LockhartL

(Image by heathbrandon on Flickr used under Creative Commons)

A few serendipitous events lately have focused my mind on issues around corporate communications and generally and in local government specifically. Not just what it is, what it’s seen to be but who owns it.

Some background: I’ve been fortunate enough to be at the unnerving and confusing end of local government ‘talent management’ and, while I’m paid to give housing advice and help write homeless prevention strategies, I’ve actually been doing work around increasing use of web and social media in the public services sphere for a little while now. I landed this unofficial role because I’m keen, able and willing and not because I have formal communications or PR experience (and presumably because I don’t put up too much of a fight about not having a role, remit or anything like appropriate pay- I’m taking one for the team.) As someone without formal comms training under my belt, accidentally gradually moving into the strange staid area that is communications in local government has me flummoxed and not just a little frustrated.

As an outsider coming in, PR and corporate comms can seem to complicate the straightforward issue of just telling folk what is going on. CIPR defines PR as

the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

Whew! That’s heavy. ‘Planned and sustained effort’ sounds like manipulation of fact and of people. What’s wrong with being straight up? Something happens and it is what it is. So why can’t we just pass on the information?

The issue of protecting reputation (or establishing and maintaining goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics)- and who the appropriate people are to do the protecting- is being debated with the rise of the democratisation of news and information sharing creeping into councils and I’m very interested to see how comms teams deal with it all. So far I feel a resistance on the part of comms teams to embrace and run in multi-platform circles (that issue is a whole new blog post in itself) so all these mini comms machines (for example staff and local citizens tweeting, local bloggers) are running ahead without them and without much, if any, formal consideration of PR techniques or strict journalistic guidelines. Can it all work together?

I’m Jane Public among a group of communications and media professionals and so I have a healthy scepticism about corporate comms. From mainstream news outlets to local news items issued by large organisations, I feel I’m being fed engineered and candy coated messages that some middle aged white guy in a suit decided I need to know about. So I dig a little deeper for the information I take in looking to bloggers, independent outlets and chatter online to strike a balance and allow me to (I think) make a more informed decision about what I feel or believe about a story. The majority of people I know operate in the same way to seek out and digest news so I think the value of corporate messages communicated in a traditional way is sinking, especially for local government bodies not moving in new digital platforms. I think digital platforms force a sort of transparency because of its immediacy and because of all the other online sources of information a council has to contend with. But again, there seems to me to be apprehension on the part of corporate comms bods to get stuck in to the issue which flummoxes me, Jane Public.

So what’s the deal with a reluctance to modernise and move with the times? Communications is a broad church. Why is there a gap in using or wanting to use new platforms and methods and people? Why are communications broadcasts not holistic and inclusive of all platforms? How is it not exciting to reach customers in different ways and to build on professional knowledge? Why does it seem comms professionals consider being more open, honest and immediate is contrary to protecting reputation when really it’s the opposite? What kind of monster catching up exercise will some comms and media teams need to do because working over multiple platforms is not being considered in everyday work now? What’s the problem?

I know I’m exposing a pretty high level of naivety here and I admit this post is somewhat oversimplifying a complicated set of communications professions. But I’ve entered this formal communications accidentally and as someone who does not fully understand the need to engineer information when it’s so easy and transparent to just tell it like it is.

I’m interested to know how communications colleagues feel about amateurs creeping into their field. Comments welcome!

I’ve taken part in a lot of conversations and debates about local government using social media and there are a few things that always come up, without fail and one of these things is social media monitoring. Not actual practical monitoring (like on the weekend to see if there are pending customer enquiries or to see if your account has been compromised)-which is a conversation in itself- but monitoring for performance reporting. The ROI of social media- that old chestnut.

It’s early stages for a lot of us in local gov social media and in order to justify being allowed to access social media for work some of us may be asked to report back the success of using it. This is a tough one because what success looks like to a number crunching service manager may not be what success is in an online world. Also, most of our monitoring processes and systems were not built with working through web and social media in mind so traditional reporting doesn’t really cut it. This is especially true if managers want short term statistics and are not interested in the value of long term trends and behaviours, where a lot of the value of online engagement analysis is. I feel there is so much ongoing conversation about this because people want so badly for there to be a way to report on social media ‘success’ in a traditional local government manner. But there isn’t.

There isn’t because social media is accessed and valued in different ways than ‘traditional’ contact. There isn’t because internally we’re probably not set up to operate on web and social media as we are by phone, face to face or in writing. It isn’t because the tools we can use to monitor aspects of social media performance aren’t 100% stable, reliable or built for public services and they change all the time. It isn’t because it would be difficult for councils in the short term to determine a change in customer behaviour offline because of what’s happening online. And all this might mean The Boss asks you what the point is.

Generally speaking your leadership will not get what they want from you in the way of evaluating success or ROI- you need to tell them what is possible. Sure, you can hand over graphs showing a growth in followers, the number of times your message was passed on and the number of hits (*cringe*) a page has had but you know these things alone are just the surface material to placate your manager.

In my fantasy world there is a way to regularly measure the offline activity that comes from our online activity, combine that with the level of discussions online and their outcomes determined positive or negative by customers, basic reach and public sector appropriate SEO measurements all to grow business and interaction online and demonstrate its effectiveness over time thus making demonstrating success easier because online interactions grow and affect business infrastructure. But what all this- and more- means is a fundamental change in the inner workings of a council and a council really valuing communicating and doing business online.

This is all about breaking out of traditional ways of working and measuring but it’s also about emergence. Like so many things in the mash up of business, web and social media, there is no one answer, there is no leader and there is no one way to measure or report back. Online behaviour, what we measure and the way we measure it is fuelled by changes from everyone and no one at the same time and what you do to measure this month will change in two months and none of this bodes well with old style council reporting. Know when to say no and take the reigns if you’re faced with this social media measurement and ROI challenge. It’s a fluid scene and your leadership needs to embrace this. Trust yourself and learn from your peers. You know more about what is possible and currently valuable than the person asking you to report on hits.

Tartan TweetMeet 2012, Scotland’s first ever national public sector tweetup, is the brainchild of South Lanarkshire Council’s web and social media aficionado Carolyne Mitchell and Deputy Cheif Constable of Tayside Police and social media guru Gordon Scobbie. Being held in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Aberdeen, Dundee and Inverness on February 22^nd, the purpose of the event is to allow people who only really know each other from Twitter to meet in person, however, I want to propose that a secondary purpose to this event is to introduce Twitter -and social media in general- to our colleagues who don’t yet understand the business or personal development uses of these platforms. The breadth of knowledge and experience in the room on the day will be very useful to local government people who are apprehensive, who want to use social media but don’t know where to start and who work around people who are using it in their business and personal lives. I’d also like to encourage people working in partnership with the public sector to attend Tartan TweetMeet. Third sector and private sector relationships are ever growing and it would be great to see a range of backgrounds at the event. There will also be an opportunity to field questions from the public on how they’d like us to engage with them using social media which I think is very exciting.

In preparation for the Edinburgh event there are a few things for attendees to know:

• Register. This will help us get an idea of numbers but it also makes it easier for attendees to connect before the event and get a handle on each other’s online presence ahead of time.
• Spread the word about the event on Twitter and use #tartantm to tag your tweets.
• We have access to a iPod dock at our venue, the Red Room in The Constitution Bar in Leith so we’re compiling a play list for the night- a TweetMeet soundtrack. Send in your song requests via Twitter using #tartantmchoons or by commenting on this blog post.
• No business cards allowed.
• Get ready for a whale of a time.

If you can’t make it to the face to face event, keep up on Twitter. Follow the discussions on the night using #tartantm.

I look forward to meeting you all!

A couple of weeks ago I was walking to a meeting with my boss and I moaned the entire way about how behind my local authority is in using social media. 

Me: ‘They should be doing so much more. Other local authorities are way ahead of them in engagement and assimilating social media into how they do business. It’s so frustrating that they don’t use social media in better ways, like so many other public sector people.’

Boss: ‘Like who?’

Me: ‘Like tons of people. You know, loads.’

Boss: ‘Like who? You can’t make generalisations like this without examples or evidence.’

My internal monologue: I’ve just been busted.

I tried to redeem myself by rattling off my favourite hits from the past year, the public sector people and organisations that have really impressed me but I got stuck and ended up sputtering to a stop. By making a big broad statement I had taken the easy way: defaulting to the negative, over-generalising and taking no responsibility by offering examples of how I think things could be better. I also didn’t consider that what I’d said wasn’t really true- relatively speaking- and I was projecting my high ideals onto an organisation that, without a great deal of high level buy in or understanding but a big swell of front line moxie, has a lot to shout about.

Sweeping generalisations have their place because they can spark conversation and debate. A recent blog post on LSE’s website is my current favourite not-my-own-story example and though some of the comments on the post are presented in a pretty harsh way, the knowledge and information shared is fantastic.

Maybe it’s not always clear to a sweeping negative statement maker they can find positivity by having a closer look and learning about another point of view or that a generalisation won’t go far as a strong argument but it’s still an opinion and deserves some level of respect, not a biting comment. We’re all friends here, fighting the good social media fight, right? Catching someone in a generalisation is an opportunity to share information, knowledge, positive stories and maybe get in a hearty debate.

I’m glad my sage boss nudged me in the right direction and encouraged me to stop for a minute, consider what I was saying and dial down the drama. If he’d talked down to me about what I’d said it would have been just about as powerful as the sweeping statement is as a solid argument.

I’ve been carrying around Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2011: A Federal Perspective in my handbag for well over a week, highlighter at the ready, savouring its juicy motivational nuggets on bus journeys and during lunch breaks. Aimed at CIOs, it gives me a good feeling to read such a high level document that reiterates and emphasises what those of us in the public sector working to change traditional ways of working have been saying for a long time,*ubiquitous quote warning* the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Bold statements from high powered agencies make me feel like maybe someone could be listening. Be brave management types!

CIOs need to be more than business stewards,
and potentially more than strategists as well. That’s
because cloud, social computing and mobility are
fundamentally disruptive capabilities, shaking up business
models and transforming how business is done. Indeed,
the technology agenda is the business agenda, and CIOs
are the executives positioned to pull them into alignment.
In addition, the next-generation workforce has
radically different abilities and expectations regarding
information. They demand and deserve the tools
to work effectively, usually in collaboration and not
normally at a desk or in an office.

Pow! Take this, director type!

User engagement can enable productivity gains, but
that’s not the only goal. Effectiveness and empowerment
are even more important, allowing stakeholders to
make better use of an organization’s information assets.
New working styles and operating models can be
realized based on streams of information, actions and
communication, instead of siloed systems and data. This
is about engaging users by allowing them to execute
their roles with the organization on their terms.

Blammo! Put this in your pipe and smoke it, IT security types!

Almost-enterprise services are seductive. They’re quickly growing in number and can be bought with the swipe of a corporate card. In today’s operating environment, they simply can’t be avoided nor ignored. CIOs must recognize the upside to their business customers while preparing to mitigate risk. Instead of creating “thou shall not” barriers, guide and govern the decision process while educating the business as to why some standards, disciplines and frameworks are worth the time and effort at almost any scale.

Public sector people are bombarded with bold, well written high level statements about using technology to collaborate, achieve cost savings, encourage digital literacy and inclusion and to engage with our communities but from down here I can’t see the action. The view from the front line can be grim what leaders allowing only limited web access, mistrusting or misunderstanding web based collaborative spaces (including the IT Team conniption inducer The Cloud!), lack of digital strategies and so on…and on…and on. There’s pushing from the top and there’s innovation at the bottom. What’s happening in the middle?

Self depreciating cracks from leadership about low knowledge or skill levels with regard to using new technologies or not knowing how they fit in a world of evolving service delivery aren’t cute. In fact, as seen in recent shenanigans from the US, it’s downright frightening. Additionally ‘lack of time and resources’ aren’t excuses anymore for not moving forward. The swell of innovation, collaboration and creativity amongst local government employees right now is huge, though it’s a shame for some the only place they can express themselves and pursue ideas is outside of work, perhaps after being displaced by private sector consultants in their own organisation. But we’re here and we’re keen, up to date and ready to help move local government forward.

So, public sector boss man and lady, what’s holding you back? Recognise the talent in your staff, get to know where modern business is headed and where your customers are and collaborate to move forward. Reputationally, it is a greater risk not to.

Path, a mobile social networking tool inspired by Dunbar’s number- the theory that we have a limit to the amount of familiar social relationships we can have due to the size of our brain’s neocortex- has recently re-launched. ‘The next generation of social is going to be personal’ says Path’s VP Matt Van Horn. Is he right? If this will be the new trend-social getting personal-what does it mean for those of us who work to promote social media as a tool for public engagement, business, galvanising communities, empowering grassroots groups and so on? 

I’m in two minds about Mr Van Horn’s prediction. On one hand I know everything is cyclical and it’s to be expected that, after years of social media gluttony and information overload, there will come a brand of social media platforms that take it down a level. I’d say most of the people I’ve failed to sell the benefits of social media to have been totally confused by the purpose spending time seeing what people are talking about online. It’s too busy, most of it is rubbish, no one cares what you had for breakfast- you know the refrain. Could a trend of social media tools created with, say, capacity limits for connections (as Path has done) and a tagline about ‘real’ relationships help bring people resistant to social media into the loop?

On the other hand the thing that new public personal social platforms could be trying to sell- better places for closer relationships- have their work cut out. Existing popular platforms can offer this if the account holder has some level of experience and there are already platforms for target audiences like carers where privacy and information security are paramount. Is this what the general public wants too? Is this what new closed platforms would capitalise on- people who don’t trust current platforms?

If this does pan out and the next generation of social media is personal then those of us who work to promote social media to organisations and individuals might need to readjust and prepare for a network of siloed groups. It could end up being the Bizarro World to what we know now in which openness and high levels of connectivity are not attractive, not understood and not really sought after. But new types of products could also mean we have more people online. So those people who have been apprehensive and don’t trust current popular channels will have a place they are comfortable with.

It could be that social media is being reborn…and this time it’s personal.

Effeciency. Cost savings. Partnership working. Collaboration. Outcomes. We hear these things all the time in local government but what can Officers do to help achieve them?

I have the answer: we could be working better together inside our organisations and with business colleagues in other organisations using internal social web like tools- it’s Enterprise 2.0.

Looking over a piece of research carried out by AIIM in the public and private sectors into the use of social enterprise/Enterprise 2.0 tools in organisations of various sizes, the feedback is encouraging. However, some key findings echo the barriers we have seen in opening up social media in local government: heirarchy in corporate culture does not accommodate the levelling that social brings, reluctance of middle management to participate, lack of understanding of the tools leads to lack of training or knowledge sharing for others to learn and makes moderation difficult, governance is poor. For good measure I’ll add in IT security as a long term battle for most local authorities looking to explore progressive and streamlined working.

However, considering the reported benefits from organisations embracing social business- reduction in travel cost and time, reduction in crazy email chains (probably with Word documents that have questionable version control), faster responses to questions, faster project completion time, more confident and empowered staff- it’s a wonder why social enterprise tools are not being snapped up by local government.

Social enterprise tools are practically a licence to print money and create a more efficient and empowered work force in one fell change managed swoop.

Enterprise 2.0 is the next step for those local authorities using Web 2.0 for customer engagement and the perfect first step to using social tools for those who haven’t made the leap to using the social web.

So who needs a freaking Enterprise 2.0 strategy anyway? Well, you do and I can help you get started. Get in touch and let’s revolutionise the way your organisation works.