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How do you spread knowledge across an organisation? Write something? Read something? Or you could do what Buckinghamshire County Council do and meet up to share social media knowledge.
by Andy Holmes
So what do you do if you don’t know everything about a subject?
Spend hours researching it and reading as many books as possible?
Being put 'at risk.' Going through a re-organisation. Chances are if you work anywhere these days you stand a chance of going through this stomach-churning process that tests patience and commitment and frays nerves. Tom Phillips in his 39-years in local government did every kind of job imaginable and some best not imagined. After surviving a series of re-organisations he took voluntary redundancy in 2011.
by Tom Phillips
They don’t give out campaign medals for surviving local government reorganisations, or I’d have a chestful. I’d only been working in my first job a week when they announced the 1974 changes following the Local Government Act 1972. It never really stopped after that. When I finally stepped off the merry-go-round in 2011, I had been in jobs placed “officially at risk” twelve times. In one particularly hectic phase in the 1990s, I was “at risk” three times in six months, in a service suffering badly from central government interference and privatisation.
Our friends from Coventry City Council always set high standards across their comms and digital activity. And they put on some pretty mean events too. The Godiva Fesitval 2013 gave them the chance to showcase all of these skills. What Coventry teach us is that Twitter might just be the festival platform of choice.
by Gareth Lewis
The first weekend in July saw the fantastic three-day Coventry City Council-organised Godiva Festival take place in Coventry’s War Memorial Park.
Here are some top tips from the person behind one of the best council Facebook pages around
1. Allow people to post on your page – It's good for interaction and gets people talking. It’s also much easier to monitor. Disabling posts on your page means people can only ask you something by commenting on one of your posts - it's easy to miss these comments.
300 is a perfect score in ten pin bowling. A very rare feat. But the comms equivalent is delivered quite regularly from what we get to see through the comms2point0 lens.
Because I am sad and I count these things, I happen to know that this is the 300th post to appear on comms2point0.
And so it seemed a good time to reflect on the brilliant case studies and posts we’ve featured along the way and the lessons we’ve learned.
The Big Yak was an internal comms unconference staged by the IC Crowd who are lovely people. In this post, here's what one person learned and seven take-homes...
GUEST EDITOR by Corrinne Douglas
I set off for London and The Big Yak, an internal communications unconference with a mixture of excitement and a bit of apprehension. Over 100 comms pro’s coming together to discuss internal communications, most of them having never been to an unconference before, would we have enough to yak about?
Some people really get the social web, what the web can do and what it can do for organisations. One of those is Euan Semple. His book 'Organisations Don't Tweet People Do' is one of the few social media books that take space on our bookshelf. We urge you to buy it. In this post he asks some key questions of local government.
by Euan Semple
The problem is in the title isn’t it? Being an authority in a time when authority is being called into question by so many people in so many ways isn’t easy.
Authority used to rely on information asymmetry. You were either in the know or you weren’t. You either had access to controlled information or you didn’t.
It's never been more important to base our communications activities on sound intelligence about who our residents and customers are. And checking that that evidence is up to date is also vital.
Who sets your comms priorities? Your councillors, your boss, your residents? I imagine that, in most local government organisations, it is a bit of all three. That’s fair enough (to an extent), but a lack of focus on residents and their issues, in the right proportions, could mean a lot of our efforts go to waste.
We all find reasons for not delivering things from time to time. And technology is often blamed as a barrier. So how would you fancy running a press conference from Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles: virtually...
Scotland’s island councils celebrated the the successful launch of the ‘Our Islands – Our Future’ campaign via the notoriously challenging method of video conferencing.
Public relations emerged in Britain in the first world war. But what would the pioneer of the field make of comms today?
The media landscape of today could hardly be more different to the one Basil Clarke faced when he became the UK’s first public relations officer in 1917.
Everyone knows the DVLA. They're the Swansea-based bit of government that looks after your driving licence. A simple comms task? No, far from it...
by Victoria Ford
Here at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) we deal with over 130 million customer transactions a year, 67 million of them digitally.
We like Jo Smith. She's one of life's great people who really knows her stuff. So nine months into her career as a solo public relations operator in the West of Scotland here are some things that have struck her.
by Jo Smith
It’s nine months since I put years as a full time public sector desk-jockey behind me and set up as a freelance PR consultant.
Going solo isn’t for everyone. But it seems to be working for me. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far...
Hello. Can you hear us? We work in pr and we've been waiting for a decent system to evaluate. We've been waiting for some time so we've decided to come up with our own. Okay with you?
There has long been an understanding in the PR industry that we need to evaluate our achievements and impact. We get this. We know it's critical to evaluate to help us learn and improve, demonstrate our value to our internal stakeholders and report back how investment has made a difference to business objectives. We also know there isn’t one single measure that will do this for us but a balanced scorecard approach looking at our performance over a range of metrics is the way to go. (Check out the Barcelona Principles for background on this.)
After taking a toe-hold of the social market Google+ continues to grow steadily. But what is it? What can it offer?
by Phil Rumens
Around a year ago, I had a discussion about Google+ over lunch. I remember saying that I couldn’t work out what it was for. It didn’t have the simplicity of Twitter, nor did it have the sharing functionality of Facebook, so where did it fit? I didn’t really rate it and couldn’t see the point of the platform.
Since then my opinion has changed.
Google+ has evolved and added what are probably its two best features. The first is Communities, the ability to create open or closed interest groups. The latter has great potential for sharing non-sensitive information (you’d probably want something a bit more secure for personal data) over a wide network based anywhere in the world.
The second is Hangouts, which you can use as an impromptu video chat room or set up as an event and invite people to attend. I’ve done this with LocalGov Digital colleagues and it really fits in with the “Digital by Design” agenda, having a face-to-face chat with people all over the country, without leaving the room. Of course this is nothing new, but it just seems a lot easier to do than other platforms.
Oh, the withering put down and the verbal jousts over minor issues. It seems to one experienced reporter that press officers are changing. That's when he can find one...
As a junior reporter, I remember there were four words I used to dread hearing tumble down the phone line from antagonistic press officers: “That’s not a story”.
There has been a makeover for regional newspaper websites under the Local World banner. That's the part of the industry owned by an organisation formed earlier this year between Northcliffe and Iliffe Media. It's fair to say that not everyone has been bowled over. Here's one comms officer's take...
One of the first jobs of the day (after making the coffee) is to check out what’s been happening by browsing the local newspaper’s website to see what they’ve done with that press enquiry.
Now that the dust has settled on a very successful LGcomms Academy in Cardiff it's a good time to reflect on the many lessons to spin out of a packed second day.
by Emma Rodgers
DAY 2 at the LGCommunications conference brought sunshine and even more quality speakers. Some attendees argued it was even better than day 1 and with a diverse agenda ranging from measles, moving to your next comms job to a slot from the top man in government communications Alex Aiken, it was a pretty good mix.
The LGcomms Academy is the premier event for local government comms folk. This thoughtful post aims to help to make it even better in 2014, and beyond.
It's very bad manners to criticise people who invite you to their party, so I wish I'd been able to say some of this during the event, at the unconference group seeking feedback on the event, but I had to head for Hull, so I'll preface what I'm about to say with words of sincerely meant praise.
Well the weather may have been pretty ropey in May - the coldest for a million years or so - but on comms2point0 there were posts galore to warm the cockles of every comms person's heart.
As you know, we invest heavily in little plastic cups to award to the most read post each month and excitement always grows prior to the big monthly announcement.
So without any further messing or flannel from me, here's goes...
At 5 was last month's top post by Eddie Coates-Madden - PR is dead... and just for good measure newspapers are dead too.
In at 4 was Why gov.uk is the best sight on the web by debut contributor Dave Thackeray.
The best jokes are often actually great stories. A great story can stay with you forever. And a good storyteller can captivate an audience. So can we embrace storytelling in more of our own communications?
GUEST EDITOR: Helen Reynolds 
Storytelling is a skill that communications people can utilise to really boost their creativity.
I’ve gathered some links in one place to give us a boost – they inspired me and so thought I’d share them in this post. But first…
