeed been doing a sterling job.

Excellent tweeting had been done each time their gritters headed out. I wish I’d been as organised as Dan in getting the highways team to email me each time ours went out (something which has gone straight on the to do list this morning on my return to the office).

There were a few others councils also standing by to reply to @ messages – Hillingdon, Northampton and Richmond (BC, Canada rather than North Yorkshire).

Maybe there were more but this was the extent of the response I got. Whether or not more of us should / could have been tweeting more leads to an interesting question though: who is required to offer a Christmas social media / online service and how many of us did it out of our own goodwill?

Perhaps it depends on who looks after your Twitter. A press officer who is on call (and contracted to be so)? If I tweeted (and I did on Boxing Day just because there was something to say) it was because I felt, in myself, that it was the right thing to do and I was willing to log on and do it.

I’m not contracted to work out of hours or be on call. But online doesn’t recognise office hours, Bank Holidays. It is a non-stop real-time channel and so (in my opinion) organisations should be ready and able to respond as such. It’s a significant shift in thinking and ways of working, particularly for public sector.

It was interesting to look over the state of play though. It’s given me a few ideas for what I’d do differently given the time over as well as things I’ll be trying to implement to further improve the service as soon as possible.

I’d love to know whether anyone had any feedback from citizens / residents / followers on the service given? Or any thoughts generally on what the round-the-clock online space means or could mean for working patterns in council PR / online comms.

Related posts:

1. Getting the conversation started
2. Crisis comms online
3. @citizens –local government twitters

As a theory, creating content for an organisation’s website and sharing responsibility for its maintenance by devolving the authorship (allowing many to write and publish) is a pretty fine idea. However, for it to work well the authorship  needs to be given to the right people otherwise you end up with no content, bad content, unhappy authors, an unhappy central team and a spiral of training-correcting-retraining which means the model may as well not be in place.

There are lots of reasons why this theory shouldn’t be written off merely because it is hard to implement and maintain. The main one is probably this: councils have hundreds of services they could or should publish information about online and the staff in those services are the ones with the knowledge about how they work. They are in a good position to know what information they are commonly asked for or what a citizen needs to know in order to access that service or carry out a transaction.

What they don’t have (in most cases) is the specialist knowledge and experience of presenting that information to meet a variety of online targets or the time / interest / empowerment to add online publishing as a task on top of their unrelated workload. This means a central team either ends up re-writing the content to make is meet accessibility, usability and house style; there is a long cycle of training where neither the trainer or the trainee end up happy; content gets stuck in a workflow because the central team aren’t happy to publish and the author can’t or won’t make changes. In other words the model stops being efficient and starts evolving into a beast.

Of course those issues could be dealt with by taking away any involvement by a central team. In essence this means deciding to no longer manage the content of your website and in the end this will lead to the citizen and the organisation losing out. The citizen may lose out due to poor or out of date information or no information at all and through a lack of consistency and therefore confidence in the brand. The organisation will find itself failing to work to optimum efficiency with duplicated information, some services not represented at all, reputation issues and (probably) breaches of accessibility guidelines.

So, what to do? We discussed this at length in the small session I ran at LocalGovCamp Lincoln. It was interesting to hear views from North Devon, Coventry City and East Lindsay councils on the models they had in place and how they were working. We all seemed to be struggling to get the right people into the author roles and therefore be able to balance efficiently with central editorial control.

I don’t think we came to any firm conclusions about how to tackle changing an existing model or how to engage stakeholders in the importance of this issue to the success of the website / online channel. What did come out of it, for me,  was:

• What works for one organisation probably won’t work for another. In fact, in big organisations what works for one department may not work for another.
• In the same vein, I’ve come to the conclusion that what works for your external site in terms of authorship may not work for your intranet or smaller sites. Some of the success may depend on the workflow here and that should be considered as a vital ingredient in implementing a devolved authorship, not a separate decision.
• I’m not aware of any way of trialing or testing to find out what is an appropriate author model for a department, organisation or site. If anyone knows of a way of analysing before implementing I would be really pleased to hear about it!
• I’m also not aware of anyone who thinks they have successfully devolved authorship. If anyone would like to share an example of an organisation in which the model is working well from all view points I would also be happy to hear about this – especially if you want to share the secret of the success!
• It is easy to get carried away talking about the newer channels of the digital stream but if we can’t produce the right content in the right way at the right time either through devolved or centralised authoring we won’t have anything worth publishing to the wider social web.

I’m still interested to hear others experience or view of devolved authorship so please join the discussion through the comments section. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Power to the people
2. Do councils need websites?

In fact it isn’t even quite the question which needs answering. A more appropriate way of phrasing it, as quickly became apparent in the session, is Do Councils Need the Website They Have Right Now?

Councils have huge amounts of services and information which they need to get to residents. They also have tight budgets to meet, lots of requirements from central Government, limited resources but in most cases a big desire to do things right. Having a website helps to meet lots of these requirements with the limitations in place. Or they would, if they were done well.

Lots of people in this session felt that council websites had in lots of cases got a little bit out of control. A sometimes bloated beast hard to control with only the whip of a malfunctioning devolved authorship model. We agreed in the group that an online channel or mix of channels would meet the efficiency savings head on while fulfilling an increasing demand from residents to communicate in this space – if only we could get it working right.

So, councils need websites but how do we build and run the website a council needs?

We discussed a whole range of things but most of the sharing focused on:

• Devolved authorship – a really nice theory but almost no-one has got it working right. I blogged about this separately as it was also the theme of the session I ran later in the day.
• Respect for web teams – the need for organisations to recognise that online is a channel which needs to be run with the same respect as traditional channels, and that respect should also be given to those employed to be experts on how to do that.
• Definition of boundaries – how much of what is online is within the remit of the web team to either run or advise on?

All three of these issues could come under one broad heading – respect and understanding. Where many websites and web teams are struggling is that there are two many cooks for the broth. In most councils at the moment there are a lot of people who have a say in what goes on the website and in what format. Some web teams have more control than others in terms of approving or improving this content before it is published but in some cases there is little control at all.

Compare this to the way that information is published through traditional channels and the service areas have to pass several gate keepers and abide by the advice of the communication professionals in order to get messages out. This allows them to reap the success and benefit from the experience of those professionals.

Online is a different matter though. Vanity publishing and ‘just in case’ publishing (there is no real drive to get this online now but one day someone might want this so I’ll publish it anyway) abound. And while there are lots of good reasons to devolve authorship if it isn’t implemented properly and backed with a workflow approval process it causes more problems than it solves. This can lead to poor content (in terms of accessibility, usability, relevance and currency) and too much of it.

Then there are the bits which aren’t directly part of the website itself – the bolt-ons, the dreaded applications. In one of those moments so typical of a LocalGovCamp that I felt simultaneously glad not to be the only one struggling with this problem and disheartened that the issue was so all-encompassing. Council websites are let down by the applications which make them interactive and transactional. Why? Partly because web teams have no seat at the table when applications are procured and no jurisdiction to have them removed if not improved.

What can be done then? Well, there is the Web Professionals group for a start. Paul Canning did a great job of introducing this to us all and it is a good step toward building that respect for communications and technical professionals specialising in the online space.

Each council also needs to work out how to publish information to the online space (across an increasing number of channels rather than just a website) tapping the knowledge of the service from that area while also utilising the skill of the web team in writing content which is accessible and usable.

Councils do need websites, the cost not to is too great (as Peter Barton explored in his blog a while back), but they need to improve the way they run them and part of that may be admitting there is specialist knowledge involved.

Related posts:

1. Power to the People (reprise)
2. Crisis comms online
3. Social networking for councils

There was lots of good chats but one that really got me thinking happened on the street as we tried to bid our good-nights. We started talking about hyperlocal, something which has been in the periphery of my vision but I haven’t looked directly at yet.

What is hyperlocal? It is information and data published about a specific community and living in that community. It might be aggregated news stories about that community, blogging, images – anything really that reflects or comments on life in the community.

It is an interesting subject for me as it potentially comes into contact with my two areas of professional interest – local government and local journalism – so I was glad to get the chance to chat about it.

The conversation between myself, @danslee and @theyamyam continued to explore some of the potential for hyperlocal bloggers that Dan looked at in his post about how local gov PR should deal with the movement. We talked about how newspapers were changing, or failing to change, in the face of online and our own experiences of journalism. This lead onto a discussion about the Northcliffe Group’s hyperlocal pilot scheme.

The Local People network of hyperlocal sites (currently in beta) for the South West of England is about ‘Your place. Your people.’ and encourages members to join groups, find out about their community and read and write local news. It deals specifically with communities with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 with has 36 portals online at the moment.

How does this project support the local newspaper business? Well, presumably they can feed their own local news, business directories and classifieds into the portal and sell advertising against that. Allowing the community to contribute also means they have a beat reporter in all these locations – a set-up they haven’t directly employed for some time. There is clearly a market here that local newspapers would want to tap.

And local government? Well, with initiatives like ‘cohesive communities’ and generally trying to make people as happy with the place they live in as possible supporting them with hyperlocal would be beneficial. @theyamyam expressed his belief that hyperlocal communities naturally spring up around the local council as they deal with the business of being a resident and so much of the content is about services for residents, the business of the council.

This is probably pretty accurate for urban or suburban areas where the geographical area covered by a council can be quite tight. It may be less so in rural areas where county and district council’s often have large geographical areas containing a number of disparate communities. In these areas perhaps hyperlocals would spring up more around the parish or town councils, or perhaps communities we wouldn’t define in any traditional sense will emerge.

If local government does start looking at hyperlocal will they look to enable through training and support or deliver more along the lines of Local People? Certainly local councils already hold a lot of hyperlocal information – from directories of groups and organisations, events, news and services.

Most councils probably aren’t enabling or delivering at the moment. A low percentage have RSS on their websites for key areas such as press releases and meetings so existing hyperlocals can’t make use of this information easily. The press offices also may need to evolve, as @danslee explored in his post, to consider and converse with local bloggers in the same way they have and do with the traditional media.

It’s certainly an interesting area filled with vibrant, creative, passionate bloggers. If you want to explore some examples look to The Yam Yam or The Lichfield Blog or take a look through the directory of ultralocal blogs that Matt Wardman is compiling.

Our discussion of hyperlocal led to talk of the need to move, especially for local government online, away from pulling people to our websites and toward making our information available for them to pull into their own online space, be it a blog, iGoogle or another network. But that’s another story, for another day…

Related posts:

1. Local government and social media – response to Ingrid Koeler at IDeA
2. LocalGovCamp – an unconference for local government – Birmingham 20 June 2009
3. Social networking for councils

This is a big shift away from the standard for local government websites which generally have a signposted navigation system. Some are still sticking with recommended (not necessarily by users) categorisation schemes under which services are listed while others have moved forward with a more usable (although in many cases still not perfect) task-orinetated navigation.

Lancashire have gone full on in being search-centric. The first page you come to is basically a big advert and a search box. In my opinion it is visually appealing and probably suits internal pressures to continue using the web channel to broadcast key messages.

On the face of it search-centric makes sense to me. Across the internets search is the main way of finding what you are looking for. Most users are comfortable with it. They like the no nonsense approach of the clean Google page.  But is it right for local government? Well, perhaps not in isolation.

Westminster have a mixed approach. The search is the most prominant navigation option on the homepage but also has the task-orientated listings underneath. Lancashire offer the option of a ’standard view’ homepage which returns to a catagorisation style scheme.

They both seem to want to drive their visitors toward using the search though. And I can see how that would seem like a good idea – like I say, it does make some sense to me. We know from behaviour in the wider online space people like search and, let’s face it, sticking a search box on your homepage is far easier than designing a classification that tries to please everyone and then cramming your content into it (whether you’re a local gov website or not).

But I wonder if this is what the visitors of these particular sites, and perhaps local government sites in general, want?

Google do search well (and apparently there are some other search engines which can have a good go as well) so if I wanted to search wouldn’t I use Google and jump straight into the deep end of the website at the page I was interested in? Would I come to the homepage at all?

If I had come to the homepage is a search what I want to see? Or do I want to see those top tasks? I know what my personal preference is but what of the ‘real’ visitors? How much usability testing has been carried out here?

I think even if my preference was for search I would only be that way inclined if the search actually works, and works well, for every single thing I want on that site. It is why Google is thriving where so many search engines withered on the vine. From my initial playing around yesterday with Lancashire I was surprised to find not all the ‘top services’ (picked from our most commonly requested services) yeilded no results. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Yeah, took me a minute to think that one through too. Which makes the usability testing question raise it’s hand again.

A couple of other things struck me – while Westminster put their search box up front and centre on their homepage with other messages / navigation below Lancashire have got their search box toward the bottom on the left. It’s fairly small as well given the size of the advertising image. It doesn’t scream ’search here’ to me. I’ve no problem admitting that the first time I opened the page I was confused about how to get into the site. It seems even more lost if you close the help box. But that’s just my opinion.

I don’t think an answer about what is best search or signpost can be found in looking only at these two sites especially when they are so shiny and new. It’s great that council’s are moving forward, innovating and looking at new and hopefully better ways to present their online information. I really hope they made the decisions about these designs with lots of input from visitors and usability testing. I’m really interested to see what comes next in local government online.

* I’m slow on the draw today thanks so there have been a flurry of other great posts about this:

• Carl Haggerty – The council homepage – search, signpost or both?
• Stuart Harrison – The Google-isation of local government
• Michele Ide-Smith – search or browse

Related posts:

1. Getting the conversation started

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.

Related posts:

1. So this is Christmas
2. Crisis comms online
3. Social networking for councils

*I accept full responsiblity for the mixed metaphor and then pushing it too far. In defence, m’lud, I’ve not had resonable quota of coffee yet.

Related posts:

1. Carl Haggerty – unblocking access to social media in organisations
2. Dave Briggs – four steps to social media success
3. Local government and social media – response to Ingrid Koeler at IDeA