DavePress » Social Media

Why senior managers need to lead online

Dave — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:44:08 +0000

I wrote a thing for the Guardian’s Public Leaders’ Network:

The explosion in online innovation throughout public services is seeing more and more activity taking place on the net, whether via interactive websites, or mobile applications. Networks such as Twitter and Facebook provide opportunities for knowledge sharing and problem solving on a scale unimaginable previously – and those in senior positions have to be a part of this conversation.

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New Zealand government social media guidance

Dave — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:50:33 +0000

More examples of advice and guidance on using social media tools in government, this time from New Zealand.

The first bit is the High Level Guidance, described as helping:

organisations when they are trying to decide if they should use social media in a communications, community engagement, or a policy consultation context. It is intended to be useful to managers and leadership teams, but also provides basic principles, code of conduct issues, and templates that are important for practioners of social media.

You can download it here.

The second is the Hands-on Toolbox, which

has been written to help practitioners who are setting up social media profiles and using the tools on a daily basis. It has been written for public servants with limited experience using social media, but also offers tools and tips that will be useful for those practitioners who have been using social media for some time.

You can download that here.

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Canada’s social media policy

Dave — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:03 +0000

The Canadian government has shared their – somewhat lengthy – “Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0″ online.

Well worth checking out if you are designing your own organisation’s policy on this stuff.

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The Twitter guide, updated!

Dave — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:12:41 +0000

One of the more popular things I have written is the guide to using Twitter in the public sector, published by my good friends at Learning Pool.

It was first produce a couple of years ago and was due an update, which has finally happened!

You can download the new version from the Learning Pool website – all for free, of course.

It would be good to get some feedback on the guide, and to hear what might be good to add to the next revision.

Don’t forget the Kind of Digital one page guides to various social media tools, which might be of use too!

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Getting digital engagement right

Dave — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:30:45 +0000

Today I gave a talk at the CIPR public services communications conference. In case they are handy, here are the slides:

Getting digital engagement right

View more presentations from Kind of Digital.

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If this then that

Dave — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:32:04 +0000

Here’s another cool little tool. ifttt, or ‘if this, then that’ is a way of automating tasks across your social networks. It describes itself as ‘digital duct tape’.

It basically allows you to set rules and actions to happen whenever you interact online.

One example described on the site is creating a task that whenever a photo is uploaded to Instagram, it should also be added to your Dropbox account.

Just to test it, I’ve created a task that emails me everytime someone mentions me on Twitter. Not particularly useful, or unique, but the process for creating tasks is very user friendly, and the potential is huge, with lots of different services included, such as Facebook, Google Reader, Foursquare, Delicious, Tumblr, WordPress… the list goes on.

It’s a cool idea and I am sure that people more imaginative than I could come up with some great uses of it!

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ACAS’ social networking guidance

Dave — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:42:42 +0000

ACAS – the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, who you’ve probably heard of on news reports about negotiations between employers and unions – have published some guidance for employers on how to manage staff use of these sites at work.

Smart phones, internet, tweeting, blogging – we have accepted all of these innovations, and many more, as part of our working lives, helping us to work more flexibly, stay in touch for longer and respond to each other more quickly.

But is it all good news? Some estimates report that misuse of the internet and social media by workers costs Britain’s economy billions of pounds every year and add that many employers are already grappling with issues like time theft, defamation, cyber bullying, freedom of speech and the invasion of privacy.

So how should employers respond to the challenges posed by social networking tools at work?

New research from the Institute for Employment Studies, commissioned by Acas, advises employers to:

draw up a policy on social networking

treat ‘electronic behaviour’ in the same way you would treat ‘non-electronic behaviour’

react reasonably to issues around social networking by asking ‘what is the likely impact on the organisation?’

Worth checking out.

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Cornwall Council’s social media policy

Dave — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:41:02 +0000

Fair play to Cornwall Council, who have posted up publicly their social media policy and passport (basically a business case type document and process).

You can download them via their social media page.

Thanks to Matt Bond, from Cornwall’s Communications and Strategy team for sharing freely.

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Police, Twitter, and riots

Dave — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:48:08 +0000

Really pleased to be able to publish this post from Cisco’s Jeremy Crump on the use of Twitter by the police, with specific reference to the recent disturbances in London, Birmingham and other cities.

The widespread use of social media has been a significant feature of the riots in England over the last week. Looters used BBM to organise and swarm. In response, outraged citizens used Facebook and Twitter to organise clearing up local streets. The police are making extensive use of social media. They have used it for keeping people updated about what has been happening, and very importantly for dispelling rumours when things haven’t been happening. They’ve used Flickr to crowd source collecting photographic evidence, and for getting citizens to help in identifying offenders. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary noted in their report on public order policing earlier this year that the police were lagging behind demonstrators in their use of social media. The service has had to learn fast.

What we have seen in the last week shows some real innovation, building on the work of @nickkeane of the NPIA and innovators across the police service over the last three years. There will be extensive analysis of what worked and what didn’t over the coming months. An immediate pointer to the extent to which social media are becoming an essential aspect of policing is the growth of the number of people following police force twitter accounts.

Almost all of the 43 local forces in England and Wales have central twitter accounts, which are run by force comms departments and are mostly used for giving out public information notices, seeking information about incidents or reporting successes. Since June, the total number of followers of these sites has increased 121,000 to 347,000. Unsurprisingly, the forces with the biggest growth include those where there was the most unrest – Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, West Midlands and Derbyshire all show increases in the number of followers in this period of over 200%. So do Cambridgeshire, West Mercia, South Yorkshire and Hampshire. The biggest growth has been in the Met, which was relatively late in committing itself to the use of twitter. @metpoliceuk now has over 34,000 followers, against 2,900 in June. Of course, not all the 346,000 followers now following police force accounts in England and Wales are unique individuals – there is overlap between these groups. But the scale of the growth is striking. The experience of Greater Manchester Police from their GMP24 exercise last year suggests that these high numbers of followers will persist. A significant group of followers are media organisations and the publication of information through the site is a means for the police to feed their messages into a debate which goes wider than their immediate followers on Twitter.

There has been more modest growth in the number of followers of the accounts managed by neighbourhood and borough policing teams. 402 such accounts which were already set up in June and still used in august have grown from 108,000 to 166,000 followers – an increase of 54%. Some of them, such as @brumpolice and @suptpaynewmp have gained several thousand new followers.

There is more work to do in understanding how the police have used these sites, what the impact has been and what new and effective practices have emerged. Much will be changed by the events of the last week, including the way the police work with local citizens to share information and maintain confidence. We can expect the police service to build on what it has learned about the potential of social media for closer engagement with the public.

Note on the data

The number of followers for 41 force accounts and 402 local policing accounts were downloaded on 22 June 2011 and 11 August 2011 using NodeXL, which is a free extension to Excel. http://nodexl.codeplex.com/. The source of the account names are the lists @nickkeane/ukcops-who-tweet and @nickkeane/uk-police-force-twitters. The local police list excludes specialist units, ACPO officers’ accounts and others which aren’t used primarily as channels for communicating with the local public.

Jeremy Crump is a director at Cisco Systems and was previously Director of Strategy at the NPIA. He will be publishing articles on the police service use of Twitter later this year.

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Too busy for Twitter?

Dave — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:42:13 +0000

A common risk associated with public bodies engaging online in spaces like Twitter is that there’s too much interaction to cope with. It’s something that often gets raised when I am talking with clients.

E-government bulletin covered the issue recently:

A second delegate from an NHS hospital trust told the group that her communications team was underfunded to respond to social media. “We are becoming an arm of our complaints service, but with no budget – and the complaints team itself won’t monitor Twitter,” she said. And a third told the group that his council’s elected members were receiving such a volume of direct messages on Twitter they were unable to respond to them.

This is, I think, another argument for comms teams not to ‘own’ social media within an organisation. If complaints are coming in through Facebook, or Twitter (or whatever) then it’s the complaints team, not comms, who ought to be monitoring those spaces.

As I think I have written before, communications teams have an oversight role, and a championing one too. They look after the main corporate channels, manage the strategy and governance processes and look after arranging training and that sort of thing. Most of the activity should happen in service areas though.

It’s social media as telephone, not press release. Another way of putting it is that it is communications not Communications. In other words, it’s the normal communicating we all do everyday, by talking, using the phone, emailing and so on; rather than the formal Communications that happens with press releases, interviews and so on.

If you are in a comms team and are drowning in social media interactions that aren’t in your area of expertise, pass them on to someone who is responsible!