Twitter police stop traffic
I was involved a short exchange of tweets last weekend about the Department for Transport’s debut appearance on Twitter.
It began like this:
Me: Congrats to the @transportgovuk gang for taking the Twitter plunge
theimp67: @neillyneil Really? Bio for @transportgovuk says “Please direct queries via the ‘Contact us’ section of the website.” #fail
For those not familiar with Twitter’s rules of engagement, this line in DFT’s Twitter profile earned them a ‘fail‘ because it implies a conscious choice by the Department to use Twitter for one way traffic only (pun intended) – to regard it as a broadcast channel, for sending but not receiving.
To the die hard Twitterer, this simply won’t do. Twitter is a place for personal interaction and conversation. Corporates are welcome, but only if they engage on those terms.
That’s a view I largely agree with (and DFT’s web team are welcome to read my @BISgovuk Twitter strategy!) but I do take issue with the growing tendency among early adopters of Twitter and other social web platforms to jump down the throats of newcomers who don’t immediately ‘get it’.
I tried to sum up my issues in 140 chars with this off-the-cuff reply:
Me: @theimp67 Everyone starts somewhere. It’s not easy for a web team to transform the culture of a trad institution – give them time & support
My point is this: Surely it’s counter-productive for an evangelist of social media to be critical in the early days of a new user’s (especially a government department’s) attempts to engage online?
A true social media advocate should embrace and nurture early forays, not nitpick over the detail and rush to shout “FAIL”.
Co-incidentally Dave Briggs has just blogged this quote from Beckett:
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho (1983)
Failing and learning from failure is important, for organisations as well as individuals.
It takes time to do new things in big organisations and criticising the people who try in the fragile early stages will only slow things down.
(I should make it clear that I don’t mean to single out @theimp67 in any way – it’s his job to care about good CRM and I concur with his further reply. Our Twitter exchange about DFT was just one example of a wider scourge best described as social media snarkiness which I’ve experienced first hand c/o Simon Dickson when I launched CLG’s Twitter channel (we’re over it now) and more recently when Dave and I had a bit of bother with live streaming from the Digital Britain summit – to which Dave responded brilliantly in the comments along similar lines).
Image: Bex Ross
Crowd-sourcing online engagement plans for next week’s Digital Britain final report
<Update> Positive reaction from Computer Weekly to the way we published the DB final report. (Even if the credit was given to DirDigEng!) </update>
Next week my department and DCMS will publish the much anticipated Digital Britain (DB) final report. Expectations from the technorati are high and I’m keen to make sure it’s supported by exemplary online communications.
Working with the rest of team DB (made up of policy officials, marketing and press colleagues in both departments, and in close consultation with the Minister), I have come up with a plan I hope will give the report’s web-savvy audience the interactive and digitally-enhanced publication they deserve.
The first step in the plan was to share the plan itself via this post on the DB blog, as an exercise in transparency and to crowd-source any other ideas.
So please go there and read about what we’re planning to do to publish and gather feedback on the final report, and if you can think of any better or additional ways we should be engaging online around this, then please let the team know by posting a comment on the official blog, or you can let me know directly.
Big thanks to Dave Briggs, for fine-tuning the ideas and into whose capable hands we’ve entrusted the delivery.
The story so far
By way of some background to the importance of getting this right, pretty much since I started in this job back in early Feb, I and the rest of team DB have faced unprecedented, sometimes campaign-like demand for digital engagement about what the interim report said and what should go into the final strategy. It’s brought exciting opportunities for me to do some full-on digital engagement and support the team through these new ways of communicating.
We’ve been meeting the demand by:
- Blogging and vlogging. I’m pretty sure this is the first proper policy team blog from any central UK government department – correct me if I’m wrong – and it’s been home to some disarmingly frank and honest posts from senior officials.
- Embracing and sometimes joining the discussion elsewhere
- Engaging, both robustly and quietly, on Twitter
- Social reporting the summit on 17 April with live video, blog and Twitter coverage
- Harvesting and distilling the huge volume of feedback online (not least from Write to Reply, the fake DB wiki, and the Twitter-powered unconferences, but also from Twitter and the blogosphere) and trying to reflect back on what impact all that feedback has had on the policy process
With all this pro-active, vested interest in the content of the final report among the online community, it’s vital that the way we publish is as interactive, accessible and re-usable as possible. However, it has to be remembered that this is the final report, so feedback can’t alter its content, but people should still be able to have their say in the best way possible.
Any ideas for what else we could be doing with the publication and engagement for the report will be much appreciated.
Note: this is not the place to post comments about the content of the report. I am not one of the policy officials, I just provide communications advice to them and this is my personal blog.
Mission Technology or Helpful Creep?
DIUS and BERR have merged, and so have their websites.
Well, not quite. But we’ve done the next best thing – rapidly developed an elegant interim homepage which uses the best of today’s agile web technologies to combine BERR and DIUS content into a single portal. At a cost of next to zero.
Steph has written it up here.
This is the first major output from the new/emerging BIS digital media team. Nobody knows yet what that team will look like, how it will work – or who will still have a job when the transition process is complete.
But in the meantime, and for as long as it lasts, Steph and I will be making the most of the opportunity to combine our forces to deliver first class digital engagement.
More on that score soon.
We’ll not be merging our blogs though. Or moving in together. As Steph says:
Thank god, I’d have nowhere to house the chickens.
Found/interesting: 17 May to 2 June
Look what I found interesting.
- Crisis Communications for the Social Media Age – Also works as a guide to rebuttal 2.0
- Swine Flu 2.0 : A Case For How Managing Social Media is a Matter of National Security – …and here’s a real-life case study from Ross Ferguson et al’s trans-Atlantic cousins
- Twitter’s hype is different than Second Life’s – Refuting the notion that excitement about Twitter’s impact on comms is akin to yesteryear’s misguided hype for Second Life.
- What’s Your Government 2.0 Personality Type? – I can’t work out if I’m a risk-taker, edge-rider or something else not described here.
- Overcoming the challenges to open government – Missed it at the time, but Tim wrote a cracking article on the 50 hurdles to open government and prompted a very interesting discussion. That discussion is now taking place on a wiki, and is well worth checking out. Something Andrew Stott and team might want to take a look at?
- The voices of government – Thought-provoking breakdown of the current UK government bloggers (including yours truly) into 5 categories, the fifth of which is still something of a ghost town.
- Over Easy | WooThemes – Lovely WP theme for SMEs
- Perch – A Really Little CMS – Nifty new super-lightweight CMS for SMEs.
- BAN Internal Email – Wish that we could, but think the best we can hope is it will one day be superseded.
- 45 provocative propositions about using social technology – Provocative but right on the money.
- The Knowledge Management Culture Shift – From “Admitting I don’t know is weakness” to “Admitting I don’t know is the first step to learning”. No wonder it’s a struggle.
- Matt Tee on POIT: Power of information taskforce – Nick Booth interviews Matt Tee on the Power of Information Taskforce recommendations.
- PR 2.0: Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals – Amazing and (it claims) definitive list of Twitter tools with concise summaries of what they do and why they might be useful.
- The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media – I’ll be pilfering some of the ideas here for my own strategy. The square/rectangle metaphor is especially clear.
- Obama plans more open government – in case you missed it.
- ScribbleLive | live blogging – another liveblog option, cf. coveritlive
Social media job interview questions
I recently recruited someone to work exclusively on social media.
It’s a shiny new post of a kind as yet still rare in government (I can only name three others) and a bit different from any vacancy I’ve recruited into before. So my (t)rusty set of interview questions for website managers just wasn’t going to cut the mustard on this one.
In search of inspiration I Googled, Icerocketed and Firehosed but – to my surprise – all I could find was one decent but short list of relevant Qs. There’s more stuff out there for the candidate to ask the employer than vice versa, including this pertinent and this rather impertinent list of suggested questions, and a well thought out generic SM job description here.
So I scratched my head and made some up instead. Here’s what I came up with. Hopefully you will find them useful if you’re ever in the same position, and doubtless you’ll be able to improve on them via comments. And – though posting this here may give the game away somewhat to future candidates – I’d say all credit to anyone who does their homework and seeks these out.
Experience:
- What experience have you gained of using web 2.0 tools either in a professional or personal capacity?
- Can you tell us about some of the challenges you have faced when introducing social media in your previous job, and how you overcame them?
- There are many free social media tools available now. How have you gone about assessing which ones might be of value or appropriate for professional use?
- There are many cases of social media going wrong for brands. Can you tell us about a time when something you’ve done online has not gone as planned, and how did you handle it?
- Give an example of when you have had to write a strategy, training or guidance document about social media and explain how you approached this task.
Depth of understanding:
- What’s the difference between moderation and facilitation?
- What’s the difference between social media and web 2.0? / Social media and social networking?
- What are the differences between writing for traditional web channels and writing for social media?
- What is RSS? Why is it important?
Advocacy:
- Assuming that I know very little about social media, and might even be a little bit hostile to it, how would you convince me that I personally should use social media in 2 minutes or less? [This one is taken wholesale from SM headhunter]
Strategic approach/business context:
- Why do you think [name of employer] should use social media?
- In what ways do we need to be careful when using these tools?
- What are the risks of using them badly?
- Who would be involved in managing them?
- How would you manage resource implications?
- Is it acceptable to outsource some of the work?
Evaluation:
- How do you make sure participants are satisfied with the experience?
- How do you know if it’s worthwhile to the business?
- How do you measure success in social media?
- How would you justify the activity a) internally, or b) to external critics? [this and the one above also c/o SM headhunter]
- How do you think social media might affect other digital media work – for example the main website?
- What are the ways of monitoring online reputation or coverage of a particular issue across the social web?
A subset of these questions certainly did the trick for me and I got a great result. What would you add or change?
Found Nemo
My son found him today in the aquarium at the Horniman and he hasn’t even seen the film.
Found/interesting: 11 April to 16 May
A near-random selection of stuff I’ve found interesting lately.
- Us Now : watch the film -like it says.
- I Can Haz Writin Skillz? – Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview. – HFACTDEWARIUCSMNUWKIASLAMB.
- WordPress in UK government: an informal audit – and very soon, blogs on the BERR intranet too.
- 5 Very Weird URL Shorteners -variety is the spi.ce of li.fe
- Death to Death by Powerpoint – Matt Jukes has cool ways to make presentations more interesting.
- UK journalists on Twitter – Insanely useful list of UK journalists using Twitter – might be the most convincing thing you could ever show a press officer to explain why Twitter matters.
- The Beeb Premium WordPress Theme – Well cheeky BBC clone for Wordpress. Temptation itself.
News you can trust – the social media way
Just a quickie to highlight two related posts on social media approaches to the traditional news release.
- Michelle of FutureGov has highlighted a great example from Defra where the standard press notice went out with a companion blog post.
- Meanwhile Steph of DIUS has written up his and his colleagues’ experiences of trying to weave digital engagement into the work of the press office – with great results. He writes:
Naively, I initially thought we could write a spec for a software tool to help us deliver SMNRs [Social Media News Releases], and roll it out. It quickly became clear that actually, there are more cultural change and technical obstacles involved in preparing, creating, publishing, promoting and assessing SMNRs than I first realised.
This feels right at the cutting edge of government digital engagement work right now: to find ways to integrate the new channels and ethos into the well-established business processes of a Whitehall newsroom. Not something I’ve dabbled with myself beyond a bit of online buzz monitoring, but will look to do so now. Thanks for the inspiration, both of you.
Another interesting find on this subject here.
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
