The convention was titled 'Regeneration, Re-invention, Recession: Capital of Culture One Year On' which of course led me to add another 'R' in the title of my workshop: Social Media Revolutions.

A copy of the Powerpoint is available through Slideshare in the Presentations section of my blog here.

Anyway, as out of context the slides can be a bit meaningless, here's what I think I said!

Social Media Revolutions: How to communicate in the web 2.0 world

Liverpool is a great city, it's got a lot going for it and it's changing all the time. Much the same as Newcastle. But ask people about Liverpool and their first thoughts may be of scousers in curly wigs saying "calm down, calm down". Newcastle has similar issues, our first thoughts may be of noisy, angry football fans eager to depose Mike Ashley and appoint a new messiah.

Of course this is not "on-message". There are images of Liverpool and NewcastleGateshead that fit better with city and destination branding. But "on-message" and "off-message" doesn't always fit well with the web. But that's because of what the web is.

What's a social network?

Talk about social networks and people think you're talking about computers, about Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or Bebo. There are social networks for all sorts of interest groups. Knitters may be members of Ravelry, but they might also go round to each others houses to knit.

When we think about (the fictional) Fight Club do we think, "that's a social network". Maybe not. But interest groups may find themselves bonding together through seemingly unlikely activities where previously they may not have found each other or even spoken to each other. It's offline, but it's a network.

I illustrated this point by finding people in the room who had pet cats and drawing a physical connection between them with string to form a rudimentary social network named 'StringFace' [okay this bit didn't work all that well, but in my head it was amazing].

So whether you like cats, knitting, bare-knuckle fighting or all three, there will be others out there with similar interests. In arranging yourselves together and making connections it becomes a social network. It doesn't matter if you use a website or an abandoned cellar, your group exists.

So if it's about connections not computers then our approach to it must reflect this. It's all about communication.

Behaviours

If we can communicate offline then we can communicate online. Don't let the computers scare you, they work for you. But we may need to examine our behaviours to see what will work.

Key behaviours are:

• Openness - if you're on the web and you're choosing to communicate then do it, don't lurk in the shadows and don't keep things to yourself. The best parties are the ones where you talk to new people, not the ones where you stick with the people you came with
• Sharing - you're not on there to sell. You might manage to sell, but that comes through sharing your knowledge, experiences, your views and personality. Don't just broadcast, create something
• Friendship - this breeds trust. I trust what my friends say about something more than someone I don't know. But if I get to know you then I'll trust your opinion too
• Human - be human. Tell people who you are and what you do, give something away and you'll get it back. I find it difficult to form a bond with a bit of code that powers some repetitive interaction. People can still tell a mail merge letter from a hand-written one
• Interesting - this should really follow from the rest of the behaviours, but what your audience find interesting is not necessarily what you will be asked to communicate. There's a balance to be struck here, but if it's something that's unlikely to be of any interest to anyone then it's probably not worth the effort

Social media is not another megaphone, it could be, but then again it's open to everyone so there are millions of megaphones and if everyone's shouting at the same time then nobody will be heard. If you sit down with someone and have a chat then you'll get more done and people will be able to hear your message. Don't go for the hard sell, you'll end up being ignored.

Have a look at this Twitter page for how the soft sell can be used to good effect in the tourist trade.

Get into Newcastle

This is a TV ad. It's on YouTube, but it's still a TV ad. Don't get me wrong  it's fine on YouTube, a chance to get extra exposure with no real additional investment. If you've got video content it's probably better on YouTube than on your own site, it'll get seen more (although if you upload to YouTube and embed on your own site you'll have the best of both worlds).

J'aime la Tour

This is a nice video. It's sharable. I'd feel much more compelled to show other people this video than the one before. It has that quality which makes it ripe for YouTube and social media in general.

If you know what makes something sharable then you're halfway there. The second video would work well on TV or YouTube (although it's a bit too long for TV). But if you really want to use YouTube then look at what it can do that TV can't.

Choose A Different Ending

YouTube is web based, so it can be linked. This 'choose your own adventure' style video uses this to good effect. If you're choosing between YouTube and TV then think what each can offer against each other right from the start. Each has pros and cons. If you work in communications or marketing you can always choose your tools, social media just offers us more tools.

Risks

People often associate social media with risk. Which is fair. And to be honest if you're not aware of risks you're more likely to fall foul of them.

But the risks associated fall into two main categories, internal and external. Internal risks are the real risks, but they're also the ones you can prepare for. Are your staff going to 'waste time' on Facebook? What if someone says something they shouldn't in public?

These risks should be managed through HR processes and through line management. Who are your public facing staff? If you trust people to speak to people over the phone, by email or face-to-face then they should be trusted to communicate on the web. Monitor and evaluate this. If you can't trust your staff then why were they hired?

External risks are those that come from the general public. They won't stay 'on message', they won't bite their lip if they're annoyed about something and they cannot be controlled through internal policies, procedures or protocols. they never signed up to your terms of use.

So... I've said before that controlling these people is not really an option. People will say bad things about you anyway, whether it's on the internet or in the back of a cab.

You can leave it be (it may cause more trouble to get involved), try and sort their issue (if it's sortable) or provide an answer which may not help that particular person but may be of use to others with similar problems. Or you can report them.

It's important at this stage to first remember the spirit of the internet. Reporting someone without first giving them a chance to have a look at their own comments isn't all that nice. And also consider whose house it is. Which site are the comments on? If it's Facebook then refer to their terms of service. You don't own the space, you're just visiting, and in the eyes of the internet everyone is equal (you're all users).

Listening

All of this is about communication, knowing who you're talking to, tailoring your message. It's all straightforward for a comms professional. But one of the most important aspects of communication (especially in thew web 2.0 world) is listening.

Monitoring may seem creepy to some, but how can you answer if you can't hear the question? It's key that you have this in place so you can join the conversation. If someone asks where's a good place to stay in Liverpool you may be well placed to answer them (so long as you're aware someone's asking).

A cheesy video

Some objected to me calling this cheesy and said that this sort of thing was what they needed to convince people of the value of social media. It still grates with me a bit - I suppose it's a bit hard sell. But if you need a simple "what's in it for me" response then this does the job.

Selling social media is not really the tough part. It's getting beyond the stage where you're thinking about technology and on to the stage when you're talking about the behaviours needed to achieve your goals.

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:

1. Have a council group
2. 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.

-----------

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

Simon Wakeman has blogged about this and gives all the basic details so far. I'm still waiting for a response from Twitter as to why the account was suspended, but am using an alternate ID (@_guy_incognito) in the meantime. Please follow my alternate account for updates until this situation has been resolved.

You may also have noticed that I'm now on WordPress. I have been looking to develop my blog further and this is very much a work in progress - but I felt I had to update on the situation as it's showing no sign of reaching its conclusion. There will be developments with my blog and I'll keep you informed.

Twitter hashtag for the suspension is #freealncl and there is a petition and a twibbon!

Do councils need a Facebook presence? - Jack Pickard dissects the Facebook presence of Tyne and Wear's councils on Facebook. Jack hits the nail on the head when he describes why we made the decisions we made about Facebook (without me having to explain our actions).

Elections 2009 - No, not the European ones (although this site was quite interesting). Derbyshire County Council had their local elections and Sarah Lay blogged here and here about how they covered it online and became media dahlings.

Councillors on Twitter - There are two sites for this: Tweety Hall and Cllr Tweeps, both are a good starting point to see who's on there and what they're doing on there!

Social media news releases - It's the future, peoples! Have a look at this one.

Flipside - Northern Film + Media's flip camera consultation project.

I thought there was a blog post out there on how to use Google Reader as a Tesco Value Twitter monitoring tool. Can't really find one so will have to blog it myself!

At UKGovCamp09 I went to a session run by @neilfranklin, @jennybee, @neillyneil and @jamzam. It was a very useful session, and the main things I took from it were to use a personal voice and to follow people back.

The thinking behind following people back was something that hadn't really occurred to me before. I thought it was a bit creepy to be followed by a public body - this was reinforced by my own feelings when West Midlands Police started following me back on Twitter. This aside I had a 'slap-myself-on-the-forehead' moment when I realised how this can look:

MODEL A
1) Interested citizen starts following public body because they're interested in what the public body wants to say.
2) Public body broadcasts messages to their followers.

MODEL B
1) Interested citizen wants to have a conversation with public body so starts following them.
2) To indicate that they are willing to listen and take part in the conversation, the public body follows them back (out of courtesy).

We've moved towards Model B now.

To hear what people are saying I use Google Reader. This takes RSS feeds from Twitter Search - I've subscribed to searches for @NewcastleCC, as well as searches related to Newcastle City Council.

We're using Tweetburner to broadcast our RSS News, Events and Jobs so that the channel has a steady stream of content. I would like to alter this so that headlines of news stories are amended from those on the press releases before being posted on Twitter, but I'm not sure how to do that yet. We're adding in unique content so that it's not just RSS feeds and we're responding to comments.

We're also using Tweet Later to manage auto-adds and to send a welcome DM to followers. Our message currently reads: "Thanks for following Newcastle City Council, if you have any feedback on our use of Twitter please let us know". One piece of feedback we received from this was from @Documentally who advised that this can seem impersonal and can cause people to unfollow. I'm still undecided on this. I'd like to let people know we're listening and that we're still learning, but I don't want people to think that we're actually just going through the motions in an impersonal manner.

One reason behind using Tweet Later was that we are getting large numbers of new followers and it's becoming difficult to manage. We currently have 253 followers (as at 10:22 GMT, 18/02/09). We've been actively growing our number of followers while trying to target users who are local to us. To do this we've identified 'tastemakers' who are active in social media and have a connection to Newcastle and the North East. We've used Twitter Grader for this. A result of this has been that people will start a conversation about us using Twitter as a sort of 'novelty', this in turn will allow others to discover us on Twitter. At present 17% of our followers list their location as Newcastle and a further 4% are from the wider North East. Together they make up the largest section of followers.

We have had one negative response from someone who we chose to follow in an unsolicited manner which said: "Well what do you know @NewcastleCC is following me. I find this very odd." We've tried to chose people who are using Twitter for business purposes so that they do not feel that the council is snooping on them and have apologised to the person who voiced concerns.

We've also had a fair amount of coverage for our use of Twitter. Both associated with our coverage of the Fenham by-election and school closures.

The next step is to provide more unique content through Twitter and to develop more of a voice for the channel. It would also be interesting to use Twitter to generate content - in a similar manner to @FenlandCouncil: "When we get a few more local followers we'll try and produce a weekly newspaper section entirely through Twitter - what do you think?"

I'd also like to use more TwitPics - I've tried this out through my own Twitter account and will be doing more on this in the coming weeks.

This service was ticking along with 47 followers (as at 28/01/09) and we were keen to grow our audience and encourage participation. We also wanted to add exclusive content to the feed. To this end the by-election in Fenham (29/01/09) provided an opportunity to have live microblogging of an election.

To monitor activity we settled on the hashtag #FBE09 although we seemed to be the only ones using this. For future events we would publicise the feed further in advance.

We linked to the Statement of Persons Nominated (17 clickthroughs as at 02/02/09) and created a Google Map of polling stations (18 clickthroughs as at 02/02/09). We also tweeted closing times for the polls and announced the results live.

The following day a press release (87 clickthroughs as at 02/02/09) was issued which gained some coverage in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle as well as LGC plus, Sleaford Standard, bdaily, Public Service and Teletext. An article is also planned for LGA first and an interview was given to BBC Radio Newcastle.

The Twitter account now has 69 followers (at 02/02/09).

Technical issues on the evening prevented us from posting a Twitpic of the announcement and we would hope to do this in future. The event also proved a useful trial run ahead of European elections later this year. If we were to cover this I would recommend two council officers to manage the feed. In addition we would add a more conversational tone to the coverage.