Sharon O'Dea

Entries tagged as ‘social media’

Some old thinking about new media

April 21, 2010 · Leave a Comment

What a difference a week makes. Thursday’s televised debates could be said to put paid to suggestions this is  Britain’s first social media election. A whopping 9.4m Britons watched the debate,  demonstrating old media certainly still has its place in our political landscape.

Pundits took just minutes to announce who they believed to be the winners and losers in the debates, and within half an hour the first polls on audience reactions were out (but as my job is politically restricted, I’m not telling you what I think).

It’s estimated 36,483 people were Twittering about the debate as they watched. Now as I’ve blogged about before, Twitter isn’t always a great indicator of sentiment amongst the wider public.

But unlike the BNP/Question Time TV event I blogged about previously, what was interesting this time was how people on my social networks seemed to view the same events in widely varying ways.

In many ways, this reflects a longstanding debate within communication theory on how people are influenced by the media they consume. 

Discussion ahead of the debates focussed on how the leaders’ performance would influence the electorate; in the days since, commentators and pollsters have concluded the debates will have an unprecedented effect on the outcome of the election.  But this is a rather simplistic way of thinking about media influence, assuming that there’s a direct relationship between cause and effect. 

In the real world, we need to remember that people use the media they consume in different ways. We have different reasons for consuming media, and these fundamentally affect our experience of it.

Denis McQuail is one of many communications theorists to take a closer look at TV consumption. He found that in order to understand how media is recieved, you need also to consider why it is consumed in the first place.

With this is mind, he analysed TV viewers’ responses and motivations for viewing.  The result of his study is called the Uses and Gratifications Approach.

McQuail found there were four broad types of ‘media-person interaction’: surveillance (information-gathering), personal identity (resonates with who you are); personal relationships (swotting up on the big TV event in order to talk about it with others); and diversion (entertainment).

Looking at responses to the debate on the #leadersdebate twitter hashtag, it appears can be categorised in a very similar way. This isn’t a statistically sound study, of course. But communications researchers  – like ethnographers and anthropologists - look for patterns (of behaviour, language, etc) and try to relate these to their social and cultural contexts. Looking at hashtaged tweets there seemed to me to be some clear trends in types of participants, and in how they behaved.

Commentators have focussed particularly on those whose motivation for viewing was what McQuail would categorise as surveillance – ‘undecideds’ who watch in order to inform their own voting choice. A Guardian/ICM poll found one in four of those watching will change their vote as a result of watching.

The flip side of this, of course, is that three-quarters of those who watched didn’t change their mind at all. In my quick n’ dirty, unscientific analysis of the #leadersdebate hashtag , it appears a sizable proportion can be attributed to the personal identity category – that is, people who already have an opinion and watch in order to reinforce that pre-existing view. Many of these already sported a party Twibbon on their icon, indicating a clear, pre-held party allegiance. These tweeters – praising the leader they already liked and criticising those they disliked – came from the Twitterati across the three main parties and were not swayed by the content of the debates.

While this group comprised a small number of tweeters, they account for a disproportionate volume of tweets as they posted frequently during the 90-minute programme.

The third group were interested in personal interaction. Unlike the previous group, they’re not overtly political tweeters, but rather interested in the leadership as they would be another other televisual event, like finding out who killed Archie Mitchell in Eastenders. Their motivation is gaining social capital; they want to know about the debate in order to inform their on and offline interactions with others.

The smallest number of tweets could be summed up as motivated by diversion. This group watched, and tweeted, because… well, it’s something to do. They forgot to turn over after Corrie, or realised they’d already watched that episode of Have I Got Old News For You on G.O.L.D.

So what does this teach us? First, that noomedia isn’t (yet) proving to be the game changer it was talked up to be this election. The 36,483 people twittering about the debate represented just 0.004% of those watching. As I’ve said before, what people on Twitter say does not neccessarily reflect what the nation is thinking. That being the case, I would take Twitter sentiment analysis services with a pinch of salt.

But secondly – and somewhat conversely - while we talk about social media audiences being more actively engaged than those consuming mass media, it seems they don’t behave so differently after all. They have different reasons for consuming, producing and participating, and these reasons affect the outcome of that participation.

The field of communication studies has a rich vein of literature about mass media audience research. Those of us working in the field of digital engagement might learn a thing or two from looking at it again.

Categories: communication · media · social media
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

UKGC10 Session two: Socialising Internal Communications

January 26, 2010 · 7 Comments

The second session of the day was the one I was looking forward to the most, having discussed it ahead of the event with Kim Willis and Mark Watson.

Kim took the lead on facilitating, but as it turns out the discussion managed to veer though the full swathe of internal comms issues without the need for much facilitating at all. It seemed like we covered an awful lot in under an hour, and could have talked for at least another hour.

Almost everyone agreed  social media could play a much bigger role in internal communications, but within the public sector at least there hasn’t been widespread adoption yet.

Someone described social networking as “what intranets are supposed to be” – enabling you to connect and collaborate with colleagues, share information and improve communication.

A social intranet enables the recording and sharing of organisational knowledge. But while knowledge management looks at how we manage our intellectual capital, we need also to look at how we record, share and pass on social capital too – that is, sharing that knowledge of people and processes that we all build up over time.

Shane Dillion said we rely too much on traditional, top-down methods of communication that no longer suit the way we work. To become more effective, everything we learn outside the organisation should be bought back in and shared.

By enabling colleagues to connect with one another, and by making working lives a little bit easier, good social intranets have a positive impact on employee engagement too.

Many cited middle management as a barrier to adoption of social media. In some ways this is understandable, as social internal comms reduces the middle managers role as a gatekeeper of information.

Our current organisational structures are built for command and control, not collaboration. So the success of internal social media  depends on moving management towards a culture of co-creation.

The question of culture is a very important one. Technology cannot itself create a collaborative culture; if people aren’t talking to each other already, introducing social tools isn’t going to make them.

Other common barriers include silo culture and concerns around security, particularly in relation to things like Government Connect. Platforms like Yammer are incredibly simple to use, and have some great functionality, but sitting outside the firewall are considered too risky by many.

(As an aside, while I like Yammer, I find its default email setting – which emails for every notification – begins to grate remarkably quickly and is itself a barrier to adoption).

But as I blogged about recently, the business case for internal social media is strong and growing. Carl Haggerty gave an update on the Devon County Council social networking pilot he talked about at LocalGovCamp. They branded this ‘business networking’ to counter accusations of frivolity and timewasting. This succeeded in winning hearts and minds, and in evaluation recently he found it produced considerable (but non-cashable) savings.

So what do we do to hasten the adoption of social media inside the firewall?

  • JFDI. The old adage that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission is true to some extent, but it isn’t that simple when it’s your job on the line. But start with a small, agile pilot that can be scaled up if successful. If it works, the organisation will buy into it. If it doesn’t, you won’t have lost much.
  • If you want to promote new ways of working, switch the old ones off. Carl Haggerty said his team made a commitment to use their Business Networking tool for discussion rather than sending group emails. People like their tried and tested methods, so you need to provide incentives to change.
  • Dave Briggs said change needs to be dramatic to work – new tools have to do the same thing at least nine times better to win people over.
  • Get buy in from leadership, and encourage them to use social media internally to communicate, listen and lead.
  • Don’t focus on the negatives. Yes, some people will misuse social tools, but most will not. Posts have real names on, so are self-policed.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Adapt your code of context to say how it applies in an online context rather than write a new code from scratch – that way you avoid protracted negotiations.
  • Hug your CIO. Work with ICT to reach solutions to problems like security rather than focus on barriers.
  • Demonstrate value. Budgets will be tight for many years to come, so we need to set out the business case for social tools, though improving flexibility, sharing knowledge, and improving productivity.

Internal social media sits at the intersection of culture change, innovation and knowledge management. It has the potential to deliver innovation and collaboration, but to do that we need to adapt to the cultural and technological barriers in our own organisations.

This was a vibrant and varied discussion, and we could all have talked for ages. Phil McAllister suggested an internal comms barcamp, which a few of us have begun to discuss in more detail. Watch this space.

Categories: communication · government · intranet
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Intranets are key to recovery in 2010, say surveys

January 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Each January, Jakob Neilsen’s annual intranet design annual is released. This showcases the top ten intranets of the year, and is a good indicator of trends in intranet design and usability.

This year’s Neilsen report found intranets are becoming a higher priority for organisations, intranet teams are growing in size, and increasing numbers feature mobile accessibility and social networking.

On the face of it, the improved functionality comes as no surprise. Mobile internet and social media has grown exponentially over the past few years. Our experience of using the web creates expectations of the kind of content and functionality we want at work too; as we rely on our iPhones to do everything for us when we’re out and about, we expect to be able to use our intranet on it too.

That intranet budgets and teams have continued to grow despite the long recession reflects a growing realisation that intranets can deliver real return on investment for organisations.

Significant and measurable returns can be made by making information easier to find – quite simply, less time spent searching for things is more time people can spend doing something worthwhile. Functionality like self-service HR can see sizable reductions in administration costs.

Less easy to measure, though, is the value of the intranet in improving engagement. Last year’s MacLeod Review on Employee Engagement (from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills) found that more widespread adoption of employee engagement approaches could impact positively on UK competitiveness and performance, and meet the challenges of increased global competition.

Good intranets not only make life a little easier for colleagues, they improve communication, facilitate collaboration, enable people to connect and have their say, and help workers feel part of their organisation. This, in turn, encourages employees to say, stay, and strive.

Another study out this month, from communication research specialists Melcrum, would suggest organisations have heeded Macleod’s call for greater focus on engagement.

In the survey of 2,212 senior communicators, 40% said the business case for social media within internal communication was clear and that there is visible return on investment, while 53% of those who responded said they were planning to increase investment in their organisation’s intranet in 2010.

The results of this study show that not only are organisations investing in good intranet design, but also in functionality and content. When asked about channels used for internal communication, the intranet ranked as the most effective channel by 73% of senior communicators worldwide, with a clear majority believing webcasts and video would grow in importance in 2010.

Respondents highlighted a wide range of business benefits from investment in internal social media. These included improved levels of employee engagement (21%), better communication with remote workers (16%), knowledge management and collaboration (25%), improving employee feedback (20%) and making business leaders more visible and accessible (14%).

Both the Neilsen and Melcrum studies show intranets are maturing. Increasingly they’re moving away from being a simple repository of information and becoming instead a platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.

Victoria Mellor, CEO of Melcrum said: “There is a fundamental shift happening with how information flows inside an organization. Peer-to-peer online networks are enabling real-time feedback from employees to inform decision-making, not to mention facilitating collaboration between remote workers.”

With budgets tight, the pressure is on for organisations to demonstrate value for money. But with growing evidence of the business benefits of investment in intranets and internal social media, it’s clear they’ll play an even more important role in 2010.

Categories: internal communication · intranet · social media
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Twitter is not a barometer of social attitudes

October 25, 2009 · 4 Comments

Like a lot of people, on Thursday night I tuned in to the BBC’s Question Time to see how Nick Griffin came across.

As I watched, I tweeted my thoughts, which became part of the huge stream on the #bbcqt hashtag. Looking at the hashtag search, you’d easily come to the conclusion everyone thought Griffin came across very badly.  Tweetminster reported that 99.9% of tweets were negative about Griffin.

Yet 24 hours later, a poll for YouGov found support for the BNP had increased following the show.

So why was the Twitter barometer of social attitudes wrong?

Quite simply, that’s because Twitter hashtags only tell us what people on Twitter think about something.

The comments on the BBC’s own Have Your Say forum, or submitted by viewers hitting the Red Button on cable or satelite had a far less critical view of Griffin’s performance, with a sizable number saying they agreed with his views.

So what this demonstrates is that what people say on Twitter should not be taken as what people in general think or feel.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the value of real-time search, with social media monitoring services selling sentiment analysis as an accurate method of understanding what people think.

This isn’t strictly true. It merely tells you what people on Twitter think. People on MySpace might think differently, and people not on the internet at all might have different attitudes altogether.

This is what ethnographer danah boyd (she does not capitalise her name) describes as the Not So Hidden Politics of Class Online:

‘For decades, we’ve assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with “access” and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the “digital divide.” Yet, increasingly, we’re seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we’re seeing a social media landscape where participation “choice” leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.’

So for instance, boyd found that while discussions about social media tended to focus on Facebook, as this was the platform used by social commentators themselves, at least as many young people were using MySpace.

Our choice of social network, boyd argues,  isn’t about features or functionality. It’s a result of what sociologists refer to as homophily, the social phenomenon which means we choose to socialise with people like ourselves.

Because of homophily, the platform on which we choose to socialise online is inextricably linked with factors such as race, education and socio-economic status. This is reflected in the stats, which consistently show Twitter users are older, wealthier and better educated than people participating elsewhere online.

The phenomenon of homophily is evident not just in choice of platform, but who you interact with once using that platform. In following people who are interested in the same things as us on Twitter, we inevitably choose to follow people who are quite a lot like ourselves.

This means it can be something of an echo chamber, with views and opinions like our own reflected back at us.

This makes it inherently unreliable as a social barometer. It only reflects a certain strata of society, while other platforms may vary from this considerably. Let’s not forget that 10m adults the UK are not online at all. They have views (and votes) too.

Those of us working in engagement (as well as lazy journalists) would do well to remember that the views that echo through our own Twitter streams do not neccessarily represent everyone.

Categories: media · social media
Tagged: , , , ,

October’s dead tree reading list

October 1, 2009 · 3 Comments

I love books. I always said when I grew up I wanted to have my very own library. And now I have. I’ve got a ladder and everything.

Granted, my need for a ladder is greater than most.

Anyway, inspired by Sarah Lay and Dave Briggs, here’s my Dead Tree Reading List for this month:

bookstack

Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear (Dan Gardiner): At work I’ve been thinking lately about how we handle risk. Does our perception of risk create organisational paralysis? Often potential risks prevent us from innovating and trying new things. Do we need to get more used to taking risks?

Most books on risk look at the gap between statistical likelihood and perception of risk; this one goes into the psychology and politics of fear, so hopefully is a good basis on which to look at these questions.

My Invented Country (Isabel Allende): In this book, Allende explores her own perceptions and understandings of her home country, Chile. I admit I’m a little obsessed with South America, but I picked this up as it reminded me of Benedict Anderson’s concept of nation as imagined community.

We Think (Charles Ledbeater): This book explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate. That’s why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation and has the potential to transform our democracy. I love this stuff.

Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky): This looks at organising without organisations. The social web gives us the tools to make group action a reality. That, in turn, could change our whole world.

The latter two are part of the growing body of literature (digital as well as dead tree) on the potential of the social web to transform the way we live our lives.

By lowering transaction costs and allowing people to self-0rganise, the web makes possible a whole raft of activity that was previously impossible or simply uneconomic.

So, for example, if you love reading and regularly buy books, you’ll know that new books are expensive. Even when you buy secondhand books, you get charged a fortune for postage and packing.

The social web makes alternatives possible. ReadItSwapIt is a book exchange website which allows users to simply swap the books they no longer want for ones they do want – for free.

Once you’ve finished a book, just register it with ReadItSwapIt and then find a book that you want to read. If someone has a book you like, you can arrange to post them to each other. All you pay is the cost of postage.

In my years of living in poky flats with shelf-space at a premium, I operated a strict(ish) one-in, one-out system using ReadItSwapIt that kept my bursting-at-the-seams shelves at some kind of equalibrium (and saved me a fortune).

A fine example of the way the web can transform the way we do business with each other, if you ask me.

Anti-Disclaimer: Links above aren’t affiliate ones, so I don’t make any money if you buy the books. However, I am probably obliged by my employers to point out there are more free books than you can shake a stick at available at your local, council-run library.

Categories: technology
Tagged: , , , ,

Will Twitter’s new terms call time on council feeds?

September 15, 2009 · 10 Comments

Twitter’s new terms of service were launched last week, to general acclaim from users. The new terms aim to tackle the rising tide of spam that threatens to engulf Twitter, as well as prepare the ground for the arrival of advertising.

The refreshed Twitter Rules spell out a number of different reasons why you may find your Twitter account terminated. In calling time for inappropriate avatars,  squatting and multiple, near-identical accounts, the new rules turn into policy what was already established moderating practice.

The new terms emphasise the personal touch, stating that you’ll be in violation of the terms of service  “if your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates.”

Now this could cause a real headache for councils, the vast majority of whom use feeds to automatically tweet stories and releases. In banning all bots, the new terms would appear to call time  for many councils on Twitter.

Stuart Harrison suggests councils mitigate the risk by personalising their tweets, supplementing feed stories with replies and additional information.

Whilst I agree councils aren’t currently making the best use of Twitter – using it as a broadcast medium with which to distribute press releases – I’m not sure many councils will be able to do this.

I expect that over the coming months and years more councils will follow Brighton’s lead and recruit dedicated social media officers. But until that happens few have the resources to really put the social into social media.

Right now it’s not clear how – or indeed if – Twitter will police this. But if they do start banning all automated feeds, I’m not sure many councils will have the capacity  to change tack quickly and keep their feeds running.

That would be a real shame. As Liz Azyan found, more councils are using Twitter than any other social platform (30% at the last count). The relatively swift adoption of Twitter is a rare example of council officers embracing social media and, well, JFD-ing it.

If Twitter starts banning councils for automated feeds, it’s unlikely many will have the determination or resources to get their feeds running again. Councils are inherently risk-adverse, and if we get burned with this it could be a real setback for social media in local government.

The problem is, the new terms imply that all bots are bad. Yet plenty of users don’t think they are.

I think of Twitter as a one-stop information resource. The personal touch is part of what makes Twitter so useful (the ability to ask questions on seemingly any subject and get a string of useful answers in minutes is really invaluable). But announcements from companies and organisations are often genuinely useful too, and Twitter would be a poorer place without them.

Like bad pubs, bad feeds are easy to spot and easy to avoid.

Fortunately, it’s not just councils and PRs who might fall foul of the new rules; many news organisations, such as the Guardian and CNN, use RSS feeds to Twitter latest stories.

And this is where we’re likely to see some push-back. Many automated feeds are demonstrably popular, and Twitter is unlikely to want to get on the wrong side of the powerful media organisations currently using their service by banning their feeds.

That being the case, I suspect (and hope) Twitter will use their discretion and separate the good bots from the bad.

What do you think? Is Twitter right to ban bots?

Categories: local government · social media
Tagged: , , ,

How can we use web 2.0 to safeguard children?

August 18, 2009 · 1 Comment

FutureGov‘s Dominic Campbell asks how we can use the social web to improve the way children’s services connect and collaborate, and so become more effective in safeguarding children.

Here’s an extract from his FutureGov blog post:

“Sat watching the case of Baby Peter unfold on the television last year, as with the vast majority of you I’m sure, I was left feeling hugely saddened, frustrated and powerless to help prevent such events from ever happening again. I am not a social worker nor do I work for any one of the numerous agencies involved in the extremely complex and challenging world of child protection. However, it did get me thinking about where I might be able to provide some support, specifically around how we might be able to draw on social technologies to contribute to safeguarding children…

“…To start off with, we are looking to bring together multi-disciplinary group of senior managers and practitioners from childrens social services, teachers, police and health workers with social web technologist, public service designer, funders – or even just people who have a personal passion for this area – to help us design and run a small Safeguarding 2.0 pilot. Nothing big in the first instance, more a proof of concept if you like, but with the potential to transform the way in which professionals and non-professionals alike might better share information and form the kinds of relationships that might prevent future tragedies.”

It’s an ambitious but incredibly worthwhile idea, I’m sure you’ll agree. If you’d like to know more, or to share your ideas, go along to the workshop.

More details about the project and the workshop are in the briefing paper here:

Categories: local government · social media
Tagged: , , , , ,

GoogleLocalGov

August 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment

On Friday some of Britain’s geekiest local government comms, web and tech people gathered at Google’s offices in Victoria to find out how we can work together.

The offices are pretty much how I expected – bright and clean, creative yet corporate. This is how offices should look.

We arrived expecting a sales pitch, and that we certainly got. Google opened by telling us that they want to help the UK public sector deliver better digital content, better value for money, and maybe some profit for Google along the way. I’ll just cover the main points of interest for me here, but if you’re interested in hearing more, Sarah Lay and Carrie Bishop have both written detailed (and therefore lengthy) blog posts which cover all the topics.

We began where everyone begins with Google – search. Google’s organic search is driven by an algorithm which is as secret as Colonel Sanders’ blend of 11 herbs and spices. The exact nature of Google’s search might be an enigma, but it’s no secret that the best way to ensure your results are relevant and so feature high up in searches is to have good content on good pages.

Unfortunately, this isn’t something that comes naturally to the public sector. So that’s where paid-for advertising comes in. This works by scoring ads by relevance (based on content) vs how much you’ll pay. The ads scoring highest are furthest up the page; you can increase your score without paying more by making your content relevant. This Paid Ads 101 rap on YouTube tells you all you need to know, fo’ sho’. But are paid for ads suitable for local authorities? Perhaps, in some contexts. Google have given us £300 of AdWords credit so we can try this out.

Google told us they can determine a user’s location from their IP address with 80 per cent accuracy, which means we can use geolocation ads to target advertising to our own residents. But this doesn’t ring true for me; I asked if they could clarify how that would work in London, for instance, where boroughs are geographically small and contiguous.

Nonetheless, by making our content relevant, we can score more highly in organic search. Usefully, Google have a clutch of tools to help us make our websites better. Website Optimiser, their website testing and optimisation tool, allows you to test and optimise site content and design in order to increase revenue and ROI. At a first glance this looked damned good and I will certainly take a closer look.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool not just for measurement, but also to help us improve our sites. By looking more closely at user journey and usability of our sites we can learn where they need to improve. But to do this we need more and better training, and the resource to do it. All too often web teams are tasked with creating more and more content without looking at what we’ve already got and how it can be improved. The speaker, Paul, has posted his presentation and you can read more on his blog.

AdSense is a means by which councils can make money out of Google, by hosting ads on our own sites. Dominic Miller talked us through how this has worked in Nottingham – netting them £15k in the first year, with apparently only a handful of complaints and very little work on their part.

In local gov we’re going to be asked to do more with less over the coming years, so the idea that our sites could generate income is an attractive one. But nonetheless I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea, in part because it seems like unnecessary commercialisation of civic life, but also because there’s potential for reputational damage there. Some councils are going to be keener or this than others; we’ll need to debate this one within our own organisations.

Next up was Google’s apps suite. The demo showed how we can work collaboratively using real-time document editing, communicating by instant messenger and video chat. Here they were preaching to the converted. Battling daily with a 50MB (yes, really) mailbox limit that needs clearing at least twice a day, 250GB of storage space that can be accessed from anywhere sounds like heaven.

Unfortunately, it’s likely to remain a dream for the time being at least thanks to concerns over data security, and in particular the hoops IT departments have to jump through for Government Connect. Enterprise doesn’t even work very well on IE6, and most of us are stuck with this eight-year-old browser. Google are confident they can answer concerns, and given they have rolled Enterprise out in some major corporations I’m sure they can. Google assured us there are no Data Protection Act issues as all the data stays within the EU, which is one hurdle overcome at least.

Ultimately the decision to move to cloud computing will be an economic one. At £33 per user per year their offering is good value, but the associated costs of migrating to cloud computing are enormous. The Digital Britain report outlines government plans to move to cloud computing, but as ever I suspect local government will be slower to move.

Michele Ide-Smith argues that the move will be driven by societal expectations; we’ll be less willing to put up with outdated technology the further it diverges from out computing experiences at home.

Add to this moves towards greater flexible and home working, and increased pressure to work in partnership, and cloud computing starts to make an awful lot of sense for us in local government.

Next up was the fabulously-named Chewy, who talked us through some of the cool stuff you can do with YouTube. The video site is now the internet’s second most popular search engine, which shows people are actively searching for multimedia content.

Local authorities are increasingly making use of YouTube videos (Westminster, for one), but as with everything on the web, content is king. People don’t expect overproduced , corporate video, as our expectations have changed thanks to the proliferation of mobile phone video cameras – and the existence of YouTube. The most popular videos on council sites are ‘fun’ ones, like this video of Street Dance in Uxbridge, from Hillingdon Council.

Advice from Google is that you need to promote your videos and make them easy to find. Simply embedding them on your home page isn’t enough – take them to where people are, and you can link back to our site from there.

This YouTube walk-through got me thinking about resourcing. I’m not sure many local authorities have people skilled and experienced in making and editing video (as well as other media-rich content).

Newspaper publishers are moving away from a model where journalists simply write. Major newspaper groups are re-focussing their journalistic teams as ‘content producers’, responsible for creating photos, videos and audio files as well as text stories, and they’ll increasingly expect the same kind of media-rich content from us. At the same time, the growth of hyperlocal media, highlighted in the recent Digital Britain report, will place changing demands on council PROs.

I strongly suspect that in future press officers will spend less time ‘selling in’ stories to local media outlets, and more creating a wider range of content – which means we need to start developing the skills to do this.

Finally we moved on to Google Maps. By this point in the day we were all getting a little tetchy and tired of being sold at, and this is where dissatisfaction on the Twitter steam started to bubble over. Perhaps they were unlucky to have scheduled this last, but it was also very unfortunate that they’d made little effort to re-focus their business presentation to the audience to address the problems with local government have in adopting Google Maps.

They told us Google Maps is the most popular mapping site on the interwebs, and 150,000 developers are using the Google Maps API to create their own maps. We’ve all played with Street View to look up our childhood haunts, and few of us would struggle to make the mental leap to using it on council websites.

But we can’t use it, because of The Big Ordinance Survey Issue. I won’t pretend to know the details, but effectively most of local government is banned from using Google Maps at the moment because of a disagreement between Google and Ordinance Survey over their terms and conditions (read all about it here, if you’re really interested). This is a sizable stumbling block for us; that they seemed baffled when someone raised the question highlighted a remarkable lack of research into the local government market.

Although Google looked a little taken aback at the sudden outburst of negativity, to their credit they immediately offered to set up an ongoing dialogue between us where we can talk through some of these issues. I think this could be really productive for both sides.

Overall, I was a little disappointed that the day wasn’t more of a constructive, two-way session, but nonetheless it was a useful overview of their products. The key is in what happens next. I love Google, and I’m sure there’s potential for them to help us achieve our aims of communicating better with residents while bringing down costs. But this was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see.

For those who are interested, Google have made a sector-specific website for local government with summaries of content from the session. There was also plenty of talk on the #googlelocalgov Twitter hashtag.

More (and, frankly, better) blogs from the day:

Ingrid Koehler

Carrie Bishop

Michele Ide-Smith

Sarah Lay

Al Smith

(EDIT: Jon Cross from Google has responded to my complaint that GeoLocation doesn’t really work: “Just been reading your blog post and I have to say there seems to be a slight misunderstanding on geo targeting, and where you’ve said our geo-targeting doesn’t work you are actually referring to natural search results, not paid ads which is what I was talking about in my session. Geo targeting on paid links *does* work. We do not geo target in our natural search listings, and we never claimed to”. So there you go, although TBH I’m still struggling to see how they can find you from your IP address when boroughs in London are often only a mile or two wide, so I’d really want some further assurance that this actually does work).

Categories: social media · technology
Tagged: , , , ,