Social media and councils – the point is?

January 19, 2011

As usual, thanks to Nic Streatfeild for keeping me up-to-date with UK Councils Social Media Reputation Index – December 2010. Living where I do and seeing some of the ‘tweets’, I now realise why some of the scores are as high as they are! If you Twitter, you will score – it doesn’t matter that what you send out is entirely irrelevant to your population, it’s of no account that you are diluting the twittersphere with near-drivel, the ‘tweets’ add to your score!

In the world of spin, the more press releases one gets to the media and the more they publish, the higher one’s estimation can sometimes be (if only in ‘spin’world). Publishing social media releases for the sake of it, is just the e-extension of that somewhat cynical world.

I hope I know ROL and Nic well enough to realise that is not the intention, it’s just that in my opinion high scoring doesn’t necessarily mean good citizen engagement…

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Voice of the Customer

May 27, 2010

My thanks to Nic Streatfeild, founder of rol Ltd the developers of GovMetric, for an email about his latest posting on his newish blog. Perhaps if I’d kept up with his Tweets I might have realised without the prompt!

GovMetric had the sense to realise that the Internet is not the only channel and so record feedback across the available ones, e.g. web, face-to-face and telephone.

When I started my research Nic was kind enough to meet up in Leicester for a chat about it and even offered access to anonymised data, which in the end I didn’t take up, but they’ve now taken a different approach and created the UK Councils Monthly Buzz Index out of their CouncilMonitor tool! So as well as reporting back citizen feedback via GovMetric they’re also trawling social media for feedback on councils. This seems a little like Professor Ann Macintosh’s IMPACT development work for the EU reported earlier, but focused on specific councils.

This experiment may or may not succeed but if nothing else will reveal some interesting trends across the GovMetric users. Unfortunately, for Nic and GovMetric my council and most of the others in North Yorkshire have signed up with a competitor, CMetrix. It’s nothing personal, just Yorkshire folk being canny with their money. What also may be interesting is when we can compare data across five districts and a county council.

My list of all the similar systems to GovMetric and CMetrix is still available  at Company table V8.

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Posted by greatemancipator