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I’ve been lucky enough to attend and participate in a couple of excellent events this past week or so. The first UKGovCamp in London and the second an LGComms seminar on social media in Cardiff.
A key theme running through both events was that of the shifting nature of the communications landscape, and the differing ways in which organisations are reacting and redifining activity. The sands are certainly shifting at speed for some, for others they're moving at a far gentler pace.
by Mark Allen
by Carol Grant
One of the most prized leadership attributes at the moment is resilience. In uncertain times, it can be the key survival skill. Some people assume that they just need to develop the hide of a rhinoceros and they’ll be fine.
However, a thick skin can make you insensitive to subtle changes taking place around you. To avoid extinction, it pays to know what true resilience looks like.
If you can keep your head…
As Kipling said, keep your head while all around are losing theirs. This doesn’t mean having all the answers. It does mean keeping calm in the face of uncertainty. If you can, you’re better placed to evaluate choices and options.
The world has never been more full of stats, figures and data. Bank losses, Facebook numbers, job cuts – the list is virtually endless and the transparency agenda has only increased the numbers maze.
Closer to home, our working world’s are also all about metrics, ROI’s, sales figures...
And our home lives are stacked full of numbers too – bank balances, school league tables, weather forecasts, mortgage rates, the price of fish.
by Adrian Short
Adrian Short is a freelance designer, web developer and data analyst. He's also passionate about local government. In this challenging piece from his blog, reproduced here under a creative commons licence, he rolls a hand grenade under council news online and suggests ways it can be better presented.
Too long, too dull and far too pleased with itself. Little more than an exercise in vanity publishing. Irrelevant to the vast majority of people.
The complaints are numerous but at least you come here to read my blog not to find out when it’s bin day.
I would have agreed with this popular consensus 12 months ago when I stood in front of ten down to earth engineering directors and extolled the virtues of ‘twitter’, LinkedIn and, to a lesser degree, Facebook.
by Darren Caveney
New year’s resolutions… I’m sure that I read somewhere over Christmas that 86% of us don’t stick to them. So, the choice is pretty simple: either don’t make any, or only embrace those which are do-able and will make a real difference.
Career resolutions are just as important as the obligatory ones about health kicks, weight loss and being better with money.
But will we all stick to them? Er, well, approximately 14% of us will, then.
Government is making lots more data available openly but as communicators we can do much more than release a lot of excel spreadsheets and expect it to improve everyone’s lives.
That’s why I love infographics.
They make data (maths, spreadsheets... eurgh) into simple, powerful images that express things so that people like me can understand them (fonts, colours, hooray!)
So if you too would like to learn to love infographics, here are 14 top tips I’ve picked up along the way...
I love it when a piece of writing brilliantly captures an idea or observation that, when you read it, feels both obvious and revelatory. It’s a kind of joining the dots moment I suppose, and I experienced it most recently when reading this comment piece by Simon Jenkins on the Guardian website.
I’d definitely recommend reading it but, in a nutshell, Simon Jenkins suggests that far from isolating us into pale faced-creatures lit by the glow of an LCD screen, the digital world is bringing us out into the real world again by providing a customised map to where we want to be and who we want to see.
do you want to create a simple, straightforward set of social media guidelines?
do you want to ensure you 'engage', 'explore', 'discover' ... and still 'conform'?
don't want to write war and peace?
how about a set of social media guidelines in less than 140 characters?
sound good?
here you go then.
My name’s Geoff Coleman and I’m a gritting bore. There, I’ve said it and a cathartic experience it was too.
Now, in mitigation, can I explain how I’ve tried to turn that strange obsession into something useful?
With the weather taking a turn for the worse over the last fortnight, you may have noticed the advent of the #wmgrit initiative on twitter.
by Jon King
We’re in a whole new world.
Social media has changed the landscape of society. The implications for the democratic process are profound.
Popular uprisings can no longer be suppressed or marginalised by the machinery of state as citizens create new, organic networks of communication freed from the grip of a complicit national media.
I have always been a supporter of the local press.
‘Life is Local’ as it appears on a masthead of one of our local newspapers and so it should be (mostly).
But times are changing and the population at large is becoming a bit more sophisticated in terms of what it expects and how it gets its news.
On Friday I hosted my first unconference on behalf of the Scottish Improvement Service. The theme was social media in the Scottish public sector and you can check out #smuncon of you like.
I knew the discussions would be lively and I knew I’d learn a lot.
Midlothian Council has found Flickr to be a really effective way of engaging with enthusiasts while also building a bank of photos of the local area.
A number of groups have been formed via the council’s website and through Rose Dewar -Midlothian Council’s Web Manager, who is a photography enthusiast herself. These groups have submitted stunning photographs of Midlothian.
Let's assume, just for a minute, that the accepted norm is that all organisations have Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and a website or two. How does that area of work stack up against the daily churn of media enquiries, press releases and marketing & communications plans?
And how do we manage the growth in demand for all of this work against a backdrop – for many - of cuts and reduced resources?
Flickr is home to over five billion of the world’s photos and is, without doubt, the most effective way to store, sort, search and share your photos online.
Northumberland is the most northern of English counties. It's quietly created some of the most pioneering and widely adopted social media accounts in the country.
As with all marketing channels, your twitter activity can only build your business if you’re maximising its reach.
Who’s following you? Are they key to your business (potential customers? existing customers? suppliers? stockists? bloggers or journalists from your sector?) Are they responding to your tweets? Are you creating dialogue and interaction? Are you getting re-tweeted?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’. Then it may be time to take a few minutes to rethink your strategy.
