Interesting question this. Quite a few councils can be found in what appears to be an ‘official capacity’ on Facebook, but many — I’d think most — aren’t represented on there.

The questions Local Authorities will tend to ask themselves about this sort of thing are:-

• what costs would be involved?
• is this something we’d need to actively moderate/look at — do we want to risk people being able to be publicly critical of us?
• what benefits would it bring — would anyone actually use it?

Now there are two ways Local Authorities can set themselves up on Facebook. They can either set up a group, which people can join, and comment and contribute to, or they can set up a page, similar to businesses, comedians and the like which people can subscribe to and receive updates.

They both pose their own indiviudual problems. Firstly, a group is more under the control of its members, so it would be much easier for individual members to write abusive comments or be negative about the council, and councils tend to worry about that sort of thing.

Using a Facebook page allows the councils to have control of their space. However, for the council to be able to send updates to someone, it requires that someone to declare themselves a fan.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought of my relationship with any council — even when I think they are doing stuff well — as a fan. I can’t imagine myself turning up at council meetings cheering and waving a scarf and getting into discussions with friends about whos council played better last weekend.

The term fan just seems wrong for this. Who would want to declare themselves a ‘fan’ of a council? It sounds a little wanky to me.

But those are the two choices, and councils wishing to play with Facebook will have to choose one or t’other.

I decided to look at the Tyne and Wear councils on Facebook to try and see what sort of a Facebook presence they had, whether I felt they were using it well, what they could do better, and whether from the way they had approached it I could form an opinion as to whether councils should have a facebook presence or not.

Sunderland

Sunderland Council is listed twice on Facebook: once as a page and once as a group. The group is declared as being “For City Of Sunderland Council Employees” and you cannot simply join — you have to request to join and then be approved by an admin.

This is therefore effectively a walled garden for Sunderland Council employees, and not the way in which Sunderland Council will be presented to the Facebooking public at large. This is provided by their Facebook page.

Unfortunately, as this page so ably demonstrates, the Sunderland Council Facebook page appears to have been more or less completely abandoned. It has one wall post, and one item on one discussion topic, both dated 3rd June 2008. Nothing has been added or changed in 9 months.

What value does this add? None.

Okay then, does it at least allow the user to know where to go for more information? Well, not really. The main Council home page is not listed; no email or telephone contact details are supplied, and the only URL used is that of “Young People”, which takes you to a page on Sunderland’s site which has not been updated since May 2008.

The intention therefore is good, but the execution is plainly not.

Gateshead

Gateshead again has no official Facebook presence, although it does have something which, at first glance, looks as though it is an official one. The Facebook group is listed under ‘Organisations – Non-profit organisations’ and it is coupled with an image of Gateshead Civic Centre.

But when you actually look at the group, it became apparent to me that it was not official. Giveaways are the presumably invalid email address supplied as a contact, that the website is listed as http://blah and that the description specifies “This is a group for all the inmates of Gatesheed Cooncil”. This makes it fairly clear — to me at least — that it’s simply a collection of employees, past and present, rather than an official group.

Gateshead Council is lucky here — and its employees are eminently sensible — by specifically stating that only upbeat messages will be allowed, because big brother will be watching. I’m not entirely convinced Gateshead Council were watching, but there’s nothing negative about the Council portrayed here: most people seem content to simply be members of the group, and those few who have said something have generally talked about payday or Christmas nights out… although there also appear to be a few posts on there which I would describe as ‘spamvertising’, but nothing offensive.

This is a quite sensible association of employees — taking care not to say anything controversial about their employer. However, if you were looking for groups or pages relating to Gateshead Council on Facebook, the absence of an ‘official’ page makes this one look like a likely candidate. If someone wanted to use Facebook to try and find Gateshead Council, this would be where they would end up at.

At least with a basic Facebook presence — a page such as Sunderland’s, users would be able to get access to official contact details — except of course Sunderland missed them out.

South Tyneside Council

Searching for ‘South Tyneside Council’ on Facebook returned only one thing on the first page of results which looked like it might be remotely relevant.

This was, of course, the Facebook group “SOUTH TYNESIDE COUNCIL ARE A BUNCH OF WANKERS”.

…which goes on to allege that South Tyneside Council workers are corrupt. Admittedly, it is listed under “outlandish statements”, but this is the only thing someone searching for South Tyneside Council on Facebook would actually find.

The down side of South Tyneside Council not having a Facebook presence is immediately obvious: firstly, there’s no official group or page so this is the only thing directly related to South Tyneside Council you’ll find on Facebook: the ‘…are wankers’ group is is the only potential source for information. Secondly, I would wonder whether anyone at South Tyneside Council is actually aware that there is a facebook group out there whichh makes the allegation that they are corrupt (and other things).

The obvious lesson is: just because you ignore Facebook does not mean Facebook ignores you.

North Tyneside Council

North Tyneside Council on Facebook is like South Tyneside Council, only with extra abuse. You can choose from “North Tyneside Council Sucks”, “North Tyneside Council are Twats”, or “Look for the Millions North Tyneside Council have lost”.

Now these aren’t massive groups: there’s only about 50 members between the three of them, but when you are looking for groups relating to North Tyneside Council, these are the first three you’d find. Again, there is no official page to counteract this. Again, because of the lack of an official page, you’d wonder whether North Tyneside Council are actually aware that these groups exist, because it appears that they are ignoring Facebook.

Newcastle

And then we come to something which has been done well. Credit needs to go to the team behind Newcastle Council’s Facebook page. It has the Council crest, it is identified as belonging to ‘Government and Public Service’, so it’s easy to see that it is the official page.

Contact details are supplied — address, phone number, website, and physical location via google maps. Perhaps lacking an email address, but they’ve certainly made it possible for people to contact the council.

They have also seemingly made the decision that it is impractical to expect people to keep adding content to this, so they have used RSS feeds to import information into the page which is relevant and which they have already published elsewhere, to minimise the duplication of work.

Note that the above photograph has been edited: I removed all but the first item in each of the ‘RSS connect’ feeds so that I could demonstrate the multiple feeds. But go and find it for yourself, anyway, don’t just take my word for it.

This importing of RSS feeds means that the Facebook page may contain information which is useful to people, because it is actually up to date. As of today, of 15 items listed over 3 RSS feeds, the most out of date piece is only 11 days old, and 12 of the fifteen items are from within the last 3 days. Not only that, but the choice of RSS feeds — Jobs, Events, and News — are likely to be the ones most of use to people.

They also have a “YouTube box” application which provides a little colour, allowing people to see the films from the Council’s YouTube channel within that Facebook page. If you want to browse more than the listed videos, though, you have to add the YouTube box application to your own profile which perhaps isn’t ideal. Could I maybe humbly suggest that since they have a YouTube channel, that as well as providing mini-versions of the vids on it, they actually provide a link to it?

Of course, nothing is perfect and there haven’t been many people who have officially declared themselves as fans of Newcastle Council. Like I say, I think part of this is the problem with the phrasing, but it is also worth knowing that you don’t actually have to be a fan to view the page, get whatever information you need from it, and move on. Similarly, you don’t need to bookmark your council’s home page in order to be able to actually use their site when you want to…

But even if it does turn out that not many people are viewing Newcastle’s Facebook Page, this is another reason why they have taken the correct approach in setting it up this way. They have set it up to collate data from their RSS and YouTube feeds, so there is no presumably no need for ongoing work. They get a nice, fresh, updated page, and have to do no work to achieve it (can anyone confirm from Newcastle?). Surely that’s worth a punt of anyone’s time…

The End … or maybe The Beginning?

Perhaps at the moment the advantages of Councils using Facebook are less clear: whether people actually want to access their Council’s information via Facebook may well be open to debate, although as Newcastle Council show, you can have an effective, updated Facebook page with the absolute minimum of ‘ongoing’ effort.

The disadvantages of not using it however are much more clear — if there isn’t an official page or group representing your Council, there might well be an unofficial one saying things you’d rather they didn’t say, and which you are currently blissfully unaware of…