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

September 15, 2009September 15, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / 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?

What makes for a good council website?

September 14, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

I’ve decided to steer clear of blogging on the recent disastrous Birmingham Council website launch.

While Paul Canning’s blog post sums up the catalogue of errors extremely well, it’s clear to anyone visiting the site that huge mistakes have been made. Bad government websites are launched all the time, but few have Birmingham’s £2.8m price tag.

The one good thing to come out of this debacle is a renewed focus on producing good, user-focused council websites.

Just what does make for a good council website? Whether we’re local gov webbies, communicators, or interested users, we all have ideas on what makes websites work for local authorities.

Dave Briggs has set up a page on IdeaScale where local gov webbies and interested amateurs can collaboratively produce a wishlist of what council websites really ought to have.

He hopes this will provide a resource full of good advice for councils looking to improve their web presence.

Come and join the debate! You can submit your ideas or vote and comment on the ideas already suggested.

You can find it at: http://localgovweb.ideascale.com/

Dear internet… can you help?

September 11, 2009September 11, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / 11 Comments

Today I have exactly nine months left of my twenties.

On my 18th birthday, someone gave me a notebook, and on each page I wrote one thing I wanted to do before I turned 30. Some trivial, some important.

I’d largely forgotten about this exercise, but as I was moving house a couple of years ago I found the notebook and realised I’d done almost all of the things I’d listed in it.

So I’ve visited Asia and both ends of the Americas, bought an original piece of art, got my degree, gone somewhere I don’t speak the language and where no one speaks English, and so on. Most important of all was ambition number sixteen: fall in love, which I did five-and-a-bit years ago and remain happily so today.

However, three wishes in the book remain unfulfilled. These were:

Visit Africa
Visit Australia
Find a sport I like and do it regularly

Now the first two sound tricky, but if I really wanted to go I could book a plane ticket. No, the latter’s the hard one.

To give you some background, I am entirely blind in my right eye, which means I have pretty bad spacial awareness can’t see anything on my right-hand side. I also have really awful balance, which might be related to my first point, but that could just be me making excuses. Consequently, I am appallingly bad at every sport I’ve ever tried.

I’ve posted this challenge to Feats of Tweet, the new project from Paul Smith, better known as the Twitchiker. Paul wants to harness the goodwill of the Twitter community to help people fulfil their goals and wishes. He’s invited people to Tweet in their wishes, and will select a few to go to the public vote on Monday (it’s a great idea, do check it out if you haven’t already).

My own unfulfilled wish isn’t likely to garner much sympathy when up against desperately-needed transplant organs, and rightly so. So I’m asking you, people on the interwebs; do you do any sport at all? Could an unfit, half-blind not-quite-thirty-year-old join in?

Over the next nine months I must surely be able to find some from of exercise that I’m not totally, depressingly crap at. But what? I’m willing to try pretty much anything. What can you suggest?

Leadership: why Greg Dyke is like the Wizard of Oz

September 9, 2009September 10, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

In an interview with Management Today this week, former BBC Director-General Greg Dyke said the key to building up a high degree of trust and loyalty among employees is to make sure that they say the right things about you to others:

‘Leadership is about the stories that are told about you – both positive and negative’, he said. ‘You’ll be judged by those stories more than anything you say or write, and people will need to like what they hear about you. The most effective leaders are the ones who are loved by their staff. Always think as a leader: how will this be seen?’

His words echo those of the Wizard of Oz, who said ‘ A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others’.

In all but the smallest companies, it’s not possible for the CEO to develop a personal relationship with all employees, so instead they rely on internal communication (as well the informal networks of office rumours and gossip).

But is it really the job of communicators to present their Chief Exec as a loveable kind of guy? Or does that risk leading us, David Brent-like, to confuse popularity with success?

David Ferrabee cautions against what he calls the ‘Wizard of Oz approach’: ‘If you do put employees in front of the CEO a lot, they might find out he/she is not actually the Great and Powerful Oz, but just a WC Fields lookalike’.

And therein lies the problem. It’s not a leader’s job to be liked; it’s their job to lead. Most CEOs are affable kind of people. Most are good communciators – they need to be so to have reached that position. But it doesn’t follow that they have to be the kind of person colleagues would be happy to go for a beer with.

In the introduction to the recent MacLeod Report on Employee Engagement, Peter Mandelson says ‘organisations that truly engage and inspire their employees produce world class levels of innovation’.

What inspires people is encouraging innovation and ideas in the workplace that are focused on competitive advantage or shared vision. That means engaging with colleagues and managers and bringing them along with you on a journey, communicating honestly and clearly.

Arguably, building a personal mythology for a leader could stifle rather than encourage innovation. After all, how many colleagues would be willing to challenge the Great and Powerful Oz?

Dyke’s job as the leader of a quasi-public sector organisation in the midst of bitter battle with senior government figures meant he slipped easily into the role of staunch defender of his organisation and his staff.

But few other leaders are in such a position. Most answer to shareholders, or in the public sector, elected leaders, so simply presenting yourself as likeable is not a viable leadership communication strategy.

So while Greg Dyke inspired extraordinary loyalty from his staff, his strategy’s not goingto hold water for many others. Other leaders wishing to develop their own organisational profile need to communicate in the way that suits their organisation, their objectives, and their own leadership communication style.

Thoughts on Portsmouth’s Facebook ban

September 2, 2009September 10, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / 9 Comments

Portsmouth Council announced this week they’ve decided to ban access to Facebook from its computers after it was revealed staff spent an average of 400 hours a month on the site.

Council bans on Facebook are hardly new; many have restrictions on access thanks to the requirements of Government Connect. But this story focussed on “waste”, noting 400 hours a month equates to between five and six minutes per month spent on the site by each of the 4,500 PC-based staff.

Firstly, the statistic isn’t a sound one; Portsmouth Council admit they can’t differentiate between business and personal use, nor between dwelling and active browsing, which means they don’t know how much of that 400 hours is clocked up by windows left open while the user does something else.

Second, the headline doesn’t reflect the real issue behind this story. Organisations have had this debate many times already, over the potential for employees to waste time if given a telephone, email, or access to the internet. In all of these cases, it’s a manager’s job to tackle any perceived timewasting, and so too it should be for Facebook. But instead of looking at the quality of performance management, Portsmouth Council are trying to solve the problem from the centre.

This strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People are already talking about us on social networks. We can either choose to ignore those conversations, or we can listen to and learn from them.

As Carl Heggarty notes, would we consider a member of staff visiting a village hall and listening to community issues and communicating with them about councils services a waste of time, or would that be considered community engagement?

Employees listening out for the organisation on social networks gives us an extended network of “eyes and ears” able to highlight problems and bring them to our attention before they spiral out of control and become significant reputational risks.

By banning access, we prevent employees from listening on our behalf, identifying problems so they can be given attention by more conventional means. But heavy-handed bans also prevent employees from speaking for us. Employees can be powerful advocates for what we do, and are likely to speak highly of us in their social networks, both on and offline. By banning access we limit employees ability to advocate for us online.

By limiting the extent to which informed and engaged employees can advocate on its behalf, Portsmouth Council is failing to get the full value from its internal communications.

Finally, centrally-imposed bans on access could also be said to have a negative impact on employee engagement. Hertzberg argues that dissatisfaction with employment is primarily motivated by company policy, supervision, salary, interpersonal relations and working conditions (what he termed ‘Hygiene Factors’). Portsmouth’s policy of blocking social networking sites could be seen to create dissatisfaction among employees, as it could be seen to be heavy-handed centralised supervision, and limits their ability to manage their work-life balance and build working relationships.

The Work Foundation found access to new technology affects how people view their organisational culture: “People who have access to newer technologies are more likely to characterise their organisation as one that is loyal with mutual trust, that is committed to innovation and development or is focussed on achievement and not rule bound”.

The holy grail of employee engagement is discretionary effort. Engage your staff and they repay you by investing more time and effort into their work; fail to engage – or actively disengage – and employees are not motivated to contribute more than the bare minimum.

A more nuanced look at Portsmouth’s Facebook ban might reveal it has a negative impact both on employee engagement and on community engagement, resulting in far more “waste” than the five to six minutes a month currently spent on Facebook.

Podcasting for internal communication

August 25, 2009September 10, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

Tools like YouTube and AudioBoo mean we can produce and distribute audio and video more easily than ever. Abi Signorelli, Head of Internal Communications at Virgin Media, has been experimenting with AudioBoo for a few months. She’s been using it to record her thoughts, and for impromptu interviews with people she bumps into.

It’s certainly an interesting idea. Using real voices from real employees can really bring messages to life, and arguably help to break down organisational silos.

Video, too, is cheaper and easier to produce than ever. Where I work we’ve been using the cheap and ridiculously simple Flip Video to record and share interviews and footage from events. The proliferation of mobile phone cameras means people no longer expect well-produced, slick corporate video. The homemade quality of videos from Flip or mobile phones lends a shaky, grainy authenticity that viewers are now used to seeing on You Tube.

YouTube is now the second most popular search engine in the world – which just goes to show people are actively looking for multimedia content.

But are people looking for it at work? Recent research at a large telecoms company found less than 4% of employees are interested in watching online video from their employer, while actual hit rates on their corporate videos are even lower. Similarly, Abi’s Audioboo advertures have stimulated some interesting debate, but the recordings themselves attract comparatively tiny internal audiences within Virgin Media.

All of which suggests that hype surrounding pod- and vodcasting is overblown. But in my view that would be too simplistic.

History shows our media consumption habits at home create expectations of the media we consume at work. So as more of us access online video or podcasts regularly, it follows we’ll expect the same media rich content in our employee communications.

Short videos from our recent community festival had surprisingly high numbers of views, and some great feedback from colleagues who said they appreciated seeing some of the events going on across the borough.

But that’s not to say in a few years time we’ll all be scrapping our staff magazines in favour of audiovisual content.

First, audiences have to jump through quite a few hoops to access podcasts. Even simple steps like having to download the file to listen, or even plug in headphones, are reasons not to bother. In organisations like mine – with a high proportion of non-wired audiences – the barriers to access can be huge.

Even for desk-based audiences, video and audio is more difficult to access than traditional print and online communications. A recording, even if really well made, takes considerably longer to consume than the same amount of information in text form. So while they’re cheap to make, they cost more in staff time to consume.

Those who are likely to take the extra steps and extra time to consume video or podcasts are those who are already highly engaged. Those who aren’t will need some strong motivation to actively access information in video and postcasts.

So how do we do that? Simply: make it worthwhile for the end user.

We need to think why would someone take time out of their day to view/listen to this? Would you take ten minutes out of a busy day to listen to corporate news in audio form? Probably not.

But would you take some time out to watch a video of colleagues at a sports day? Or a preview of a new product? Possibly.

Its certainly not suitable for every kind of message; the disincentives to access mean it certainly can’t be relied on for business critical information.

But nor should we write off podcasting for internal comms just yet. Video and audio can bring colour and tone to communications that traditional channels can’t. With home consumption of online audio and video expected to continue to grow, as well as increasing numbers of people working remotely, audio and video look set to play an increasingly important role in the internal comms mix.

In the meantime, it’s good to experiment. You can listen to Abi’s AudioBoos here. Why not add your own?

What #welovetheNHS tells us about viral communication

August 15, 2009August 15, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

This week, in response to some quite extraordinary nonsense being spouted by the US right wing about one of the UK’s most beloved institutions, NHS users on this side of the pond began sharing their own stories and words of thanks on Twitter.

The hashag #welovetheNHS quickly saw tens of thousands of individual messages of support for “socialized medicine”, with many sharing stories of loved ones’ care. The story spilled over into mainstream media as politicians joined in, and on Thursday made the front page of the Evening Standard.

#welovetheNHS messages on Twitter

72 hours on, it’s now the subject of news and opinion columns on either side of the Atlantic, as well as a hell of a lot of Twitter spam.

What’s interesting, for me, is the comparison between this organic campaign and an earlier one. Back in 2007, the Labour Party launched a campaign to celebrate the 60th birthday of the NHS. Called Proud of the NHS at 60, this asked people to share their individual stories and experiences as NHS users, and ask their friends to do the same.

The principle is the same, but the outcomes were very different; Proud of the NHS at 60 had relatively little impact, while #welovetheNHS really caught the public’s imagination and became one of the biggest news stories of the week.

I can think of several reasons why this is:

1. Authenticity
Proud of the NHS at 60 was conceived either by the Labour Party or a PR agency working on their behalf. The campaign objective was to translate pride in a national institution into support for the party which founded it.

Conversely, #welovetheNHS began as a grassroots campaign, with the aim of setting our transatlantic cousins straight about state-provided healthcare. That people are keener to join in a campaign begun by real service users than an incumbent political party is hardly surprising. Nonetheless, it provides a useful lesson in the dynamics of viral campaigning – it’s damned hard to make these things take off unless it’s seen to be genuine and heartfelt.

2. Leadership
The hashtag #welovetheNHS was originally coined by comedy writer Graham Linehan. As the creator of TV shows such as The IT Crowd and Father Ted, he’s not a figure normally associated with healthcare, or with politics. However, Linehan (@glinner) is one of the UK’s most popular Twitter users, with a wide base of followers with widely varying interests.

Linehan has had some success using Twitter as a campaigning tool already, spearheading a petition on the Daily Express’s front page on Dunblane survivors.

His popularity and diverse following meant he had a good critical mass of followers re-tweeting his original post, enough for it to take off. A strong launch to a sizable critical mass of users is essential for viral campaigns to work.

3. Success
Everyone likes a winner. Research into voter behaviour, for instance, consistently shows that people who don’t already hold strong views one way or the other will often pick the person or party who looks likely to win, as we like to be on the winning side.

Those who heard about the campaign later were arguably attracted to join by the considerable success of the campaign in its first few hours. Those who had already participated were motivated to keep on adding tweets by the prospect of greater success.

So people like to join something that already looks like it will be good/successful. The early stages of the campaign are when its success is decided.

4. Seige mentality and good, old-fashioned patriotism
Because we might slag off the NHS all the time for its long waiting lists, MRSA infection rates, and so on – but it’s ours, goddamnit, and we’ll stick up for it.

The NHS is one of the UK’s most popular institutions. Almost everyone concedes it’s not perfect, and will happily criticise it. But over 90% of Britons wouldn’t be without it. Hearing some of the hysterical, inaccurate information doing the rounds in the US motivates people to defend an institution they like.

Conversely, the Proud of the NHS at 60 campaign launched when there were no obvious attacks on the health service from outside, so people had little motive to join.

What this illustrates rather well is the enormous difference an enemy makes to the success of a viral campaign.

It seems highly likely that Twitter campaign stories will continue to cross over into the mainstream media, just as ‘10,000 people have joined a Facebook group’ stories did throughout 2007. But just as with Facebook, the most successful campaigns will be those that were begun by people considered the have an authentic voice (rather than by whole institutions), which offer a strong motivation for others to join, and which quickly reach a critical mass of users.

GoogleLocalGov

August 11, 2009August 16, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / 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:

(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).

Old school comms at Google

August 9, 2009September 10, 2009 / Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

I’m an internal comms geek. So when I went to Google’s London HQ this week I was really surprised that their internal comms people favour the old school poster-in-toilet approach.

Proof positive that even in the most tech-savvy of environments you still need traditional print and face-to-face internal comms channels.

But in the loo? Is that an appropriate environment to be advertising in? Internal communicators are pretty split on the issue.