Al Smith Social media in local government

Where to start? – further reading/resources

As part of a meeting I'm preparing for this afternoon I'm putting together a list of resources that I will send through as a follow-up email (further reading - if you like). It's a basic intro to some of the things which usually come up when I'm having an introductory chat with people about social media and web 2.0.

I thought I'd blog this as it may be useful to more than just the one organisation and there may be some in here that people haven't seen before.

Some of them are blogs, some are specific articles on blogs (which isn't to say the rest of the blog isn't worth reading) and some are just general cool geekery which may get your juices flowing for a new project.

LGEOResearch - Well this is a good place to start. Local Government Engagement Online Research, to give it it's full title, documents ongoing developments in social media and local government. Regularly updated with interviews, best-practice and case studies by Liz Azyan.

Social Media Staff Guidelines - Codifying social media behaviours can be tricky. Nevertheless it's something that is asked of us and can go some way to allaying the concerns of a risk-averse organisation. This article provides numerous examples which can be taken as a starting point and adapted to meet your needs. Another article, from Mashable, makes suggestions as to how a social media policy should be written.

Managing online reputation - Citizensheep has produced a great process flowchart to help you decide when to wade in online and defend your brand/organisation. Useful stuff!

Ben Marsh - This guy did cool things with #uksnow creating a real-time collaborative weather map. It may be that the map is blank when you look at it, that's just because nobody is tweeting about snow at the moment. If it was snowing I could go to Twitter and post the following "#uksnow NE1 [first section of postcode] X/10 [where X is density of snow out of ten]". A snowflake would then appear on the map, it's size would be regulated by the score out of ten. This combination of tagging and mapping is a simple idea which can be transferred to other topics. Vodafone noticed this and asked Ben to make this #ukhols map, driven by "#ukhols NE1 [first section of postcode] Leeds [place where you are holidaying this summer]".

Utah.gov - Right then, you're going to build a public sector website, have a look at this one first. Take from it what you can, if you can improve it then go ahead - and tell me what you've done!

Really Simple RSS - Post from Dave Press explaining RSS. I could recommend all of Dave's site (and do), but this article needs a particular nod as it covers a core area in a straightforward way.

Planning Alerts - If you combine RSS and geographic data you can get something like this site. It takes data from councils who publish their planning applications in a usable format (ask your techy people). You can then subscribe by email to receive updates on new planning applications in your area. Stuart Harrison from Lichfield council (and others) has adapted this to send Twitter Direct Messages through Twitterplan. Nice.

That should be enough to start with.

Anyone want to recommend more?