Google Hangouts offer a great opportunity to broadcast discussions and events to the world for free. At the Department for International Development (DFID) we are working to get the issue of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) on the global agenda. For the International Day for Zero Tolerance to FGM/C on 6 February, Development Minister Lynne Featherstone joined the United Nations for a Google Hangout to engage people around the world.

There were clear benefits.The Hangout generated worldwide engagement on an under reported issue. There were 2,493 clicks for the event which was viewed live by people from over 100 different countries. And, the beauty is by having the discussion on your YouTube channel it can be used as a tool long after the event.

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The following guidance is used by the DH digital team to produce video and train colleagues in the Department on the process of filming, editing and sharing.

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Digital Engagement – The Ground Rules (NAO)

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MRC Social Media Guidelines

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- content inventory: for keeping track of the pages published on your site. Can include details of ownership, review dates and metadata
- editorial calendar: for keeping track of any events, campaigns or product launches that provide an opportunity for supporting content. Also to keep track of content marketing activity
- new web page planner: to structure copywriting and help challenge requests which begin ‘we need a new webpage…’
- content quality checklist: to audit the quality of web content on a site

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[Blogging] can be a great tool to share knowledge, opinions and feelings and if you’re blogging about work or an area of expertise, it can set you apart in your chosen career. It gives future employers or colleagues a place to go to get to know what you think about things. Even if no-one ever reads it, it can give you a space to clarify your thoughts and the opportunity to think things through.

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If you’re looking to engage these kinds of sites with a campaign, consulation or news story, Openly Local can be a great way to find contacts. It lists hyperlocal sites and their Twitter accounts on a map, and makes the directory searchable by area.

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There’s a bit more context to it on the accompanying blog post

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The purpose of this site is to help you to explore the new opportunities that the digital world offers for engaging with and empowering citizens and consumers. It contains one of the most comprehensive, categorised collections of Digital Engagement methods on the web.

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I can blog and talk about engaging with people using social media until the cows come home, but sometimes you have to walk the walk too. Here’s an example of how I got involved in an anti-council Facebook group and turned around some of the negative sentiment.

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Top Tips for Directing and Filming

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Six golden rules during Purdah

No publicity will be given to matters which are politically controversial.
The general presumption will be that no references will be made to individual politicians in press releases (except where there is a valid emergency as set out below)
Great caution will be exercised before undertaking any significant media exercise unless it can be demonstrated that this was included in the forward diary before the election was called.
No photographs of candidates in the election will be issued
Before any request for council photographs and other materials is considered, enquiries will be made as to the use to which they are to be put and an appropriate restriction on use imposed if supplied.
The position of Mayor as the figurehead of the authority is different and material will be issued, providing it is not of a political nature.

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I was surprised to read on the BBC last week that I may have been the first MP to join twitter.

I recall the very moment. Back in March 2008 my wife and I were out for dinner with a good friend who has always been interested in Social Media. He mentioned Twitter to me and by dessert I was signed up.

I’ve posted a tweet or two (sometimes more and occasionally none) most days since.The BBC also reports that over half of all MPs now have a Twitter account and just yesterday I happened to reach my 40,000th follower, so I thought now might be a good moment to jot down mypersonal unofficial rules.

My 10 Rules of Thumb for Every Tweeting MP

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What it is:

Twitter is much maligned in some quarters, with comments such as: “But I don’t want to know what you’re
eating for lunch thanks very much.” Here our contributors explain what Twitter is to them.

A fantastic place to network and collaborate, hear the latest news and views and create relationships with
people that you might otherwise have never have come across.

Twitter is democratic – from the newest recruit to CEXs – everyone can share and learn

The latest, breaking news often before anyone but the source.

Recently I’ve been telling people news that the mainstream media couldn’t confirm for nearly an hour -
alright it made me feel important, ok!

A chance to get your elevator speech to people who you wouldn’t otherwise reach. And to change it, refine
it, and experiment with different ways of explaining why what you’re doing matters,

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We are able to confirm some commonly held truths about content, as well as quantify the value of categories. Reasons why tweets were liked and disliked provide some insight into accepted practice and emerging norms, as well as simple lessons to improve content.

With Twitter’s emphasis on real-time information, old news, even links that were fresh this morning, can be seen as annoying.

One way to add value to links is to include a personal opinion or thought.

Misuse of retweets and @mentions can make it feel like you’re overhearing someone else’s conversation, and overuse of #hashtags can make it hard to find the real content. E-mail or direct messages might be more appropriate; though unique hashtags are valued when users want to follow a question.

Cryptic tweets and a lack of context were particularly disliked: “just links are the worst thing in the world”

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I often get asked how you make a social media surgery. Below is a list of ingredients and how you use them.

This recipe is for a standard social media surgery and is ideal for community, voluntary and neighbourhood groups.

Last year I would have said this is enough to serve a city, but since then I’ve got a bit greedy and think that every neighbourhood should have a surgery much like this one. I’d recommend you read all the way to the end before starting to mix the ingredients.

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We encourage FCO staff to make full use of social media channels to achieve objectives. This includes on-platform channels like our blogs, and off-platform media like Flickr and Youtube.

Our FCO on Facebook page highlights which posts are doing what on Facebook and we’ve also listed details of which posts and which departments are part of the FCO on Twitter

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There’s nothing that ruins a piece of text as the lack of a decent image.

A picture can tell a thousand words.

So, thank the Lord for creative commons.

It’s a place to go when there’s no photography budget and you need an image in a hurry.

Creative commons licences allow for images to be re-used so long as certain conditions are met.

One of the best places to look for them is Flickr.

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Good data visualisation can help users explore and understand the patterns and trends in data, and also communicate that understanding to others to help them make robust decisions based on the data being presented. This site supports public sector researchers improve the way that they visualise data, by providing good practice examples and case studies, practical and step-by-step guides on how to visualise data, and links to more detailed resources.

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Web chats are good for:

- providing an accessible, live forum to field questions
- opening a dialogue with an online audience
- discussing a specific topic
- understanding specific concerns and issues

Web chats are also:

- open to everyone, not just the intended audience
- lightly moderated
- used by anonymous participants
- a permanent record online

Here’s a interview with Tim Lloyd, former Deputy Head of Digital at the Department of Health, on his learnings about running effective webchats (and on digital engagement generally):

Tim Lloyd on digital engagement and webchats from Steph at Helpful Technology on Vimeo.

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“Yammer?” a colleague once asked, “isn’t that a Black Country word?”

Actually, no. It’s a web-based platform to allow people from the same organisation to talk to each other.

Used by 80,000 comanies as of Septrember 2010, it’s a way of sharing ideas, links to useful websites and for asking for help to crack a problem.

You need your organisation’s email address to access it so it’s a walled garden to allow discussion that cuts across directorates and teams.

The best thing of all?

It’s free.

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To try and relay some of the worries mentioned above and which we’ve heard about first-hand through our Learning Community, Learning Pool decided to create Facebook: a quick guide for people in and around government.

The guide provides a quick overview of how to set-up a Facebook page and the useful things to bear in mind as a government organisation when doing so.

Despite being labelled as a social networking site, it can be effectively used as an engagement site between government organisations and members of thet public that they are finding it increasingly difficult to connect with.

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We shared our first Twitter Guide in December 2009.

Since then the guide has been downloaded by members of the public sector from throughout the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand who’ve used it help them incorporate Twitter as a part of their overall Social Media Strategy.

The guide was written by Dave Briggs, who has been promoting the use of interactive websites and social networking in government for the last five years, and has been a keen user of Twitter since early 2007.

Dave runs the hugely popular blog DavePress and is Director of Kind of Digital which are both concerned with encouraging innovation through technology in the public sector.

Our Twitter quick start guide has been up-dated to take into account the recent changes in the service’s functionality.

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I suggested we create a buddy press test site on my teams hosting and we explore it further with some of his other colleagues the following week.

So that is what we did,  we sat down and went through the out of the box features and they loved it…we refined some of the features and created some additional privacy which took about 2-3 hours  - we didn’t even create any visual design aspects, as we said we could apply these at any time once they had them created. We then handed over a fully functioning online network platform last week and they launched it last Friday!

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Do link to related appropriate articles.

Do identify yourself and your affiliation.

Do tell the truth and use spell check.

Do treat others with respect.

Do correct misinformation politely.

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Because Mark’s updates were coming from a verifiable, official source they proved helpful to other people in Wolverhampton trying to make sense of what was going on. Steph Jennings of the WV11 blog said: “When we set up WV11 we made a decision that we’d only ever report things if we knew were fact, so getting updates from Mark and other police officers was really valuable.”

Steph and James relayed Mark’s updates regularly to their Facebook page and blog – pouring cold water on myths that there had disturbances at the Bentley Bridge shopping centre in Wednesfield (which, by the way, is WV11). The work they did appears to have had an invaluable effect.

“After a while, people were coming onto the Facebook page and correcting what other people were saying [when they were rumours]. People were saying things like: ‘I think you should just listen to what the guys running the site are saying.’”
Of course, Mark’s tweets weren’t just being followed by the WV11 blog – but by more traditional news sources, too.

At one point, Mark says, the content of an update found its way on to Sky News – perhaps more proof if it was needed of the value and timeliness of the information he was providing.

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And, as has been our style since the beginning, we’re practicing what we preach. This infographic demonstrates how to repurpose existing content in a different media format, get more bang from your archives, and reach new and different audiences in the process.
The graphic is based on 21 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue by Copyblogger guest writer Danny Iny. We’ve re-imagined the way to present these content-creation tips, while adding a meta-fabulous #22 (you’ll see why).

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Know your audience

What makes your blog stand out in its field? This can be a daunting question, especially when comparing yourself to more experienced bloggers. As a PhD student or Early Career Researcher, your fresh approach to your subject is your strength. Some of the best blogs highlight the work-in-progress aspect of research – your readers will return to your blog to see how your methodology is developing.

Find a style that suits you and stick to it! It’s good to be informal but show your grasp of materials and theories. Be clear about what’s relevant to your readers and your style will flow naturally. Don’t forget: insight is important but so is expression.

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Here at Cornwall Council, based on the last 12 months statistics, we get an average of 189 views each week of our Vimeo hosted external facing films, (we have internal films as well) which range from Fire recruitment and safety films to clips from third party sources, such as BBC News, that are relevant for our local audience. Now this isn’t too bad a figure but there are always ways that we can do much more to boost this number.

Unlocking the key to getting more video views has always been a challenge. So this got me thinking about ways in which we can firstly attract viewers to the film and then get them to engage with it and take something from it. Rule number one deals with film in general whereas the remaining points are much more focussed on getting visitors to view your film among the crowd on a sharif site such as You Tube or Vimeo.

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Starting out

Deliberately called it Coventry – (“who would become a fan of Coventry City Council? About 5 people”)

Also allows them to put out press releases from partner organisations (like the Herbert Art Gallery)

Started November 2009 as a pilot experiment, let’s see what happens

Started out putting out the same press releases as on the website

Got 500 fans in 2 months

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Last year, the Online and Social Media Division helped produce the 2010 Social Media Book. While this is an excellent product, it only scratched the surface of Army social media use. We decided it was time to produce a document that provided more guidance, additional case studies and more advanced tips and best practices. 

So here it is, the 2011 Army Social Media Handbook! This document provides extensive social media guidance. It contains information for Army leaders, guidance for Army Families, operations security tips, branding information, checklists, regulations and frequently asked questions.

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Today is polling day in the county council and European Parliamentary elections. It’s an important date in the calendar. Politically it could turn out to be a significant vote for this county. It’s will also be of significance to this team and the work we do whatever the political outcome.

In a lot of ways it feels as if this day has been a long time coming as planning and work on how we will cover the election on our website and in the greater online space began at the tail end of last year. In smaller ways I would still like a bit more time to tweak and improve and do even more than we have. But time and voting waits for no web team and so here we are: polling day 2009.

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This communications planning pack is designed to help you to create an action orientated comms plan using the popular mind mapping technique …

1. on each page, using the topic at the centre of the page as your guide … write what comes to mind, drawing a branch from the main topic for each idea or thought. keep it to as few words as possible.

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Social media is changing the way we work, socialise and govern. It can also help your council save money. This new publication shows how you can use social media to achieve more for less.

People turn to the web to find out about many things – from days out, entertainment and shopping, to making connections with friends and colleagues. They expect to be able to comment and contribute to everything, from online versions of newspapers to items they purchase from online retailers like Amazon.

Citizens will increasingly expect local government to provide its services online with the same level of interactivity that they find elsewhere. It wasn’t that long ago that email was a novel way to contact your councillor. Many councillors are already interacting with the people they represent online through social media, and it won’t be long before this is a common expectation, too.

Some practical guidance to help councillors use social media has been developed by:

Local Government (LG) Improvement and Development (formerly IDeA)
the Leadership Centre for Local Government
the National Association of Local Councils and Standards for England.

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It frustrates me that organisations still seem to think they can manage their reputations by controlling what information is spread about them.

This is simply not possible anymore, and attempting it just makes you seem heavy-handed and out of touch. Far better to listen to what other people are saying about you and engage when appropriate.

The US Air Force produced a useful guide to blog assessment which susequently found its way onto the internet. It’s good, but I wanted something more generic, in plainer English, and more suitable for UK Third Sector organisations.

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Wow, your facebook fanpage looks uber cool. But lol! What is this? I can see some angry comments probably from your clients or former clients raising their ugly heads in the middle of such blissful state. Does not sound cool huh? Now, what you are supposed to do if you face the situation? Would login in and delete the inflammatory comments from the posts or will you take some time out of your hectic schedule and concentrate on finding out the reason why the person is so much upset? It is your pick. But for those who are clueless and looking for a solution to deal with disgruntled facebook fans, this post is dedicate for them.

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Hopefully those who go for job [Head of Children’s Services] have a good idea about what to expect after watching potential colleagues and the previous Head of Children’s Services on YouTube.

What did we do? Simon Burch, our Chief Officer for Social Care and Health explained:

“This is a key post at an exciting time and in order to give candidates a flavour of what we are doing in Monmouthshire we have have done some short YouTube videos to give people a better feel for us here in Monmouthshire. None of us made it to RADA though so please concentrate on the message, not the messenger!

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How do you evaluate the cost-benefit of the government’s digital engagement? As a result of the Improving government online review of measurement standards, several interesting discussions were started around extending the work on valuing and evaluating websites to all digital media.

Evaluation is a key priority for Government communicators. Matt Tee, Permanent Secretary and Head of Profession Government Communications, has prioritised evaluation as a key area of focus, along with skills and behaviour change. This is not surprising given the current economic climate. Government has to account for every pound spent and that means evaluating our communications activity to demonstrate cost-effectiveness.

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I have been asked to develop the social media strategy for the department where I am currently based, and have spent quite some time reading, learning, stealing/collaborating with colleagues.

I am not convinced that a strategy is the right way anyway. Stephen Hale sent me down the path of principles and so here I am. It would be great to get some feedback on these.

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Even though it feels like Facebook has been part of our lives forever, Facebook “pages” for business have only been with us for just three years.
Businesses are still learning the most effective ways to engage with fans. The questions often being asked are:

1. How often should we post?

2. What type of posts will drive fan engagement?

3. When should we publish our wall updates?

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As councils gear up to tackle some of the biggest changes in local government for decades, there’s never been a more important time for honest conversations with our residents.

Some of these conversations will take place in community centres, council chambers, on the doorsteps of homes and across the pages of local newspapers – just as they have done for centuries. Increasingly though, conversations about the future of communities and neighbourhoods and the things that really matter to local people are happening in virtual meeting places; it’s up to councils to play an active part in these conversations wherever they are.

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Social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world – and at the moment that’s often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.

Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break out of all these loops. It’s quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it’s relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways. It communicates bottom-line results and ‘take aways’ in clear language, yet with due regard to methods issues and quality of evidence. In multi-author blogs like this one, and all our blogs, it helps create multi-disciplinary understanding and joining-up of previously siloed knowledge. (Twitter is a huge supplementary help, in forcing academics to communicate key messages in 140 characters!)

Academic blogging gets your work and research out to a potentially massive audience at very, very low cost and relative amount of effort. With platforms like WordPress (which we use here), you can set up a blog and have your first article online in no more than 10 minutes. Recent research from the World Bank has shown that blogging about an academic article can lead to hundreds of new readers when before there were only a handful. Blogging in multi-author blogs is a great way to build knowledge of your work, to grow readership of useful articles and research reports, to build up citations, and to foster debate across academia, government, civil society and the public in general.

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A case study presented by Kate Bradstreet, Senior Director of Communication from the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, and Debbie Dickinson, digital media and communications strategist, Department of Climate Change and Energy EfficiencyMs Bradstreet first took the audience on a tour of the clean energy future site, explaining the main driver of traffic was actually a household assistance calculator, but also integrating Twitter and videos.

Ms Dickinson explained that the whole campaign was about getting a government voice into a discussion which was already ongoing in the social media space. Ms Bradstreet said the department has had 47,000 views of their YouTube videos.

The department developed case studies to show the impact of carbon pricing on different people. Many of the case studies were based on Treasury modelling.

Ms Bradstreet said their Facebook risk strategy included a 24-hour moderation policy if needed, but the fact the Facebook page is largely self monitoring and worst values were not realised.

Ms Bradstreet said there was some nervousness around negative comments but that has improved. Saying most Facebook posts have between 20 to 40 comments.

The Clean Energy Future site was built using WordPress and most of the design was done in-house. With the campaign’s Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all run by four people. Ms Bradstreet said the most significant costs were probably from animation and videos, and that a lot of the work was done in-house by a very tech savvy employee.

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Unless you know who is talking about you and the issues you want to know about, you can’t begin the process of engaging with them online. We’ve started building simple online Dashboards for policy and press teams using free online tools and information feeds, to help teams take their first steps in social media in an easy and low- intensity way.

Overview

Our Dashboards are made up of a customised Netvibes page with a shared login for a small team to use. Netvibes is a free, web- based personal web portal or blog aggregator tool (similar to iGoogle or Pageflakes) which allows you to customise a screen with a number of widgets displaying RSS feeds, weather updates, search forms and more.

Behind this page sits a Google Reader account which groups a number of feeds together using tags. The Netvibes page draws in these grouped feeds into a single widget (e.g. ‘Specialist Media’ rather than having separate widgets for Education Guardian, Times Higher Ed, etc). Because the dashboards are powered by a Google Reader account, the users can graduate to a full feed reader once they become more confident following online debates.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from a regular cuttings service?

The Dashboards use Google Blog Search to scan blogs as well as mainstream news services. They offer a wider range of sources, and work in real-time. But we won’t be getting rid of cuttings anytime soon.

Why not sign up to Google Alerts?

We do use Google Alerts too. But everyone gets too much email, and Dashboards provide a way of structuring information more neatly, so you can scan specialist media separately from stakeholder news.

Why not just set everyone up with feed readers?

Finding and monitoring blog feeds directly can be overwhelming at first – so many unread items, so many feeds. The Dashboards are one-page highlights of the most recent stories grouped into logical categories: specialist media, ministerial mentions, keyword mentions and stakeholder news. Plus, it means we can incorporate other widgets such as shared bookmarks and Post-it style help notes.

Can I do the same?

Absolutely – we’ve documented and published our methodology in the spirit of open source. Please build on and improve what we’ve described here.

Ten steps to building a Dashboard

1. Gather the keywords and sources you want to track. We use a simple online survey which asks four questions:

• In a sentence, how would you describe your role/area of interest?
• Which publications or newsletters do you currently get information from? For example, which trade journals or email newsletters do you subscribe to, if any? Are there particular journalists or opinion-formers you’d like to track?
• Which organisations are you particularly interested in keeping up to date with? These might be delivery partners funded by DIUS, stakeholders such as the CBI or key customers
• Please suggest 10 or 15 keywords which best describe what you do: These work best when they are specific phrases, e.g. ‘Apprenticeships’ rather than ‘Training’

2. Set up a Google Reader account for the Dashboard. Go to www.google.com/reader and sign up for a new account. If you can set up a new email mailbox or alias for the user, that helps to keep things simple.

3. Research and collate the RSS feeds relating to each of the keywords and sources required, and add them to Google Reader. The time- consuming bit. Working through each keyword, find the available feeds:

Specialist media and stakeholder news: visit each site and hunt for the RSS feed. Firefox helps with this task as it makes the feeds autodiscoverable and the RSS button appears in the browser address bar.

Ministerial/keyword mentions: use Google Blog search and Google News search to find matching UK posts and articles within the past week, and subscribe to the RSS feed of the results

In Google Reader, use the green ‘Add subscription’ button to add each one to the list of feeds.

4. Tag the feeds into categories, and make the aggregated feeds public.

To make the dashboard manageable, we use Google Reader’s tagging of feeds into folders to create aggregated feeds which combine, for example, all Specialist Media feeds into one. The process is a bit fiddly, but worth the effort:

Choose the feed, and assign a tag to it from the Folder settings dropdown. Once you’ve organised your feeds into neat folders, you need to make these public so the feed can be used by the Dashboard page. Click on ‘Manage subscriptions’, then ‘Tags’, and make each tag public.

Finally, ‘view public page’ for each aggregated feed and grab the RSS feed for this page. Again, Firefox helps with this as the RSS feed button is displayed in the address bar.

5. Set up a Netvibes account. Go to www.netvibes.com and sign up with the email alias/account you’ve used for your Google Reader account.

6. Empty out and brand the Netvibes page. By default, the Netvibes page has various widgets pre-installed. You can customise the look and feel within the ‘Settings’ area, and remove the default widgets by hovering over and clicking the trash icon.

7. Create new widgets on the Netvibes page for each aggregated feed.

Choose ‘Add content’ from the top-left corner and ‘Add a feed’. Paste in the RSS feed URL from the public page you created in Google Reader in Step 4. Check the preview is OK and then add the widget to your page.

8. Customise each feed widget. Hover over the widget and click edit to customise the look and feel, number of items displayed and title.

9. Add webnotes (like an online Post-it note) to describe the content of each feed widget. The drawback to aggregating feeds is remembering what each one comprises. Add a ‘webnote’ widget to list the sources. Sometimes we also add other widgets – such as an area for shared bookmarks or links.

10. Document the logins and coach the user on how to use their Dashboard. Ta-da. Hopefully the Dashboard is chock full of relevant, juicy sources. If there’s a lot of noise in some of the aggregated feeds (US stories, random stuff etc) try to refine the keywords used in the Google Blog and News searches within the Google Reader feed. Any changes you make to the Google Reader feed setup is automatically reflected in the Dashboard page, thanks to the lovely aggregated feeds.

If the feed reading bug strikes, then you can pass on details of the Google Reader account, and your user can start to take on the management and updates of the Dashboard themselves – or maybe graduate to reading feeds in a regular RSS reader.

Questions or Feedback?

Written by: Michelle Lyons & Steph Gray

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