I don’t believe in requiring all council staff to communicate when they would prefer not too.

I live next to a cemetery. I see a lot of problems in the service which could be addressed through better communication. The cems&crems is always trying to do awareness raising with cemetery open days (once a year) and other things. (We do go to these, we’re weird we know.) But rather than put on bizarre hearse parades, maybe an interactive website? Maybe the grave maintenance guys could Twitter, I dunno. But certainly local people would benefit from having clearer information about what’s ok in terms of graveside tributes. Lots of people come looking for information on their ancestors, I bet a little more info online wouldn’t hurt and would channel a lot of requests elsewhere. And my local happens to be packed with minor celebs from the music hall days, there could be a lot of local history interest and more information that people could share.

There are different ways for employees to benefit – any probably every employee can benefit in at least one way (but this comes from the fact we can give social media a very large reading… it covers a significant number of tools and phenomena). Local authority employees could:

* Benefit as consumers (RSS reading; professional development opportunities etc.)

* Benefit as producers (Sharing news through social media; providing public data for innovation; using rich media (video etc.) to get beyond plain text documents)

* Benefit as conversationalists / communicators (Either in small close networks, or in open social media spaces)

But, there may be costs to engagement. For example, the grave digger could twitter – but he would need access to a mobile phone capable of easy twittering. The detached youth worker would really benefit from having access to online video and an online network from a smart-phone whilst out on the streets on a Friday night… but that’s got significant budget implications. When we think of the staff who are not already seated at desks where unblocking social media access is the only issue – we end up with a lot more of a cost-benefit analysis to work through.

The other implication of imagining a social media-enabled local authority I’m struck by is the power of social media in breaking down organisational barriers and hierarchies. You might ask the question “Which council workers would no longer need to be council workers if social media were adopted?” (ambiguity of question intended…)

I’m not sugegsted all coucnil employees should be using this stuff, I m curious though if we can think of any that couldn’t/oughtn’t. Grave diggers would make great twitteres ” digging a grave” “oiling my shovel” ” taking a spot of tea”.

No but seriously, Despite the fact that I agree with the principle, I can understand why local authorities are wary of opening up to social media in some situations. For example Local authorities have statutory duties to enforce various laws. If a council employee gives the wrong advice in a comment on Facebook, or Twitter or something, does that constitute ‘official’ advice? And if it does, given the extremely long memory of the internet imagine the implications of one wee slip? There some aspects of Local Authority work that probably need to remain more ‘formal’ – that’s not to say they need to stay on paper though :)

http://twitter.com/Stephen_Cross/statuses/1227900185

Stephen_Cross @podnosh Hopefully very few at Hillingdon: with a CEO who seems to ‘get it’, an LGComms chair and a SOCITM president my job should be easy

If social media is:
sharing, letting go of power/ownership/hierachy, doing little things that contribute to something you feel passionate about, communicating constantly, engaging in dialogues, being prepared to change your thinking several times in a day or even hour, creating ways of doing things more efficiently because you want to and not because anyone’s telling you, being in touch with a much wider group of people than you can physically communicate with and finding ways that people can find you intuitively when they want you…
then, no, there are no jobs that wouldn’t benefit from a bit of that.

But if it’s just a few managers contributing to an atmosphere of fear by making their minions use Twitter to ‘engage’ cheaply without any understanding of why, then it’s not really going to add much value for anyone. God forbid we get a wave of finance administrators following in the wake of marketers and reluctant journalists :roll:

That’s interesting and useful of its self, but what’s really interesting is that there might be some real outcomes from it (we are planning a social media project – when we get the time).

No but seriously, having working in a local authority in a campaigning role it can be quite difficult to make sure everyone is “on message”. That’s the same for any large organisation, but particularly important in local authorities which by their nature are extremely political – and there’s nothing more cut throat than local politics. So, I’d love it if all council staff were encouraged to make more use of social media. On the other hand, some people might be great administrators/policy wonks/number crunchers or whatever, but terrible communicators. And the web has a very, very long memory. And then there’s the statutory duties councils have… one wrong bit of advice from someone on the web and the council is liable for all sorts of stuff. I can see why people in Local authorities are wary.