LG/WWW

There's an elephant in the room of channel shift. In fact it's knocked through to social media's gaff and is currently residing in the whole ground floor of the digital comms building. I'd been meaning to write about this for a while and Helen Reynolds post asking " Isn’t it time ALL employees were encouraged to use social media " promoted me into doing so. Channel shift encourages not only customers to use digital, but also those providing the service to communicate with service users using digital too. That might be using social media, a Customer Relationship Management system or some other electronic means. In my LocalGov Digital role I talk to lots of people, in lots of organisations, in lots of sectors and one thing is apparent; the standard of literacy of some delivering services is perceived as not good enough to communicate effectively using digital. This is not in any way a judgement on their professional capability. I myself once worked with ...

This week we had an incident on one of the trunk roads in our area. Fortunately there were no fatalities, but the road was closed in both directions for a few hours. The incident happened around 6.45am and TVP Roads Policing tweeted about it. Ideally partner organisations would have someone monitoring Twitter and have re-tweeted it, but often it simply isn't possible to have dedicated members of staff to do this, around the clock. So this got me thinking, could I build something to the task? I was reminded of films, where in a civil emergency, radio and television becomes one broadcast network. Could something be done along similar lines with Twitter? I started to build a proof of concept and surprisingly, in a short space of time it was finished. So how does it work? Firstly, (this is the technical mumbo-jumbo) set the code up with your OAuth application authentication and then get it to run at scheduled times, ideally every couple of minutes. Even running the code this ...

A hangout is a video chat room, integrated into Google+. Isn't that a dead platform you might ask? I used to think that too, but I wrote about why I changed my mind, here . Back in February 2013 I ran the first LocalGov Digital hangout , an evening event for those with an interest in local government and digital; Kate Sahota ran the next one in March. Since then I've taken part in a few of Shane Dillion 's excellent hangouts, Jerome's Turners Out Of Hours Hyperlocal and set up what we hope to be regular hangout for local government officers in Berkshire. Now seems like a good time to make LocalGov Digital hangouts a regular event and to start with I'll be running them from 2pm to 3pm on the third Thursday of every month. Whilst the hangouts will focus on a topic, the overall aim will be to share ideas, promote collaboration and highlight local government best practice in delivering services and information digitally. Like unconferences and camps, hangouts fo...

Photograph: York City Council On the 11th July we're trying something a bit different. Residents, people from local businesses and organisations standing in the streets of West Berkshire will be publishing content live on our website. In the past I've described how Twitter is basically a content management tool used by 140 million users worldwide. When the Olympic Torch Relay comes through West Berkshire this theory will be put to the test. The contributors or Torch Tweeters as we're calling them will be describing the Relay in their own words and will hopefully convey the experience of viewing a once in a lifetime event to those who can't be there.  It's similar to what Citizen Relay did in Scotland, but live and in real time on a website. Why do I think this a good thing? Well firstly those like me who work in Comms and extol the virtues of social media occasionally need to remind themselves that not everyone gets it. Sure you could obtain the...

Last year we launched a pilot page for local news . As well as showing the news we publish it takes content from Twitter and display the latest tweet from a selection of over 25 organisations local to West Berkshire. We chose our initial group based on local, primarily not-for-profit organisations that tweet and you can see the full criteria here . The pilot was to test whether the page worked technically, whether it updated all the time, every time and whether what it displayed looked as it should. The page passed these tests with flying colours  but it also produced some unexpected but positive results.  For example towards the end of the week the page often becomes a what's on at local art venues and Saturday afternoons the page often displays live local football and rugby scores and if there's a fixture, racing results. These are both things we didn’t expect to happen but are a great ways to promote local cultural and sporting activities. So where do we go fro...