Al Smith Social media in local government

PSFBuzz – what I think I said

On July 7 I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at PSFBuzz in my adopted city of Newcastle. There was a great lineup of speakers and some an audience that was open to many of the topics discussed.

My presentation had lots of slides which served mainly as cue cards to guide me through what was essentially a 25 minute rant on online reputation and shifting roles in local government communication.

Some of the points overlapped with the other presentations, in particular those by Carl Haggerty and Simon Wakeman. The benefit of this was a consistent message for people to take away from the conference.

This is, as I remember, a fairly accurate report of how my presentation panned out:

Losing control: why people will say what they like about you anyway

The title itself recognises the traditional pressure on communications specialists to control the message. Whether this is through developing relationships with journalists and other professionals or by the creation of ambassadors to represent your brand to the public at large. Traditionally consistency of message is at the heart of this.

Broadcast as a means of delivering your message is dead. Well at least in the traditional sense it is. We can look at advertisement in the 40's and 50's, some of the messages they push are questionable in the least, but then that's not the nature of the audience. If you see a billboard that says "buy our car it's great" where are you going to see a contrary view?

But now we've all got billboards.

This affects us in a couple of ways. Firstly, with everyone capable of broadcasting how do you know who to trust? Do you trust everyone or no one? With that in mind if you are going to broadcast you need to build trust with your audience.

Secondly, your message may get lost. Your billboard is lost in a sea of other billboards, many of which may be carrying the opposite message.

So if you're going to put your message out there you must be willing to listen for the response. And you must understand people.

People are mean. People say mean things. Some of the things people say about you may be warranted. But on the internet we need thick skins.

The following quote is from the micro-blogging site Twitter, I've not identified the author as I didn't think it appropriate:

"Fuck the Newcastle council people!"
Twitter user

Okay, so someone said a mean thing about us (the council) on the internet. We know this because we are listening.

But what if this took place somewhere else? Is this different because it appeared on the internet? I suppose that's down to what you think the internet is.

Is the internet a library? Some people think it is, but those people are usually librarians and they may think of all places in such terms (I must disclose at this point that I live with a librarian and am merely being flippant about librarians here).

Librarians often quote the following:

"The internet is a library where all the books are strewn on the
floor"
Various

That quote may tell you more about how people treat what they find on the internet in terms of sourcing and research, and in fact librarians may be the people to help us gain understanding of this. But it doesn't tell us much about how the internet is used to communicate.

Maybe the internet is a library, but at the moment people are scribbling in the books in crayon and shouting at each other.

Let's look at another model then. Let's say that the internet is a pub. Pubs attract all kinds of people, some people sit down and read, some pubs even have bookshelves. Some people go to listen to music, some pubs have bands or djs... you get the gist. But some people go to pubs to argue and to fight.

So what happens if in the scenario earlier it's not somebody random on the internet, but it's somebody random in the pub?

"Fuck the Newcastle council people!"
Bloke at the end of the bar

Somebody said something mean about us (the council) in the pub. We know because we were in the pub and we were listening.

What next? Tap him on the shoulder, introduce yourself and put your view across? You may be a brand ambassador and win him around. Or you may wind him up a bit more and get slapped across the face.

So there are really two options. Get involved or "leave it Darren it's not worth it".

As communication professionals it's at this point we need to take a step back and size up our opponent. How big is he? Do you know him? What's his demeanour? How is this going to pan out?

It's the same online as it is offline. We must go through a process of assessing the situation. Will responding make this worse? Can we put our point across and reach an understanding? Press officers do this everyday with printed media.

Here's a good way of formalising that process courtesy of Citizensheep.

So we can't really control what people say about us on the internet, short of shutting it down and locking people up because they voiced their opinions about you. That sort of thing's not desirable whether it is the internet or whether it's the local pub.

But there is something we can control. Our staff.

Local government organisations are large employers, we have people who come into contact with the public every day in all manner of different ways, from teachers to customer service staff. We also have lots of ways of governing their behaviour in the course of their work. Acceptable use policies, codes of conduct, contractually binding documents which set out what we expect of our employees.

When we place staff in a position where they come into contact with the public we are trusting them. If we didn't think people were able to represent our organisation and consequently our 'brand values' we should not have employed them. We have procedures in place for when/if this trust is breached. This is very much a management issue and not an issue of creating additional policies to address new technologies, the process and the trust are the same.

We should also address this with training, behaviours and language can differ with the medium. Before we jump in we need to carry out research and BETA testing, don't over-test, but gain confidence by watching before joining in. Remember the lessons of Habitat et al. Once you know the lingo and can throw a zombie in Facebook, use a hashtag sensibly on Twitter or have learnt to tell ceiling cat from basement cat - you should be ready.

At Newcastle City Council we're doing this with Twitter, I'm not saying this is the best or only way forward - the message is more important than the medium - but we are using it as a two-way communication tool.

We do broadcast (a bit), but we're listening too. At first we just watched, learning convention and behaviour. Then we jumped in - still a bit scary. We grew rapidly, changing our approach along the way, learning from mistakes and experiences (there is more detail on this on the rest of my blog).

Our main channel contains news, jobs, events and extra 'bespoke' content. We're outgrowing this though. RSS feeds push news, jobs and events through the channel, with news being the most popular topic (in contrast to jobs on our homepage).

Events news is user generated, with details submitted through the Cityeye section of our main site. This content is then moderated before being published. A result of this is that content comes though thick and fast - perhaps too much for some.

But this wasn't the first sub-channel to be developed. Instead, with the building of our new library and a good understanding of social media already, our libraries team started their channel. We supported this from the corporate communication department until it no longer required regular help.

We now have the option to promote libraries content from the sub-channel to the main channel where necessary. The important part of this is that libraries staff know their area better than the people in the centre of the council, and they are also often frontline staff who we trust to speak to the public offline.

A sub-channel for events may be necessary, but is more of a technological issue than a staff issue, so it's in BETA at the moment and will be launched when we've ironed out quality issues.

So again, we look to our staff for our next sub-channel. Looking at a customer service model from San Francisco we are hoping to develop a similar system, plugging into our CRM software and treating issues on Twitter in the same way as issues by email or telephone. So we're working on this at the moment - and I'll let you know when it's live.

But this is a new way of working for many communication professionals, putting aside technology we are saying that communication is the responsibility of many people across the organisation, not just those who have it in their job title, in this model the council is represented by it's people not it's processes.

This allows us to build better relationships with people on the internet, building our own social capital as well as that of the organisation.

"What does success look like?"
Peter Holt (my boss)

My boss often asks me the question above. And success in a traditional sense can be measured in numbers. Over 2000 people subscribing to our channel, more than 15,000 clickthroughs which generate more than 1000 unique visits to our main site.

But then there are other things, anecdotes, responses to us that tell us how much they appreciate what we are doing and the fact that we are trying. It's not as measurable, but I've got tons of it. That's social capital, and whilst intangible it's also success for us.

That social capital in some ways is more real, we're not tracking online clicks we're tracking an offline impact (which lasts longer).

And if you think that this is not worth the risk of putting yourself out there, just look at the earlier example of our Twitter detractor. He said something mean, we heard it, we chose not to respond. We had that choice. The Newcastle council he was referring to was not us (this council), the council he was referring to are not on Twitter, they probably didn't have the choice of whether or not to respond.

If a tree falls in the forest and you weren't around to hear it, it still made a sound - we know, we were there.