For my second social media session in a row (there were generally four or five sessions going on at any one time so you had to pick the ones that were either most interesting or most relevant to yourself), Ingrid Koehler (@IngridK) led us through how, and what, Councillors should be doing with social media, and the steps necessary to get there. She has also blogged her thoughts on this, so you might want to take a look over there too.

It was also nice to see former cabinet minister Tom Watson (@tom_watson) taking part, although the consensus amongst the people I spoke to seemed to suggest they felt the word “former” was an awful shame and a big loss for the digital agenda.

Unlike the other sessions, for this one my notes were made directly onto the laptop. This was done as an experiment — I wanted to try twittering some of the stuff ‘live’ — but this ultimately proved a bit of a distraction as I ended up reading a few other tweets, which I thought was probably a bit rude to Ingrid — I am sorry, Ingrid, terribly rude of me, won’t do it again, promise — so ended up minimising my browser and just using notepad to take my notes. Well, at least notepad has an appropriate name, hasn’t it?

Anyway, this started with the issues surrounding social media: there’s the fear of saying something stupid and getting into trouble (we can presumably all think of equivalent examples), and there was the idea that social media is sometimes perceived as a threat (not sure whether this is because it’s outside the council’s control, or for some other reason, but we came back to a related issue later on).

Ingrid then proceeded to ask us:

What have councils or councillors done that have been successful and have worked?

Martin Black of Camden (whom I had earlier discovered as twitterfriend @martinxo [waves to Martin]) indicated that some of their councillors have started tweeting.

As an aside: if we talk about taking up the gauntlet of twitter, would this be the #twauntlet?

There was a Councillor Allan Andrews of Coventry Council who set up the I Love Earlsdon page on Facebook (his ward area) which has over 800 fans — which if you consider the number of fans compared to the number of people in the ward, and then compare that ratio to the percentage of people the council will usually engage with, has got to be impressive. This also illustrated a point about Councils on Facebook.

No-one (or not many normal people) will declare themselves to be a fan of their Council as a whole. They may be much happier declaring their support for a ward, for a particular event, project, or place. I’m happy to be a fan of the Laing Art Gallery: as much as I like and respect what Newcastle City Council and in particular a few of them are doing online (you know who you are), I’m not going to declare myself a fan of the council.

I then praised @jamescousins as an examplar of councillors using social media. Not only is he a very active twitterer, but he’s behind CllrTweeps, which lists twittering councillors and councils, and he’s an active blogger too. He’s also a Conservative, but you can’t have everything.

Oh, and he snores.

Anyway, at this point there was then a voice from behind me who started talking about a project called councillor.info from 2001, where the intention was to get local councillors to use the internet a bit more (to both read and write on it) as many of them weren’t even reading stuff on it very much. The voice then suggested that he felt that if Local Authority officers have the will to encourage Councillors to use the internet, they will, but his experience was that there seemed to be a lot of veto groups in the council, describing the classic veto group as ‘legal stuff’.

Even where initiatives did get off the ground, he continued, some press releases would not say who was behind the initiative, nor provide any direct quotes from them, but would simply state that “the Council have…” in order not to be seen to be promoting a particular councillor (and hence that councillor’s party).

It was seen as vital to always start the use of any social media with the professional values and value basis of the council and councillors, and ask how social media fits in with that, as opposed to asking those enthusiastic about social media, who might be going down a “whee! look at all the cool things you can do with this” route, which isn’t necessarily appropriate for all circumstances.

Buy in from senior levels was seen as vital also: and the higher the better. If the Chief Executive, Leader and senior Cabinet members all see it as a good idea, people tended to find that all the problems raised by other people seem to get downshifted from major to minor issues. Providing a set of rough guidelines for councillors to use — as well as providing appropriate support for them — is important, because this guidance will help councillors over the initial ‘lack of confidence’ hurdle, plus it might prevent obvious mistakes!

The issue of strange council dictats (what councillors should do, what officers should do etc) was raised, along with this strikingly bizarre requirement relating to email use:

emails to council staff must only have clickable links if they are to internal websites. Links to external sites must not be clickable

Not directly related to councillor social media use, but worth mentioning because of the striking WTF? reaction it produced.

Tom Watson added that leadership was definitely needed, but in order to achieve embedded cultural change (as opposed to an initiative which lasts for a few months and fizzles out), Councils not only need a decision from the Chief Exec, the Leader, but they also need high-profile early adopters to provide a model for others.

One potential issue raised about the reluctance for Councillors to engage in social media is the bizarre left hand/right hand thing many councils do with it. Left hand says to councillor “we’ve blocked access to Facebook through our corporate firewall to stop employees wasting time; we’ve produced these blogging policies so we can keep a close eye on employee bloggers and discipline them if they step out of line.”. Whereas of course the right hand is saying “don’t you want to engage with residents on Facebook? Or have a blog?”. (See also Session 2)

A more extreme example of this can be seen at Plymouth City Council, who seem to show a complete lack of understanding about Twitter:

…as a result of these problems, I have asked for an immediate and urgent review of our policies and procedures on use of information technology and social networking sites

In the meantime, I have decided to limit access to the ‘Twitter’ site, which is one of the communication channels about which I have received complaints, to our Corporate Communications Team

Barry Keel, Chief Exec Plymouth City Council

As a soundbite, it might be effective. As a means to stop people using twitter, it’s next to useless. I’d guess that considerably less than 5% of the tweets I post to twitter are from Twitter.com. And even if you can switch off communication to all of the APIs, you’re not going to be able to prevent people updating twitter unless you can jam all of the mobile phones in the area too. So it just makes Plymouth look knee-jerky and stupid (and plenty of people, including opposition councillors, have already pointed this out). But I’ve got sidetracked a little here…

For councillors contributing online, one of the key things they want to know is who is looking at it, what are the metrics for their particular ward and so on. It was suggested that when looking at how many people are reached by a particular channel, you cannot expect a high proportion of ward residents are actually that interested in politics or what the council is up to — a suggested comparison was to compare “percentage of ward residents who have seen Councillor’s social media thingy” with “percentage of ward residents who watch Newsnight”.

Finally, I have to close with one of the things that didn’t get mentioned. I spoke to Ingrid after the session, and asked her whether she had come across Councillor Jack Brody. She said that while the name was familiar, she wasn’t entirely sure. I explained that Councillor Jack Brody was a spoof (apologies Councillor Brody: I keep saying you’re a spoof, you keep insisting that you aren’t — hopefully we can agree to differ), it was an entertaining spoof, and in this case might be one you would present to the Councillors as “we’d really rather that you didn’t engage in social media in this way”.

Anyway, without any further ado, let me please introduce you to Rochdale’s finest: the pocket-lining, junket-loving … and not exactly inoffensive … Councillor Jack Brody. Don’t say you haven’t been warned