Facebook vs. Twitter
Towards the end of last week I was sent a link to an article in the Local Government Chronicle questioning those councils who favour Twitter over Facebook.
The article was based on a survey by ntl:Telewest Business (which I hadn't received) claiming 40% of councils have Twitter accounts and 22% of councils have official Facebook pages. Whilst these figures may well be accurate it is simplistic and a bit silly to suggest that councils are not using Facebook on this basis.
Facebook does have higher traffic than Twitter in the UK but there is not a straight comparison between the two. Both sites have different uses, pros and cons. Twitter lends itself well to distributing information and news and the ability to automate content via RSS saves officer time. In addition Twitter is more searchable and users can subscribe to Twitter searches, making monitoring easy.
Facebook on the other hand has numerous problems for local authorities to overcome. Whilst the title of LGC's article suggests that councils are not making 'friends' with Facebook users this is in fact the main hurdle. Who wants to be friends with a council? (If we wanted to get pedantic we could also point out that you can only be friends with 'people' on Facebook not organisations.)
The terminology of Facebook forces users to make declarations which may not sit easily with their views. There are essentially two options:
- Have a council group
- Have a council page
A group involves people becoming members and joining 'X Council'. A page involves people becoming a fan of 'X Council'. Neither is ideal and leads to low numbers of council 'fans'.
In addition moderation of Facebook groups or pages is time consuming and negative comments can cause reputational damage. Twitter does not have this issue as follower's tweets do not appear on the profile page of '@XCouncil'.
So those are some of the reasons why councils prefer to maintain a Twitter stream over a Facebook page (although many have both). But what wasn't discussed in the article is that councils can engage through Facebook without having an official page.
Councils may use Facebook for services or campaigns, you might not be a fan of 'X Council' but you might be a fan of a library or an art gallery. In addition you can highlight events like Medway's Fuse Festival. So without having to say "I love my council" you may want to tell people how much you love some of the things they do.
So, how about things that the council does that you really don't like?
Well that's an opportunity for engagement too. In the example above a councillor has invited people to come along to full council to hear a motion being discussed. I've blogged before about engaging with issue-based groups on Facebook.
Facebook is just another site. How you use it is up to you. To say that a council is not enagaging if they don't have a fan page is not even half the story. We have a fan page, it doesn't have many fans. We could invest a lot of hours into our Facebook fan page, or we could get better ROI by using Facebook in other ways or in maintaining our Twitter account. As communication professionals we make these choices, please don't suggest that we didn't think them through.
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Update
Here's a link to a Politics Show piece on social media engagement (focussing more on politicians) with a little cameo from me: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/regions/north_east_and_cumbria/8271707.stm
Web refresh time!
Firstly, this is not a discussion of Birmingham City Council's recent relaunch. There are plenty of other people dissecting this and making suggestions about how things could have been done. I just want to let people know what we're planning, that way people know what is going to be produced and how we're going to go about it.
It's probably easier to say what our web refresh project will not do. We are not rebuilding the website or replacing the CMS. There is a seperate project which is looking at channel shift and improving/increasing the services that we provide online.
So what are we doing then?
Well, we're improving the search function on the site. This has involved the purchase of Google Search Appliance. Feedback has taught us that people have trouble with our existing search and that it struggles with PDF documents held on the site. This is a bit of a quick fix, but we'd also like directorates to upload less PDF documents, creating pages instead.
We're also introducing a new front-page navigation system on top of LGNL to take people to the things they are looking for in a more intuitive way. LGNL is useful for indexing the site and for linking up with Directgov so we're not doing away with it altogether. Instead it will sit at the bottom of the page as a 'site map'.
The new navigation system will offer categories of user/information drawn from multiple areas and displayed as suggestions. Each category will have the five top suggestions and a 'more options' link which takes the user to a landing page with an explanation of the category and a longer list of approximately 15 suggestions.
We have drafted a proposed list of 15 user/information categories and sample content (in no particular order):
- Children and young people: For children and young people not their parents. Advice, events and opportunities for young people.
- Student life: For students and people in FE and HE. Info on post-16 options, council tax exemption, advice on studying in the city, links to institutions.
- Parenting: For parents. Advice on benefits, nursery places, registration of birth, family planning.
- Visitors: For those visiting the city. Transport info, large scale events, places to stay, things to see.
- Leisure: For residents. Parks, permanent leisure facilities, restaurants/scores on the doors, theatres, galleries and museums.
- Roads and transport: For commuters. Public transport information, parking, Tyne Tunnel, roadworks and traffic.
- Find a job: For jobseekers. Jobs at the council, benefits and back to work schemes.
- Councillors and elections: For residents. Who’s my councillor, surgeries, registering to vote and election information, meetings, agendas and minutes.
- Older people: For older people. Benefits, community groups and health advice.
- Housing: For residents. Social housing, council tax, benefits, planning, home improvements (Warm Zone, adaptations), YHN.
- Planning and development: For residents. Planning applications, regeneration, building control and citywide planning.
- Environment and waste: For residents. Bin collections, Envirocall, and eco information.
- Business: For local businesses. Doing business with the council, business rates (NDR), BID, licensing and procurement/partnerships.
- Health and wellbeing: For residents. Public health campaigns, doctors, sports, activity, hospitals and disabilities.
- Council tax and benefits: For residents. Council tax and benefits, customer service centres and contact centre.
The titles will be rewritten to improve flow and specific content is to be decided by the most appropriate directorate based on user stats. We'll then undertake user testing across the new navigation system.
We will also offer four transactional functions: Report it; Apply for it; Pay for it; and Get involved.
The final part of the refresh will be to reskin the site to update it and improve look and feel.
So, that's the plan. It doesn't involve much additional work and seeks to address three issues: search, navigation and design. What do you think?
Advertisement on newcastle.gov.uk
Below is a draft proposal for advertisement on Newcastle City Council's website. There's also a very useful policy here
Introduction
The council homepage typically attracts around 300,000 unique visitors each month. These visitors use the council website to search for information relevant to their experience of the city. In order to offset the cost of providing these facilities and of maintaining the quality and relevance of content it may be desirable to use the website to generate revenue.
Based on figures provided by other councils we could perhaps generate £15,000-£20,000 p.a. by hosting advertisements on the site.
Options
1. Carry on with the current model without advertisement
+ No additional associated costs
+ Avoid controversy
+ Does not change aesthetic values of site
- Does not generate revenue
- Misses out on added value of adverts
2. Manage advertisement in-house. Expand the current advertisement sales capacity in the communication and marketing team to cover selling space on the website and provide design services
+ Full control over placement and content of advertisers
+ Revenue generation
+ Added value for visitors
- Costs of management may outweigh income
- Extra demands at a time when capacity is threatened
3. Seek outside agency to manage advertisement for us
+ Revenue generation
+ No additional costs
+ Added value for visitors
- Commission taken by supplier
- Need to work closely with supplier to define appropriate advertisers
Recommendations
To maximise the value of the website, to cover the staff costs of moderation, and to fund innovation and research it is my recommendation that the council pursue the third option. Further to this I would recommend that we select a supplier with other public sector clients so that our specific requirements are understood.
Option one does not provide revenue generation and option two would require too much officer time to manage.
Concerns over monetisation of this resource raised by the public can be offset by explaining that these actions help to keep costs down. In addition advertisements may point the customer to relevant content on other sites which we do not hold ourselves. As such if a customer is seeking information on a health issue we would be able to direct them to retailers of relevant products through advertisements, without specific endorsement of the retailer.
Adverts should be held off site and content pulled through online; this would mean we would not have to host third party content on our servers beyond the source code required for this. This would pose no risk to our servers and little demand on capacity.
The code itself should be capable of being cut and pasted into webpage templates, this is a job which should take less than one hour and should not require ongoing commitment.
It is my understanding that the communication and marketing team would have the skills and expertise to liaise with the chosen supplier. All ongoing moderation of advert content would therefore be carried out by the communication and marketing team.
The next step would be to seek a suitable supplier, pending acceptance of these recommendations.
Examples of other local authorities using ads
http://www.fylde.gov.uk
http://www.nottingham.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=171
http://www.merton.gov.uk/learning.htm
http://www.huntsdc.gov.uk/
http://www.westoxon.gov.uk/living/Housing.cfm
http://www.weymouth.gov.uk
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