Al Smith Social media in local government

How did you like the chocolate factory, Charlie?

Google's LocalGov Seminar at their London HQ had a few interesting points to consider for those attending, and those now hearing the reports from the day. Not least, it seems, that the day was not very well tailored to the audience.

But it's best not to dwell on the negatives. This was (hopefully) the first step in a relationship between local government and Google that will lead to co-operation, support and new ways of working. As people seem to want that more than paid-for advertising solutions.

Adwords were discussed in an opening session, perhaps wrongly focusing on transactional functions such as payment of council tax. High placement on Google council tax searches may be desirable so residents can find out where to pay, but as they can't pay their tax to another councils this is not something you would normally pay for. After all, I'd tend to search for my council AND council tax.

A case study was given on Hillingdon's use of Adwords to promote a Christmas ice-rink, which was a better idea and may be of some interest to our marketing team as we all try to make our budgets go further.

Analytics and conversion provided a brief how-to on what makes a good website and how to track abandoned shopping carts etc. Again, a presentation that focused on the transactional but highlighted a tool which could prove an alternative to others such as Websense.

Then, one of the most controversial topics of the day. Google AdSense. Do you want paid-for advertising on your site? If you do, why choose Google? Fair enough, it seemed a large number of people in the room had been asked to looking into advertising solutions for their sites, as 'alternative revenue streams' are increasingly mentioned. AdSense provides one solution and allows for family-safe advertisements, filtered by category on selected areas of the site. Downsides are retrospective blocking of individual ads and lack of monitoring.

A case study from Nottingham City Council did little to stop the murmurs. Nottingham's new website is an attempt to create a personalised council homepage, providing an alternative destination site (which is a bit Marmite it seems). Their case-study outlined that part of this development was paid for by AdSense revenue. Okay, so even if you don't like ads this may be an incentive.

Nottingham's traffic seems comparable to Newcastle's so I was interested to hear the figures, and it brings in approx £15k p.a., a contribution, but not a major one considering the revelations about the cost of Birmingham City Council's web development. Given slightly larger traffic to Newcastle's site it may be something to look at, but not a huge revenue stream. (It was also slightly concerning that a banner ad on an events page seemed to advertise a theme park nobody had heard about and was not labelled as a Google placed ad.)

The issue of negative feedback to ads on council sites was also brought up. Nottingham had received three complaints in 12 months relating to advertisement. But a full user survey may turn up others who do not like the advertisements but have not taken time to complain.

The next talk on Enterprise Solutions was a highlight. Use of GoogleMail, Docs etc. in an organisation as an alternative to MS to work collaboratively, quickly and flexibly. But this talk was a bit like preaching to the choir, and maybe the people in the room were not the ones who needed to hear about the savings and improvements on offer. It may take time, but it would be good to open up a conversation around this. Even on a pilot basis.

After lunch we looked at being creative with YouTube. Which is great. We watched a few videos, including this one that I highlighted on Twitter the other week. But we also got to see that it's actually easier than I had thought to add features to videos.

OpenSocial, featured in the next session, seems to be an attempt at universal login to sites, carrying your contacts with you. Nice idea, I liked that you could see your friends contributions to sites seperately from others, i.e. those whose views you value higher. It seemed to work off the peg too, so may be a solution for comment enabled council websites. Not sure if it works pre-mod though, which may put some off.

Next talk was on Android... lots of people have mobile phones... smart phone ownership increasing... why not create apps on Android platform... here's some demos... Android has 8% of market.

Finally a talk on Google Maps. Which are nice. People like them, we'd love to use them, but can't because of issues between Google and OS. If we buy Google Maps Premium we can use Google Maps apparently, so there appears to be some progress in this area.

So that's what happened. We came. We listened to a (slightly off-topic) sales pitch. We went home.

But it's a start as I say. Google got plenty of feedback from the day and hopefully there are a few things people can take away and build into what they're doing.

Google also have a dedicated webpage for this. And Carrie Bishop blogged about the day too.