More than 200 comms people from across local government came to Birmingham to share and learn. This is what struck one head of communications.

by Darren Caveney

More canals than Venice*, more trees than Paris**, and more comms folk than you could shake a stick at. That was Birmingham last week, and a hot and sultry City it was as it graced a fascinating LGcomms Academy 2012.

I was fortunate to chair three workshops around social media. I’d fully expected this to be the number one topic of the week, and I was not to be disappointed.

It’s pretty clear that so many local authorities have now really embraced social media and steamed ahead to maximise the opportunity of really engaging with many customers in new and innovative ways.

I had anticipated at least of couple of voices talking about controlling the message, not taking risks, retaining total control of social media channels and ensuring that those pesky services kept their pesky mitts off these shiny new toys. I was wrong - I didn’t hear so much as a whisper in the sessions I took part in. Good news then.

What did emerge for me were two things which, whilst having positive slants, leave me concerned that we are reaching a tipping point with social media on two fronts.

Firstly, that lots of social media comms activity is delivered outside of the traditional working day and is powered by organisational evangelists with lashings of goodwill. This approach has, I’m sure, been partly responsible for some of the successful and organic growth of social media within local authorities. These evangelists will, I guarantee, work way in excess of their contracted 37 hour week, which is fine to a point but isn’t massively sustainable or realistic for everyone.

And I also suspect that the adoption of social media isn’t fully integrated across all four corners of every comms team across our lands and we need to be honest about this.

Of course, the comms officer who waxes lyrical about social media and uses it at the expense of other communications channels is as wrong as what I term a minority of ‘hard to reach comms folk’ who seem happy to resist the adoption of social media. It’s always been a case of horses for courses when it comes to delivering effective communications campaigns. It’s just that now the course is like the grand national multiplied by 1000, pumped on steroids and wearing bells and whistles. Ignorance is not an option for any of us.

This hard to reach hunch, and it is no more than that, was backed a little further during a session I sat in with Louise Kidney from Government Digital Service. Louise asked the room (of 52) how many had personal social media accounts. The (surprising) answer was around only half. Not exactly statistically valid research into the social media habits of comms professionals but revealing nonetheless.

So my growing concern is that we could quickly become victims of our own success, that having built large followings across our platforms, we may just struggle in the future to service them in times of emergency, when the evangelists at last take a holiday, heaven forbid leave their organisations or simply as and when the volume of customer demand grows across these channels, week by steady week.

The answer in part probably sits with our colleagues in customer services. But therein lies my second concern. How advanced, capable and ready are public sector organisations in terms of mainstreaming social media into their customer relations offer? The answer is probably that we have a mixed bag out there. There are some – like Norfolk, Gloucestershire, Derbyshire and Torfaen Council’s - pioneering the use of formal channels for customer enquiries and complaints and they are to be commended and imitated. There is a lot of catching up to be done by others but do we have strong business cases to sell the story, and importantly have we asked our customers whether they want and value these new access channels? Current volumes of enquiries through these dedicated channels are relatively low and so may be sniffed at, but the numbers will undoubtedly grow, we just don’t know by how much and how quickly.

It was absolutely clear from #LGcomms12 *** that there is a great deal of best practice activity being delivered by local government comms folk and other departments around the UK. Work we can be proud of and work which some sections of the private sector must envy.

But the tipping point I sense which is now present for many of us might just stop us in our tracks a little until we resolve the ever difficult resources conundrum and better prepare our organisations for what comes next. And it’s this we need to be honest about.

* As a proud Brummie I have to admit that I’m not sure this fact has ever been substantiated (but that’s the thing with reputation… )

*** A clear sign of the progress made these past 12-months was evident in the digital reporting by delegates – over 2,000 tweets carried the hashtag generating over 1.25million opportunities to see.

Darren Caveney is creator of comms2point0.