technology

technology

Brands on Facebook: a cautionary tale

/ Sharon O'Dea / 7 Comments

Yesterday, staff at Bizarre Magazine found their Facebook page had disappeared. Not only that, but the personal accounts of all of the magazine’s editorial staff had disappeared too. This marked the latest twist in an ongoing battle in the social media sphere; for many months now, the magazine found its content deleted from sites like YouTube following claims of unspecified breaches of terms of service.

The motivation behind this isn’t clear – it could be a reader with a grudge, or a commercial rival or something else entirely. Social media sites don’t give you the details of allegations against your brand, nor are you given an opportunity to respond before your content is removed.

Now it’s true Bizarre has a reputation as, in the words of Dave Grohl, a “titty gore mag”. But Editor David McComb replies “Bizarre is an edgy brand, but still a mainstream one. You find us in Smiths alongside Kerrang and FHM. But we know social media sites have strict rules on content so we take an especially cautious line; there’s nothing on any of our social media pages which wouldn’t be permissible on British TV – before the watershed.”

Right now you might be saying to yourself, I don’t run a magazine, so why should I care? But this is a worrying tale for anyone who uses social media for work purposes. Whether you’re a publisher or a public sector body, no organisation is universally popular. That means that any brand using social media is at risk of similar malicious use of the ‘report this’ function on social media sites. Anyone can flag your content as breaching terms, and on many sites this will pull it down automatically.

This happened a couple of times in my previous role – someone with a grudge against the council had a video removed by claiming they breached copyright. And they were deleted, without warning.

Organisations are increasingly heeding the call to focus less on a single site which expects customers to come to them, and instead on fishing where the fish are – taking your own brand to where people are already. Confectionary brand Skittles has gone so far as to replace its entire site with links to its social media presence.

There’s a strong case for doing this. But as Bizarre’s experience shows, there are some significant risks attached to doing so too.

More and more organisations are hosting their rich media content on sites like YouTube and Vimeo then embedding it on their own site. This makes a lot of sense – it’s cheap, easy to do, and needs little tech support or hosting. But what happens if this content disappears? You’re left with The Big White Space in the middle of your webpage, that’s what.

A second risk is the loss of customer data. When Bizarre lost their Facebook Page, they lost all means to contact their hundreds of Facebook fans. They used their page to let readers know when the latest issue was released, and to invite them to their live events. If your company/council/department lost your Facebook fans, do you have an alternative means to contact these people?

Thirdly – and I didn’t know about this – is the problem of guilt by association. When Bizarre’s page was deleted, so too were the personal accounts of those listed as page admins. They’ve lost thousands of contacts, pictures, and personal messages, seemingly with no way of retrieving them. Are those currently managing your organisation’s Facebook page aware they could be risking their own account by managing yours? And if they did, would they be willing to do this?

Blogging today, Rich Millington argues it’s easier to build businesses around successful communities than communities around successful businesses. Bizarre was a great example of this in action; it positioned itself as one of the key players in the alternative scene, using its social media presence to really connect with readers in their own online environments. But they don’t own this community; it can be taken away without warning.

So what can you do about this? Well, you pays your money – or rather, you don’t – and you takes your choice. You company doesn’t pay for Facebook or YouTube, so has no Service Level Agreement to enforce when it goes wrong, and no protection against malicious attacks. This level of risk is acceptable to some, but for many household name brands certainly won’t be. The important thing is to be aware of those risks. Are those in your organisation pushing for greater use of social media sites aware of the potential pitfalls?

Organisational communication 2020

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments

This was the 50th meeting of the London Communicators and Engagement Group, an informal monthly meetup of (mostly internal) communicators. After 50 meetings you’d think organiser Matt O’Neill would be out of topics to cover – but you’d be wrong.

This time, Matt invited David Galipeau (from eighty20.org /United Nations/Academia) to deliver a mini exposition into the future of communications. In a futuristic spirit he delivered his talk – on where he sees communications of the future heading – using a Skype video link from Geneva.

David Galipeau off Red Dwarf

In practice, this gave him the disjoined, disbodied appearance of Holly from Red Dwarf. But it worked surprisingly well – so that’s another nail in the coffin for international business travel, perhaps.

As Matt said in his introduction to the event, communicators are focussing on how we can use social media tools to improve organisational communication now and in the immediate future. But are the implications for the future? ‘Is this just the start of an emerging pattern that will fundamentally change the way organisations talk internally and externally?’ asked Matt.

He’d also suggested we take a look at some of Galipeau’s work ahead of the event. Alas, I was in a rush, and when I took a look at this, I thought ‘arrgh!’ and closed my browser tab.

Galipeau’s talk was almost as difficult to digest. I know he’s an academic, but I suspect I was one of the more geeky communicators in the room, and still quite a lot of what he said went right over my head. I’m not sure whether those who weren’t digital natives really knew what he was talking about for much of the time.

For example, Galipeau talked about the implementation of IPV6. For the lay reader – that’s most of you, I suspect – our IP addresses are currently based on IPV4, but we are fast running out of numbers. IPV6, Adrian Short told me via the Twitter back channel, will give us gives 6.5 x 1023 addresses for every square metre on Earth.

The arrival IPV6 will enable an ‘Internet of Things’ in which everything down to your slippers will have its own IP address. Your TV will speak to your fridge, and your supermarket trolley to your bank.

This, he contended, means the interweb is entering a new and much darker phase, quite different to the hippy free-for-all we’ve come to know. The internet is already slowing down thanks to tens of thousands of DOS attacks taking place daily. This, he said, is an early sign totalitarian nutjobs are engaged in cyber attacks and counter hacks, and the threat of industrial and political espionage is growing.

He gave groups that protested against Scientology as an example of this – yet didn’t really elaborate what was new about this threat other than giving people the ability to self-organise.

What was odd about the talk was that the speaker achieved the rare feat of going right over people’s heads while at the same time getting some real basics completely wrong. For instance, he talked about ‘crowdsourcing’, giving the example of “bringing people together to all dance in the station at the same time”.

This isn’t crowdsourcing, it’s flashmobbing. Crowdsourcing means drawing on the wisdom of the crowd in order to inform your own decision-making. It has a purpose, and increasingly it has real value for individuals and corporations. It can be as simple as putting a shout out on Twitter to gather some lazy reasearch, or as complex as wiki-style policy formation.

Simply framing it in terms of simply bringing people together for no discernable purpose really undermined Galipeau’s credibility, and this was reflected in the Twitter stream.

Galipeau went on to argue strongly what organisations are becoming more centralised, and in particular decision-making is becoming more centralised within organisations. But as he didn’t elaborate on why he believed this to be so, or what evidence pointed in this direction, I wasn’t convinced (particualrly as it doesn’t chime with what so many of us internal communicators are working towards).

I was glad, then, of the surprise appearance of engagement guru John Smythe. His excellent book – CEO: Chief Engagement Officer – focuses on how organisations can deliver increased engagement, and improved productivity, by opening up and moving towards a culture of co-creation.

When Smythe asked the speaker to give examples of research that proved the opposite, Galipeau muttered something about unpublished research commissioned by the US military, which didn’t convince me at all.

I am far more convinced by Smythe’s thesis than Galipeau’s, not least because the latter appears to run contrary to so much of what I see going on in government and business. There are already countless examples of companies successfully democratising decision making both with employees and customers.

Smythe has challenged Galipeau to a debate on this, which he very grudgingly accepted. I really hope this happens.

My objections to Galipeau’s thesis are, I admit, partly emotional. He presented a remarkably gloomy vision of the future, in which the individual is powerless and the corporate centre is an omniscient Orwellian beast.

Nonetheless, it provided an interesting counterbalance to the the highly positive future envisaged by theorists like Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater. Shirky, as I’ve blogged about before, sketches out future in which technology enables public participation on a scale never before seen. He says that ‘for the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. And they’re going to change our whole world.’

So there’s a concensus that techology will radically change our relationship with organisations and the state. For me, at least, the balance of evidence would suggest Smythe and Shirky’s culture of co-creation is on the rise.

If Galipeau’s talk got you reaching for the anti-depressants, check out Us Now, a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet. It’s a rather more cheerful view of the digital future.

UKGC10 session three: Google Wave

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

Shane Dillon led the post-lunch session on Google Wave. I’ve blogged about Wave a couple of times before, one a general overview and another looking specifically at what application it might have in internal communications. That being the case, I’m not going to repeat my comments here, but instead on my notes from the session itself.

Shane had set up a reasonably successful UKGovCamp wave ahead of the event, so those who attended the session had some practical experience of using Wave beforehand. It was perhaps telling that a few of us remarked this was the first time we’d logged on to Wave in weeks.

Shane is clearly a fan of Wave, and in many ways I can see why. It has some top notch features, enabling users to embed documents, maps, pictures and so on, and to play the conversation back.

In the context of the FCO it has particular relevance as it combines collaborative features with the asynchronicity of email – making it especially good for working across a number of time zones. In my earlier blog I made the same comment about its potential for use in the global charity where I previously worked.

Collaboration is good, and anything which makes collaboration easier should be applauded. But Wave doesn’t make collaboration easier, because the user experience is appalling, as everyone in the room agreed.

As one Tweeter remarked: if even geeks like us struggle to get to grips with Wave, what hope does anyone else have? Motivation is everything, and the effort vs. reward ratio is too low for Wave to make it worthwhile.

Part of Twitter’s appeal is that you can be up and running in seconds, and it’s so intuitive you can get to grips with it right away. Wave on the other hand, had a hour-long instruction video.

Wave also has heavy demands on technology, requiring an up to date browser and broadband connection. This could prove a barrier to adoption in the public sector, many of whom are still running IE6. Our customers and residents may find connection speed a barrier to adoption too, as broadband connections are unavailable in many rural areas, for instance.

One participant asked if Wave was something young people would be interested in. Whilst there’s evidence young people use the internet in different ways from older ones – eschewing email in favour of instant messenger and social networks, for example – I’m not sure this is something that would appeal to Generation Y, not least because it doesn’t (yet) work on mobile.

Wave’s apparent lack of success is seen by many to be a sign Google has lost it. The success of Google Search and Gmail – which totally changed the game in the respective sectors – means we forget that Google do fail occasionally, and should be allowed to if it encourages innovation. Who remembers Google Lively?

Perhaps we shouldn’t see Wave as it currently exists as a finished product, but rather a sandbox for potential features to be used elsewhere. If these are adopted on other platforms, they could become altogether more useful and user-friendly. Similarly, Waves could become more attractive once they can be embedded within other web content.

Wave is undoubtedly a powerful tool, and one Shane would argue is worth spending some time getting to grips with. Get you head around the clunky interface and strange public wave search, he contends, and you’ll find thousands of debates and discussions on subjects from climate change to Pakistani politics.

But while I can’t say I have such a yearning to relive early 90s ICQ chatrooms, I can see Wave functionality having some useful business applications – for online meetings, document sharing, newsgathering or planning, perhaps – if the user experience improves considerably.

So while Wave isn’t a roaring success, it may be too early to write it off as complete a failure either.

UKGC10 session one: Web Professionals

/ Sharon O'Dea / 6 Comments

The first session I went to at UKGov Barcamp 2010 was led by Vicky Sargent from SOCITM, who is looking at how we can develop a framework for professionalising web careers.

Vicky began by explaing that historically SOCITM have been the industry body for senior IT managers in local government. But they’ve begun looking at how we can better support people working in and with web technology – that is, not just the guys providing the infrastructure, but the content too. And not just in local government, but in the public sector more widely.

People in digital roles come from a variety of backgrounds, which is a reflection of the broad spectrum of work that falls under the umbrella of ‘digital’. These include:

  • Communications: people from PR, marketing or publishing backgrounds with a focus on producing content for the web
  • IT backgrounds
  • Web developers
  • People who’ve fallen into it as they happened to be there when this whole internet lark took off.

As the digital sector grows, there’s a real need for a recognised skills and competencies framework. There’s also a call for greater recognition of the profession, so those working in it get the training, recognition and support they deserve. 

This debate is timely for me. My background is in communications, and as such I am a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and their sectoral group for Internal Communicators, CIPR Inside. But I recently moved into an intranet role, and as my CIPR membership expires I am wondering if there’s any point in me renewing it.  CIPR is – as the name suggests – focussed on public relations. But while my new role is certainly internal communications, I am not a PR practitioner and I’m struggling to see what CIPR can offer me.

The extent to which CIPR supports and understands Internal Communications is the subject of much debate within the internal comms trade of late, with Communicators in Business voting to become the Institute of Internal Communications in order to focus on internal communications as a discrete profession in its own right. CIPR have responded by beefing up its offering for internal communicators.

But neither seems to offer a great deal for those with a focus on digital. And that’s why an  industry body dedicated to raising the status and skills of the web profession would be really valuable for me personally, and no doubt for many others.

There was universal agreement in the room about the need for professionalisation. All too often, noted Alastair Smith, the task of managing web content is given to the most junior member of the team, who recieves little training in how to do it. Job descriptions can often be poorly written or out of date, which has meant many web officers have lost out in the job evaluations required as part of Single Status initatives.

Another common problem seems to be a lack of recognition web professionals get within their own communications teams. Web officers are generally given lower pay grades than junior press officers, even though their jobs are arguably more skilled. Heads of Communications almost always come from Press Officer or Marketing Manager roles, and see digital communications as something of a poor relation.

Senior managers often say the web is their most important customer service channel, yet this isn’t reflected in the way they recruit, train and pay their web officers. Web skills ought to be seen as an investment in improving service quality.

So for instance, Socitm found that bad websites cost councils £11m a month in abandoned transactions requiring attention by other, more expensive means like face-to-face or telephone. Yet few councils have people skilled in studying analytics or improving user experience, and so are unable to tackle this.

There are countless examples of this lack of foresight and understanding.  The value of moving services online is clear, with enormous potential to reduce costs. But for this to happen, we need to focus on giving web teams the skills and resources they need to cope with this channel shift.

There are a number of other initiatives with similar aims, such as the COI’s Web Academy and the GCN. But the former is largely aimed at top civil servants, giving them a brief overview of digital and its potential, while GCN focuses on career paths for web professionals in government comms. 

Most in the room felt that while the GCN was useful, they don’t have enough focus on digital and Socitm was well placed to continue this work. However, digital communicators need to work closely with those working in press and marketing, so should keep their general comms skills up to speed too.

Vicky noted particularly the need to develop a skills framework for web, as these roles aren’t recognised in the national skills farmework. She hopes Socitm can bring web skills into the Skills Framework for the Information Age.

Those with most to gain from raising the status of web professionals are those devolved editors and authors. Too often they’re isolated and lack training, get no additional pay or support, and don’t have their web responsibilities written into their job description. A professional group and a widely-recognised competencies framework could force their managers to understand the work they do.

All of those in the group felt this would help web teams convince senior management that professional web management requires a skill set; it isn’t just something you should devolve to anyone with a half-day’s CMS training. Producing good web content is about a lot more than copying and pasting.

I also think communications teams, and particularly press officers, will be forced to develop broader content production skills, as  the news outlets they serve demand a full package of rich media content rather than simple press releases. But this is something we covered in much more depth at a session on how journalism is changing, and I’ll blog about that later.

Socitm are part way through their project, working with consultants to scope the remit of a web professionals group and draft skills profiles for common roles.

Their preliminary report is already out, and they’re holding a workshop on February 4th at the DCLG. The main output from the day will be a set of defined skills, and a draft will be circulated to those coming beforehand. If you’d like to attend, contact Vicky for more details. 

SOCITM have a web community of over 600 people on the IDeA’s Communities of Practice site (called the Web Improvement and Usage Community). This is one of the most popular groups on the CoP, and has three people faciltating it for a few hours a day each.

Vicky hopes that this group will help to identify where we go next and help to take this forward. Socitim will provide the neccessary admin support, but they people need to join in order to signal their commitment to the project and give them the funding they need to deliver this.

In my view this is something webbies would benefit from getting behind. If web becomes a recognised profession, it gives those working on the web greater credibility within their own organisation, so that their professional opinion is respected and valued, and they are given the recognition, pay and support they deserve.

Google Wave for Internal Communication

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments

After my first post about Google Wave, I asked if any other internal communicators would be interested in trying Wave to see what, if any, applications it could have in our field.

And so a couple of weeks back I was joined online by BlueBallRoom’s Jenni Wheller, and Mark Detre, who’s responsible for Google’s own internal communications across the EMEA region (good to see Google eating their own dogfood here).

The three of us began by having a simple play around with the features, adding maps and pictures to the discussion. Once we’d got the hang of it, we began to think about how we might be able to use it to improve internal communciation.

Jenni asked “‘I’m not sure what it adds to the mix – i understand that it integrates various platforms that we all use but do we like keeping them seperate? do we need them all together like this? I feel like i’m skyping!’

However, by combining the live aspect of chat with the option of playback (asynchronicity) of email, it beocmes useful for dispersed teams.   In my last job, working for global charity, we had people working in pretty much every time zone. A platform that allows for people to watch the discussion before adding to it themselves, could be a real benefit to small but global organisations.

We talked about the potential for organisations to use Wave for specific communications. It would work very well for something like a live online chat with the CEO, where people could post questions in advance of the live event, and join in at the time or play back afterwards.

However, even with just three of us talking at once the conversation can be happening at several different points in the Wave, so it’s easy to miss bits of it.

Similarly, it’s quite easy to ‘zone out’ while on Wave. Tab over to an email, or answer a call, and it’s hard to remember where you left off.

Jenni, Mark and I agreed a Wave discussion, like a face-to-face meeting, would work a lot better with a chair or facilitator keeping participants on track.

You need different tools for different jobs, and this one would appear to work well for specific projects, allowing people to chat, email and share documents all in one place.  Mark said:

‘The main draw for me is that it brings everything together; for example, I do most of my drafting in Google docs, and I guess there’s also an easy way to insert those; it looks like Wave is best for businesses that do most of their work online or in the cloud’.

Few organisations are yet at that stage, though; this is a little premature for the rest of us, and would almost certainly be difficult to sell to colleagues. The potential is there, but we need resources as well as attitudes to catch up.

There’s still a long way to go before social media tools become the norm in the workplace. And even when they are, our existing channels remain useful. As I spotted when I visited Google recently, even in a high-tech environment the printed poster still remains effective.

Will it change the world? No. But will it help internal communicators? Possibly. We all have to make a call on what helps our own organisations to talk, listen and collaborate, and this is certainly a useful tool to add to the mix. Nonetheless, becoming more collaborative requires cultural change.

And that means changing our behaviours, not our tools.

If you’d like to read and join in the Internal Comms Wave, drop me a line and I’ll invite you in.

First thoughts on Google Wave

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

The geek community have been all a-fluster since the launch of Google’s latest big project, Google Wave, to a select group of 100,000 testers.

Google Wave is probably best described as a collaboration platform, bringing together the key functionality from email, instant messaging, shared documents and multi-media content. Google themselves say it’s ‘what email would be like if it had been invented now’.

After a long week wondering if Google Wave invites would be retro by the time I got one, mine finally arrived. At last I was one of the chosen few. My initial enthusiasm for it was tempered a bit when I realised the only other person I knew with an invite was Dave Briggs, and he wasn’t even logged on.

Things took a turn for the better, though, when I was invited into a SocITM09 Conference Wave, with Alan Coulson waving live from the SOCITM conference. This coverage really showed the potential of the platform. Alan live-blogged from the event in detail, adding links in where he could to slideshows posted online. This really helped those of us who were interested but not at the event to get a feel for what was going on (especially when combined with the live Twitter stream on the #socitim09 hastag).

At the same time, Sarah Lay and I had a bit of a chat within the broader Wave conversation (this is what Google call a ‘wavelet’).

Right now Wave is mostly a live chat type of system, like a souped-up MSN Messenger, where you can watch people type in real-time, replete with typos and corrections. But beneath the bonnet, it’s no Halfords Hero. It’s packed full of top-notch features and has bags of potential.

Things I learned:

  • Wave looks great. It does some cool stuff, which are better explained by Mashable than by me.
  • As you’d expect from a product that isn’t even in Beta, it’s a bit buggy (I’ve crashed out a few times), but the interface generally works well, is easy to understand and has some interesting features. Search isn’t integrated with proper Google Search yet, so the results are a bit iffy, but no doubt this will be fixed in time.
  • Wave is considerably more interesting once you know a handful of people with logons. Like anything else on the interwebs, unless you’ve got someone to talk to you’re just belming into the void.

Things I didn’t learn:

  • What Google Wave is actually for. For many years now I’ve had the principles of SMART objective-setting drilled into me, where one considers what one wants to achieve before working out how to get there. I’d imagine this applies as much to product development as communications strategy, and I wonder if somehow this missed the key step of identifying the problem before developing a solution.

On the other hand, a lack of clear purpose isn’t always a problem. I mean, Twitter isn’t really for anything, yet it’s clearly successful. I can’t help liking Wave. I’m a massive geek, and I love geeky things.

I’m not sure what use it has right now for council communications. Apart from anything else, you need a decent browser and good connectivity to make the most of it – we often lack both in the public sector, and in many areas of the country (particularly rural ones) our residents do too. The potential is there, but we need the technology to catch up.

Nonetheless, I can see plenty of applications for it in other areas of online life. In our ‘wavelet’, Sarah Lay and I discussed how the interface reminds us in many ways of journalists’ newswires, with rapid and quick-fire updates adding to an ongoing, fast-developing narrative produced by collective intelligence and effort.

I’ve seen this in action a few times; first, on September 11 2001, and second, on July 7 2005. On the former, working in a newsroom I watched the story unfold via successive text and picture updates (from a small number of sources like AP, Reuters and AFP). Four years later, we saw the collective intelligence of hundreds of Londoners quickly produce a summary of events on Wikipedia using a variety of sources and reports.

I can see Wave taking this to its next logical step, with collective effort producing a collaborative document including text, photo, video, maps, links, etc. It has the added bonus that it can be played back, so you can see how the narrative developed.

Now clearly you can’t sustain or develop a platform just so it can come into its own in the case of a huge but fortunately rare event. But the principle – of harnessing collective effort and intelligence to produce a single multi-media document – applies in all sorts of areas.

You could, for instance, use Wave for an online debate, adding different streams to the discussion and enhancing this with text, video, maps, and so on. This can be played back to show the evolution of the conversation.

Michele Ide-Smith posits a scenario where technology like Google Wave could really enhance citizen consultation. Online consultation on a housing development, she suggests, could begin with a short video and interactive maps, followed by discussion and debate on the issue facilitated online. Discussions can be replayed and key points responded to during or after the live event.

Eventually Google Apps and Docs will be integrated with Wave, giving it bags more potential (especially so for organisations that move to cloud computing).

Will it replace email? Maybe. Outside of work, where I drown in the stuff, I use email less and less, increasingly favouring things like Twitter, Facebook and IM, so a product which brings together the best of all of these could be just the thing we need.

I’m still thinking about what, if anything, Wave could do for us internal communicators specifically. There’s now a handful of us with Wave accounts, so I’m hoping to organise an Internal Comms Wave later this week to check out the features and think about how it can enhance our own work. If you’re on Wave and you’re interested in taking part, drop me a line or leave me a comment and I’ll invite you in.

One final thing: I can’t log on to Google Wave without getting the Pixies’ Wave of Mutilation as an earworm. I suspect this is just me. Is it?

October’s dead tree reading list

/ Sharon O'Dea / 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.

What makes for a good council website?

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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/

GoogleLocalGov

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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).