If you can’t be bothered to do either of those things, you might instead want to have a quick glance at the things which struck me as interesting…

• The survey had 665 valid responses
• Only 4.7% described themselves as beginners with screen reader technology (but as they point out, we shouldn’t draw inferences from this, because there is no way of knowing if this survey sample is fully representative — which we also need to bear in mind when looking at the other results)
• JAWS is the primary screen reader for most (2/3 of correspondents) but 5 other screen readers have shares over 1% so we can’t assume screen reader = JAWS
• 83% have updated their screen reader in the past year (but if the survey sample is artificially tech-savvy, this might be artificially high also)
• When asked which browser was used with their primary reader, the top four, in order, were IE8, IE7, Firefox 3, then IE6. It’s worth noting that the IE6 percentage is significantly lower than reported by most site analytics, although it’s difficult to tell whether this relates to screen reader requirements or sample selection
• More than 74% of users report that javascript is not disabled in their browser, with almost 15% don’t know. Is javascript still the big bogeyman barrier suggested by WCAG 1.0?
• There’s something very interesting about alt text. I’ve always been working on the assumption — long backed up by other professionals — that screen reader users would prefer to have decorative images to have a null alt text so that they would be ignored by the screen reader. It would instead appear that over 75% would prefer either “smiling lady” or “photo of smiling lady” to indicate such an image (of a smiling lady). Not particularly convinced this result should see a change in best practice however — but I’m open to persuasion if this is what people want…
• The most problematic three items were CAPTCHA (presumably particularly those which are visual-only), Flash, and ambiguous links. Looks like another vote for the end of ‘click here’ as well as a reminder to all those companies who produce inaccessible flash-only versions that they are causing accessibility problems
• …in comparison, lack of ‘skip’ links doesn’t seem to bother many people
• Social media use seems to be (mostly) tied in with perceived accessibility, with the most used social media tool (YouTube) being seen as at least ‘somewhat accessible’ by 78% of people (although not the highest), and the least used (MySpace) reporting the least accessible (assuming that the graph is correct, and not the figures, which were wildly out of whack with the graph at the time I put this together). MySpace, which is least used, is reported as one of the most accessible; some of the most used are reported as the most accessible, so there does not appear to be a direct link between accessibility and use, . This information would be better presented in next years survey as a % difference between screen reader users and users in general — as it would be more possible to draw comparisons as we could see differences in trends: it’s impossible to know to what extent (if any) these percentages are affected by accessibility without knowing the % use in the general population
• In short, there is no “typical” screen reader user.

But instead perhaps the question I should ask in return is why don’t you blog? Most people generally enjoy communicating their thoughts and ideas with others, and the medium of a blog is pretty much an ideal way to do this. Fair enough, there are things you should maybe consider — such as how much personal information you actually want to put online — but you may be surprised at how many people actually would want to read what you have to say, even if what you want to say isn’t earth-shattering, providing you write as least reasonably well.

I HAD MY BREAKFAST AND I HAD A BOILED EGG AND SOME TOAST AND THEN I WNET TO THE LAVATRY AND HAD A WHIZZ AND THEN I THOUgHT I NEEDED A POO BUT I DIDNT SO THEN I FNISHED GETTING DRESSED AND WNET TO WORK

…although unless you think you can do better than the above, you might possibly want to give it a miss.

But assuming you can write better than this (and lets face it, most of us can), then what is actually putting you off? If it is the idea that blogging is difficult, or that you think cost will be prohibitive, then you really have no excuse.

You Can Blog For Free

A chap contacted me a week or so ago through my contact form, and asked if I would give him a quote for putting together a blog for him. Given that he’d already written a couple of books, I reckoned that he was probably capable of forming coherent sentences and therefore that blogland wouldn’t be the worse for having him on board. So I said that I could do such a thing, but from the sound of what he was after, I didn’t think he’d really need a quote, because I reckoned that at least 90% of what he was after could be done entirely cost free, through having a hosted wordpress.com blog.

So with not too much work required, I put together a blog site for him to talk about his interests — walking, climbing and so on. Whilst never having described myself as a climber, I’ve certainly done some walking in my time (usually in the Lakes) and so from purely selfish reasons it’s been fun putting together his blog. I’ve enjoyed putting it together, I’ve enjoyed reading what he has had to write, and the link back to my site will hopefully help promote my services to others.

Okay, granted you can’t necessarily guarantee that someone will be around to help you set up a blog, but if you personally know any bloggers, they probably will (if they have time) be happy to help. And even if you don’t, it isn’t actually that hard. Which brings me to the next bit…

Blogging Isn’t Difficult

Then, when we’d got something we were at least content with, he then said that he felt that he would possibly benefit from some training, so that he was able to put together posts for himself. Again, I said that if he was really desperate for some training, I’d be able to put together a quote for him, but I didn’t really think he needed it. Instead I sent him some simple instructions about how to add a WordPress post:

1. Login (link at bottom right). Username [redacted] password [redacted]
2. This will take you to the admin page, where you’ll find all the functions, most of which you’ll never need to use
3. To add a new post, either click ‘new post’ from the logged in bar across the top, or select posts/new post on the left hand side of the admin detail.
4. You’ve then got a WYSIWYG editor to add a new post. There are two rows of icons – the top row of icons allows you to insert media into the post (e.g. the top row, left hand button allows you to insert an image; the one fourth from the right on the second row is the ‘more’ tag – anything you put before this is the ‘teaser’ text; anything else goes in the main post body only).
5. You can save the post without publishing it by pressing ‘save draft’. You can set to publish immediately by pressing ‘publish’ or if you set the date by using the Edit link next to “publish immediately” and set a date/time in the future, this changes to ‘schedule’ so you can schedule the post to publish at a specific time.
6. You can also mark posts as belonging in a particular category, although you don’t have to.
7. … and that’s about it — just have a play around

Advice on creating a wordpress post

See? It’s not difficult. In less than a week, someone who had initially described themselves as a ‘technical neanderthal’ has been adding their own wordpress posts, inserting media, and is now looking at tagging posts and so on.

Because They’re There

The blog is maybe still “under development” to some extent as the creases get ironed out and further tweaks are applied, but it’s certainly up and running. So if you’re interested in walking — or what you can do with a blog quickly, easily (and perhaps most importantly free-ly) why not ramble over to Because They’re There… and take a look?

And remember, next time you’re wondering why someone else blogs you should maybe turn the question around and see if you can really justify to yourself a reason why you don’t.

And then when we’ve got you doing that, let’s look at getting you on Twitter…

If people are talking about you in a negative way, it can damage your brand. It can get worse than this too: if people identified as belonging to your company are talking about your company’s products, employees, customers or competitors in a negative way, this can be damaging to your brand and generate a whole pile of bad publicity as the Dixons Store Group found out…

Staff at shops owned by the Dixons Stores Group have been caught insulting customers on a social networking site.[...] In it staff, many of whom used their real name, post comments about encounters with members of the public, many of which heap insults on them. Among many different insults, customers are called “stupid”. One staffer at a store asked if it would be acceptable to use a cattle prod on customers who prove difficult to satisfy.BBC News: Gadget shoppers branded ‘stupid’

And it’s not that easy to remove this information either. After reading the article, I went along to this group on Facebook and managed to find a few different things which don’t sound too flattering for the group…

How often do you find that your customers (guests in the DSGi B&B) are taken aback by the costs of such things like Belkin cables, Norton 360, Office, tech guys services, even delivery and install charges? [...] Why? cos the company doesnt actually advertise the profit making items! all the adverts are product ONLY.Why are customers often surprised when we try to sell them add ons/essentials

So here you have someone self-identifying as a Dixons Store Group employee who is suggesting that the adverts don’t actually provide value to the customer, because they don’t actually tell customer the cost they will need to pay to get their item up and running…

Then there’s this one, which is even more damning:

Now we all know the delivery guys have never grasped the concept that they are an integral part of good customer service and conversely can in one fell swoop undermine all of our efforts with their incompetence, rudeness and inappropriateness with customers. That much is kinda expected. [...] I am therefore stunned and amazed at the lengths the company is prepared to go to piss off customers and sod them around over a piece of paperwork and an arse covering exercise.Efforts DGSi will go to to piss off customers in the name of service

And then of course, there’s the stuff they made the national media for — calling customers idiotic. But it’s not just Dixons Group, there are others out there — although briefly looking around I didn’t find any in the same league as the Dixons group employees for shooting themselves in the foot. Besides which, the Dixons Group employees who have posted this sort of thing will be in the shit anyway now it’s made the national media, and I didn’t want to drop anyone in the shit who wasn’t there already.

Obviously, some sets of employees are more sensible than others:

PLEASE NOTE -This group is just for fun – NOT to insult the company or customers! Any negative comments will be deleted! Any comments written on this group are done so at the individuals risk.TESCO employees

Please note, all Facebook quotes in this article were taken from Groups where you do not have to be a member in order to gain access to all of this information. All you need is a Facebook account…

There’s nothing complicated about what you have to do: if you are an employee of a company be careful about what you say about them online. Assume that anything you say online can — and will — be traced back to you and that everyone who knows you will know about it. And it might be worth checking exactly how public posts on a particular Facebook group are before you start ranting on it…

If you are an employer, make sure that your employees know what is expected from them when they use social media (in or out of work time) and ensure that you are monitoring what is said about you online.

Or you too might find yourself featured on the BBC…

Still, on the bright side, it appears that at least kids realise the importance of online privacy, even if the grown-ups don’t:

Of the 13 to 16 year olds 58% said that keeping personal information private was the subject in which they needed the most help and guidance. Children aged seven to 11 were not asked the question because of the high incidence of ‘don’t know’ as an answer in a pilot survey Ipsos MORI, the research company which conducted the study, said.

The second most common concern that young people had about going online was about the security of information. The survey found that 28% of 11 to 16 year olds said that they needed advice on keeping information secure

Out-Law.com: Young say they need help and guidance with online privacy

Firstly, it came about because the local Portsmouth paper The News issued a FOI request to find out about Facebook access and discovered…

Facebook is to be banned at Portsmouth City Council after The News discovered staff spend an average of 413 hours a month using the website. [...] Facebook usage peaked at 572 hours last month – the equivalent of 71 working days. Portsmouth Today

Obviously this then led to the likes of the tax-payers allowance chipping in to talk about all of the taxpayers money being wasted, despite the article also clearly stating that “Current rules state staff should stick to using it in lunch breaks or after work”. The council response is therefore presumably in response to potential bad publicity.

And this to me is where Portsmouth Council have fallen down. For all the information presented, there is no evidence whatsoever that Portsmouth staff have been accessing Facebook when they were on Council time. If they have been viewing it on their own time then really, what’s the problem? And if the council don’t know when they have been using it, then surely this is a management issue — surely it’s not that difficult for line managers to have a report comparing Facebook access to hours ‘officially’ worked and take appropriate action if necessary?

No, it’s a knee-jerk reaction punishing all staff for misdemeanours which may not have actually been committed by anyone. And knee-jerk reactions do not make for good policy. Given that this…

…equated to each of its 4,500 staff, who have access to computers, spending between five and six minutes a month on the site.

Five or six minutes per person per month. Have the council also introduced policies to stop people stopping for a brief chat by the coffee machine? I suspect that is likely to take up a hell of a lot more than six minutes per person per month. Nor does six minutes per person per month seem more than could feasibly be carried out in lunch breaks.

Of course, the Taxpayers Alliance don’t help, chipping in by saying that people are paid to work for the taxpayer and this is therefore clearly a waste of public money. Now I’m all for public money not being wasted, and I’m not in favour of people being paid to fart about during work time, but there is no evidence this was happening.

In fact, the problem was strictly down to management/reporting:

The council stressed it was unable to determine whether staff had been accessing Facebook in break times or before or after work, which had been allowed.

The question here must by why not? It’s not technically impossible (it’s not even that difficult) to produce reports going to line managers of when people are accessing particular sites. What has happened here is that the council have not set up the necessary management practices in the first place, and as a result the staff are being accused of wasting taxpayer money. Whereas if proper procedures had been set up, anyone who was wasting time when they should have been working could be pulled for it, and other people aren’t being punished for something they haven’t done.

It’s knee-jerk, it’s bad policy, and it’s punishing staff for their management not instituting better procedures.

But having said that, the Council is under no obligation to provide internet access for their staff other than for business purposes — but if they are going to, you’d think they would go about monitoring it properly and therefore that they wouldn’t need to ban staff from using social networking/media. They’ve also gone down the twitter ban route despite the fact that if staff want to update twitter during work time, they can still use their mobile devices to do so (and it will probably take longer to type messages into a mobile too).

But I’m not just out to kick Portsmouth Council. It’s not a blanket, outright ban: anyone within the council who needs to use social media sites for their work will still be able to:

Council chief executive David Williams said: ‘We intend to restrict internet access to social networking sites more than at present for non-business use. Any member of staff may, under this revised policy, make a business case to have these sites unblocked.’Portsmouth Today

Fair enough. But the whole problem wouldn’t have arisen if line managers had been able to monitor what their employees were accessing on the internet and when. It’s not just social media sites (and as I said before, not just on the internet) where staff may waste taxpayer-paid time…

Obviously, if anyone has any further information, opinions, or would like to tell me why I’m completely wrong, that is precisely what there’s a comments section for…

Before even reading the policy, I can tell that this is a good idea. This is something that Councils — and other large organisations — need to be dealing with. If you don’t have a policy about it, employees will do it anyway, and will share information on Facebook and so on. You need to be aware of it, and you need to ensure that your employees are aware of their responsibilities in this regard.

This is a particularly good example of such a policy because it is short and punchy. You don’t need, and don’t want a fifteen-page policy full of legalese and incomprehensible management-speak. The document clearly sets out who the policy relates to and why:

…details the ground rules for employees who should ensure that the content of their blogs/social networking sites does not bring the Council into disrepute or breach their obligations under the Code of Conduct [...] This policy applies to all Council employees and Members.Cambridgeshire County Council Blogging/Social Networking Policy

The Council provide simple advice — if you can, try not to mention your work or reference the Council on the web. If you do mention/reference however, you need to make it clear that any views you express are your own and are not necessarily representative of the council, and in addition, you must not breach the Data Protection Act; disclose any information not already public; post illegal material such as child pornography; breach Council copyright; make defamatory remarks about the Council, colleagues or service users; publish anything that could undermine public confidence in you or the council; and not misrepresent the Council.

For the most part, this is a sensible list of things a council employee shouldn’t do. However, I think that in the case of some of the issues — such as breaching the Data Protection Act or posting child pornography — the Council would be quite within their rights to take disciplinary action even had they not mentioned them in the blogging policy (and indeed the employee may have more significant issues to deal with — such as criminal prosecution — than an internal disciplinary matter). But it does no harm to mention them in the policy, I suppose.

I’ll just be clear: I fully support Cambridgeshire County Council having a policy, I think it’s great that it’s so simple and straight-forward, and I think it is fantastic that they have chosen to share it with others. However, that does not mean I have to agree with all of it.

Firstly, let’s look at “publish material or comment that could undermine public confidence in you as an employee/Officer of the Council”. The problem with this is probably that it is too broad. What would be deemed to “undermine public confidence”? If you go out on a works leaving do, and some photos of you and colleagues the worse for wear end up on Facebook, is that undermining public confidence? Would that be the same for members of the Drug & Alcohol teams? Is it undermining public confidence to express your political views, if clearly stated as your own? Would that be the same for BNP supporters?

On the other hand, I think it’s important that the Council don’t try to get bogged down in too much detail: if examples of the sort of thing that might undermine public confidence are available elsewhere on your intranet, just link to those — I’m sure this sort of thing will apply to your behaviour in public as a whole and not just online.

But I am also unclear about precisely what the council mean when they say:

make defamatory remarks about the Council, colleagues or service usersCambridgeshire County Council Blogging/Social Networking Policy

…simply because there appears to be key differences between some definitions of defamation:

The accepted legal definition of defamation is “the publication of a statement which tends to lower a person in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally.”Weblaw.co.uk

Defamation law exists to protect the reputation of a person from defamatory statements made about him/her to a third party without lawful justification. A statement is defamatory if, when said about a person and published to a third party, it would make ordinary people think less of that person.Channel 4

Any disparaging statement made by one person about another, which is communicated or “published,” may well be a defamatory statement and can give rise to an action for either libel or slander in English law.

Generally speaking, slander is when a defamatory statement has been made orally without justification. If the statement was made in a permanent form, for example, recording words onto tape, it would not be slander but libel.

Libellous statements are those that are recorded with some degree of permanence. This would include statements made by email or on on-line bulletin boards.

Out-Law.com

There’s a slight difference in implication here. Some seem to suggest that any negative statement may be defamation, but it would only become slander or libel under other circumstances (for example, it not being true). I would assume that the Council would be using the term ‘defamation’ meaning ‘untrue and negative remarks’, but this isn’t entirely clear.

After all, if they were simply using it in the ‘negative’ sense only, this would mean that if I was a resident and an employee of a local authority, then I would have less rights to complain about something the Council was doing badly than some other resident would have. And surely that can’t be right.

But while I might call for clarity on that point, Cambridgeshire County Council have already done more than many other Councils. They’ve given their employees some guidance on what they can say. And it’s a very useful starting point for any other Councils (or similar organisations) wishing to do the same…

How

It starts by setting out objectives and metrics for using twitter — what do you want to achieve, and how will you know whether or not you’ve achieved it. This is a key issue: while I’m firmly behind companies, organisations and the public sector expanding into the use of social media platforms, it’s important not just do to it “because it’s there”: you need to know what you want to be getting out of it.

The objectives it sets out are to extend the corporate reach online; to provide a human voice of the organisation, to provide thought leadership, to demonstrate commitment to digital channels, provide a low barrier method for feedback, to monitor mentions of the brand on twitter, and to provide live coverage of events for those who cannot attend.

Sensible objectives, and ones which can pretty much apply across the board in the public sector, irrespective of whether you’re central government, local government, or residing elsewhere in the public sector. They also describe how they will know whether they are achieving these things — from feedback, from the number of followers, and also from mentions elsewhere on blogs. So indeed I’m helping them achieve those targets by talking about it here…

They also list tools that people might like to use to help this — twitterfall for real time monitoring, twittersheep to help understand more about who is following you and qwitter to see why and when people have stopped following you.

The policy then goes on to look at the risks and how these can be managed: can you meet the demands of people who engage with you on twitter, does your use of twitter ‘fit’ (i.e. not too ‘corporate’) and so on. One good example is the accusation of being accused of bandwagon jumping and doing something of little actual benefit — if you have set out objectives which you are evaluating your use against, then it’s going to me much easier to justify what and why you are doing.

Similarly, they look at security risks — both of the account being compromised and how to reduce the possibility, and also the risk of inappropriate tweets: the loose tweets sink fleets! idea and again what sort of policies and procedures need to be in place for this.

Similarly they have looked at the resources required for this:

The Digital Media Team will be responsible for sourcing and publishing tweets, coordinating replies to incoming messages and monitoring the account. This activity is expected to take less than an hour a day. Evaluation will take longer: approximately one day every 3 monthsTemplate Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 5

So far, the policy is all very sound and sensible. It’s pretty much a common-sense approach that anyone who has used twitter with any degree of regularity would be happy to recommend. They also demonstrate an understanding of what and how much you should tweet — you want to tweet sufficiently regularly that people want to follow you for information, but not so frequently that you’re flooding them with information they don’t want.

They recommend 2-10 tweets per day, excluding @replies and coverage of live events, which seems a very sensible level to be looking at, and they also understand that because twitter is seen as about sharing it isn’t simply a case of promoting your own message: if someone else says something which is relevant or worthwhile, you need to consider re-tweeting their message.

Consideration also needs to be given to how you will promote the twitter channel — when to include links to it, when to mention it and so on.

What

Then they look at what content should be placed on twitter. This is a key question and one where you would need to determine what is suitable for your own audiences — but for example unless there is a good reason not to, any press releases to the web would be tweeted about, as well as blog posts, key website updates, marketing and so on.

They also consider whether there is a need to add content with additional value — this is where twitter comes into it’s own as a ‘breaking news’ medium (with more traditional media, posts, or other blogs providing more analysis later) although obviously you have to run this through an appropriateness filter — which is why you don’t want to be in a position where it will take hours to get clearance to publish a particular tweet.

They look at the use of hashtags — when is it appropriate to use a hashtag? I’ll have to disagree with the guidance here: they say it’s appropriate for providing live coverage of events and for crisis communications. I think this is missing the point slightly: if a particular event or topic is being widely talked about with a particular hashtag and you do not use that hashtag, there is a significant chance that your communications will be ignored because they will not be picked up by people filtering for that hashtag. I think it’s important here to consider that you may need to use the same hashtag as other people when talking about something which already has a specific hashtag.

Obviously for anything governmental you have specific issues around elections, particularly during that period known as Purdah (the time between the announcement of an election and it being held, when any government activities which may be seen as promoting a particular candidate are suspended):

The same approach will be taken to Twitter as other comms channels during recess and Purdah. We let our followers know the reason for reduced volume of content with a tweet to announce the start and end date.Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 9

Summary

And that is basically it. It’s all common sense guidelines that I agree with (although I’d maybe change the hashtag advice slightly), and it’s all stuff that regular users of twitter (particularly if they have been monitoring how it has been used by people representing organisations as well as individuals) will already have a fair idea of. The guidelines will probably most benefit those people who are less sure about twitter, particularly as the appendices provide information on what twitter is, how you use it, who else is using it, and a policy which includes two different options on following:

If you follow us on Twitter we will follow you back. This is automated. Being followed by us does not imply endorsement of any kind.

[Alternative, suggested by @scrumph (Sebastian Crump at COI)] If you follow @COIgovuk we will not automatically follow you back. This is to discourage the use of direct messaging, avoid resource wasting spam handling and so that you can easily identify other key Twitter users that we think are relevant to our industry and government in who we follow. However, being followed by COI does not imply endorsement of any kind.

Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 19

It’s obviously up to each government department how they want to manage followers, but I would strongly recommend that people consider the @scrumph approach (disclaimer: I know him). This is for three reasons: firstly because spammers will follow you, and if you follow them back it will< be seen as an endorsement of that account by some (irrespective of what disclaimers you publish to the contrary), secondly because if you do not follows spammers back it makes it easier for other people (and twitter itself) to identify these accounts as spammers and ban them, and thirdly because it means that the people you do follow people will know have been specifically chosen and are likely to have something useful do say (even if you do not agree with it or endorse it).

I would also urge that these guidelines be changed to recommend the @scrumph approach…

But other than those two minor things, these guidelines can be adopted pretty much as is by anyone else in the public sector considering how — and whether — they should start twittering.

New government guidance has been published urging civil servants to use the micro-blogging site Twitter. Launched on the Cabinet Office website, the 20-page document is calling on departments to “tweet” on “issues of relevance or upcoming events”.

BBC News: Government advice urges tweeting

Personally, I think this is a great idea. I think government — at national and at local levels — should look to take every opportunity to engage with the public — and actually try and get them interested and involved at whatever level you can. I think this should be part of a corporate communications strategy: not just using social media for the sake of it, but looking at the best way to communicate with citizens, bearing in mind different citizens have different preferences.

And while not everyone will want to engage online, a significant and increasing proportion will (waves hand) and for these people if you can engage with them online it’s frequently better in terms of reputation management than simply dealing with them over the telephone.

So the Template Twitter Strategy For Government Departments is available online to look at, should you want to.

If you’re going to use twitter, you’ve got to use it properly otherwise at best you’ll get ignored and at worst you’ll set yourself up for some habitat-style reputational damage. It’s important to best know when, and how, to use social media — don’t just use it because it is there, use it if it will add value to your organisation.

Obviously, not everyone approves of Government use of social media, and this is where the irony comes in:

I’m sorry but the government should get on with it’s job, not twittering, facebooking or myspacing. Really, anyone who uses these things must have no life

Mark from Lancashire, talking on BBC Have Your say, quoted on BBC News: Government advice urges tweeting

Right, so Mark thinks that anyone who uses twitter, facebook or myspace must have no life. But presumably that those people who contribute to BBC’s Have Your Say are an entirely different kettle of fish…

Dave

…started the session by telling us a little bit about himself: how in the space of five years he has gone from trying to work out how to make risk management fun (clue: you can’t) whilst working in a benefits office, to having been asked by 10 Downing Street to work three days a week with their digital communications.

This is not through a traditional CV, but through to the reputation he was built up online through blogging and through talking about social media on the web…

Web

Dave quoted someone or other to say that “websites don’t change the world, people do”, although it would also seem from some of the things he was saying that the right website in the right place will help people to change the world.

He talked about the first web browser, and how it was designed as read/write thing, rather than just a browser, and therefore that he doesn’t see Web 2.0 as a leap forward, he sees it as a return to where the web ought to be, after the retrograde step made with web 1.0.

Policies

When producing policies about the web, these need to be about culture, rather than specific technologies — otherwise those technologies might well be out of date by the time the policy is ready.

Remember: you don’t have to like everything. Some of the social media things might suit you, and what you need; some might not. You don’t have to use them. But it is worth at least having a play with them to find out what they can do.

It’s okay to be scared: the pace of change is so rapid that it is no surprise that people are wary about it. For example, You Tube seems to be part of the furniture now, but it was only launched in 2006. Dave also feels that newspapers are going down the drain and TV isn’t really sure what it’s doing (no reference to radio, though: I wonder if everything he had to know, he heard it on his radio?)

Then there was another quote (again, too busy getting the quote to see who) — “communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. Which offers up a supplementary question — how do we make the web less exciting?

The Long Tail

…also known as “something about niches”.

We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.Amazon

(take the moment to stop and decipher it)

What the internet is good for is the self-organising of niche interests: it allows people with similar interests to group together and convene online.

Information Overload?

He then raised the concept of “infobesity” — the idea that there is just too much information for anyone to cope with; but countered that with another quote I didn’t pick up the author of — “there is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure”.

Culture Shift

He talked about companies or organisations who close off avenues to use tools like Twitter, instant messaging and so on, and said that the time will come — and it will come soon — where new employees expect to be able to use these sorts of tools to carry out their jobs: organisations which ban these might find it difficult to get the best staff.

What does local government need to consider?

• If you don’t do it, someone else will (e.g. Fix My Street)
• Get with it as quickly as possible; be aware of it; learn about it

But you also have to remember the other mantra: if you build it, they won’t come. You’ve got to market it, drive it and seed useful content on it. You need to remember that interactive websites need interactive organisations — if you don’t change the culture/ way the organisation works, it will be a car crash.

Dave returned to a point which had been made earlier in the day: that you don’t want to be too professional. If something is too professional, too slick, too corporate, then people won’t trust it and won’t want to engage with it. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be shambolic either…

…but it’s better to be doing something than nothing at all.

The Four Point Plan

And coming to the end of his talk, Dave finally unveiled his four step plan for incorporating social media.

• Listen — people will be saying horrible things about you; it is better to know this than not to know it, as you can try to find out why
• Acknowledge — respond to comments on blogs; acknowledge what people are saying; provide explanations
• Create — create your own content, photos on Flickr, organisational blogs and so on
• Share — and then start licensing your content under some form of creative commons, allowing people to re-use it

Make a policy — copy Carl’s — as people need to be confident in what they are doing, but don’t over-strategise, as that takes all the fun out of it.

And above all JFDI.

I’ve talked about this before, so I’m likely to skip at least some of my notes, but there was still plenty of stuff there which wasn’t covered in that original post…

Twitterplan

Lichfield Council originally set up a twitterstream called @LDC Planning which has 69 followers and shows the planning applications in Lichfield, but this prompted the question, how do you get only the planning applications you are interested in?

Using the API from Planning Alerts, which pulls out planning information from 321 local authorities, he was able to set up Twitter Plan, as an alternative method for those that find Twitter to be more instant and engaging than email.

Stuart then carried out a live demonstration of Twitterplan, signing someone up to the service — about the first time in the day anyone had tried to do anything online and had found that it worked. Now we’ll just have to wait and see whether @skepticmike reports anything back…

Other Bits

But he also insisted that while APIs are becoming more and more important, it isn’t just about Twitter Plan (lovely though it is). There’s Rate My Place which is a one stop shop for food safety information (albeit currently only for Staffordshire, making it slightly less use to me), but there’s also They Work For You, which you can use to keep track of your MPs and MSPs and so on and Openly Local which is much the same thing for local councils but at a much earlier stage (so far only 45 councils are included).

However, if one of the councils currently included is relevant to you, you can pick out details of individual councillors, including their committee memberships, a declaration of interests, party information, and a link back to the official page. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on…

At this point I must also remember to thank Goss Interactive, who have a very useful habit of providing pens and notepads at these events. Anyway, after that message from our sponsor, we’ll return to Al…

Al has produced his own what I think I said post, so you’re welcome to take it all straight from the horse’s mouth, or — since you’re here already, you could finish reading mine and then read his. Yeah, that seems like a better idea.

He started with “broadcast is dead”, but of course that’s not strictly true, it’s more a case of “broadcast as we knew it is dead”, because people can now broadcast their own message themselves, and people no longer trust “corporate” broadcasters in the way that they used to. (It used to be the case that something seen as ‘official’ would be more accurate; now it is perceived that official = spin).

People Say Bad Things

But people can, and do, say mean things. You can trust them to do this. And there’s no reason why we should expect their online behaviour to be particularly any different to that you’d find in the pub.

So you shouldn’t be too surprised if you run across a tweet which says something like:

Fuck the Newcastle council people!unknown

What do you do? How do you join in? Do you take the kick-down-the-doors approach, the ban-the-internet approach, and try and get the user banned? In practice, you have two choices.

There’s the do nothing approach, to avoid giving the people extra publicity — ask yourself whether you really want to have that particular argument in a public space?

When To Engage

Or do you do something? Do you engage or do you let it slide? Al suggested we use CitizenSheep’s method for deciding how to manage your online reputation. (It’s a nice simple flow chart, and it’s probably something which should be used as a staple for decision-making of this nature)

You have to decide what you can control. You can’t control what people are saying about you, but you can control how your staff use social media through acceptable use policies — it therefore can become a management or disciplinary issue if they act in an inappropriate manner.

And you have to understand when it is important to wade in. For example, that “Fuck the Newcastle council people!” tweet didn’t in fact refer to Newcastle upon Tyne: it referred to one of the Newcastles in Ireland… if @NewcastleCC had gone wading in here, they might have risked looking like idiots, so it’s important to be clear you’ve got the relevant facts before you begin!

Understand What You Are Doing

“Loose tweets sink fleets!”

It’s worthwhile taking the time to understand how a particular social media platform works, and what is, and is not, seen as acceptable behaviour (what’s the appropriate netiquette?) otherwise if you jump in feet first when you don’t really know what you are doing, you could make a complete hash of it like Habitat did (Note: see How Not To Use Twitter and UK Furniture company spams Twitter).

There was also the fuss over the offending Plymouth tweet, which led to Plymouth Council banning the use of twitter on their networks, and which many of us hadn’t seen until Al’s presentation.

@NewcastleCC on Twitter

Newcastle uses their twitterstream to give out information such as news, events, jobs and ‘extras’, with these extras being manually added information (responses, comments etc) rather than aggregated RSS feeds in order to help provide a personal as opposed to an entirely corporate face (as being too corporate puts people off –again, it’s likely to be seen as ‘spun’).

Newcastle were interested to discover that the news represented the most clicked links from their twitterstream (as opposed to jobs, which is much bigger on the website), and are separating out different types of tweet into different accounts — you have @toonlibraries representing the libraries, with other ones also being planned for events and customer service/local information.

“What does success look like?”

It’s difficult to know: but the Newcastle Twitterstream is certainly providing some people with useful information — it has more than 2,000 followers and is generating over 15,000 click throughs per … some unit of time (would have been helpful if I’d noted this down!)

And one for the future — while there doesn’t seem to be anything as yet resembling a hyperlocal blogging community on Tyneside, there are a lot of people taking photos and putting them on Flickr. So Newcastle Council are also considering using Flickr as a source of images from around Newcastle: if people on Flickr give permission to use their images, they might for example get access to tours of public buildings not generally available, or find their photo on the cover of the council magazine… (you need to be alert to the opportunities of social media as well as the risks)