By Will McInnes

6 reasons why Brighton & Hove Council are right to hire a social media specialist

Disclosure: Our social media agency is currently conducting a piece of social media research for Brighton & Hove City Council, who we are proud to have as a client. We work with them primarily because we care about this city and because we believe this work and this movement matters.

So the background is that our local council is hiring for a new role to join the communications department to "increase visibility, build our brand and learn about our audiences by utilising social media".

The local newspaper, The Argus, took a disappointingly critical viewpoint in my opinion so I felt I had to chip in with a different perspective - one passionately for Brighton, but tempered with experiences in how large organisations are changing with the new digital era.

There are 6 reasons why I think this is a significant and smart step for the citizens of Brighton & Hove, who the council must serve:

1. We are there

The council works for us.
We are spending more time in social spaces and less time consuming and paying attention to traditional media.
To work for us, they must communicate with us.
Simply, they must be where we are - and we are in these new social spaces.

As a crude yardstick the Brighton network on Facebook is marginally larger than the population of Brighton so there is some substantial engagement or opportunity available (though many sections of our population will not be represented there). At the other end of the mass to niche continuum, the work of SCIP and the rest of our digital community has created little clusters of very niche community sites such as Prestonville Postblog and Coldean Residents Association.

We are there. They (BHCC) must be too.

2. Getting value for money

All large organisations carry an overhead in communicating (just internal communications, for anyone that's come across it in a team larger than 20, is gigantic, let alone external comms).

Most organisations are adapting their communications spend from how we used to consume media to how we do today. In our work with our client base we know that the sparkliest, bravest blue-chip brands are only part-way on this journey.

What drives all of these organisations is the knowledge that if they spend more money where we are, and less where we aren't, then they will get higher levels of engagement, better results, and at less wasted communication £££.

Brighton & Hove City Council, like all major organisations, can get better value for money and free up more resources for elsewhere in the city by improving its communications mix.

As citizens, it makes sense to support them in this.

3. Leading the digital way

For me personally this is huge, as someone that grew up here, and who passionately understands the quality and potential of what we have in Brighton and wants to see it succeed.

Brighton is leading, digitally.

Economically, my understanding is that our biggest sectors in the city are public sector, followed by health and financial (a significant chunk of the latter being American Express) and then it is Creative Industries. Our digital community is the biggest chunk of Creative Industries.

Our sector is growing fast. We have more than 800 companies employing more than 8,000 people in digital.

A BBC journalist recently commented to Phil Jones, CEO of Wired Sussex and the man that gave me this information, that he reckoned proportionally we have the biggest digital community in the UK. I agree and hope somehow we can prove this.

We have talent in so many different flavours of digital:

• In mobile
• In search
• In virtual worlds - both of whom's only HQs outside of California are HERE in Brighton
• In user experience
• In social media
• In web development
• In e-learning
• In video games (or is that another sector - I dunno)

Talent enough that in the recent HSBC 'Super Cities' report, which speculated about the tier of cities that would emerge as power-players in the knowledge economy, Brighton was selected as one of the five in the UK.

The work of Wired Sussex and its committed team and board* is all about helping that happen. This is an active work in progress. (* Another disclosure: I am a board member at Wired Sussex).

So we need more attention and recognition from the big policy makers and funders to support this upstart community. To recognise its value now, but its significant strategic value tomorrow.

Gradually that is happening.

To speed that up we need momentum: momentum that is powered by an understanding of the new digital age within our council - a big player in this; within our local media community; within central government.

And across the board, at every 'touchpoint' we need to lead - to demonstrate how the Internet can be harnessed to make real differences to the real world. For me, that absolutely includes excellence and pioneering with Brighton & Hove City Council. It transcends. In fact, it reminds me of how Curtis James invested his time speaking with the management of Brighton Station to see if they could improve their appearance and customer experience, given that it was the moment of arrival for so many visiting our city. It all matters.

Personally, as a citizen, I buy the very smallest riskiest tiniest seed of that for 24,402 - £ 28,353.

4. Change is very hard in big organisations

Other than our work with Brighton & Hove City Council, our work is exclusively for much bigger organisations: from Coca-Cola through to Department of Health, WWF to HSBC.

Working with them, we see how hard change is. The barriers to change are significant.

Even our most pioneering clients find it hard to transition to a social online world. They must bring their legal people along on the journey, their HR folk, their customer service people, their product managers (funnily enough, sometimes the hardest to convince - can be harder than legal). It's not easy.

So what they tend to do is invest in both advancement across the board - where we train their whole press team, their whole marketing organisation, create policies for all employees, encourage participation broadly - and invest in advancement in concentrated ways. During our time working with them both BMW and Channel 4 have created dedicated roles to address social media.

This isn't saying 'oh my, if we hire this one egg-headed Facebook fiend all of our woes will fly away'.

This is saying 'one way to make these changes might be to create an internal expert and ambassador that has the time and space to focus on this and get results by working with their colleagues'.

Although I wasn't involved in BHCC's thinking on the matter, I'd guess this was part of their plan. Not to silo and ghettoize Social Media, but to appoint a gardener-in-chief to help others with their nurturing and growing.

Again, I buy that as a citizen.

5. Supporting change within the council

In my contact with the council I have found that they understand the possibilities of the social web, and have the appetite to harness them as much as any of our clients.

These are the people I have personally met and talked with that seem to get the opportunity that social media presents them to engage and do the Council's work better:

• Council leader Mary Mears (who mentioned her 'much more au fait' colleague Counciller Ayas Fallon-Khan, who is I have heard a big digital advocate)
• John Shewell, Head of Corporate Communications
• Jake Barlow, Head of Marketing
• Yvette Bordley, Senior Marketing Officer
• then Acting Chief Executive Alex Bailey
• Anthony Zacharzewski, Acting Director of Strategy & Governance

If these guys, a tiny cross-section representing the leadership and the communications team, can lead the vanguard and help their organisation listen and engage and empower other parts of the council to also move with the times, then I buy that.

More importantly, we should support them. Change is horrifically hard. Change inside public organisations is generally thought to be even harder. More power to their digital elbows I say.

Our public servants are trying to move with the times. I want to help them with that.

6. To rise above the one-eyed perspective of The Argus

My intent has been to keep this as positive as possible. As a supplier to the council I am very badly placed to provide a credible riposte to one of their challengers. I also believe in the role and duty of the media to interrogate society's organisations and keep us all on our toes. We need more of that - not less.

But I wanted more from The Argus on this story, especially given that their Web Editor Jo Waddsworth has done such good work bringing their content to social spaces...

You'd have thought it would be hypocritical to criticise the very same investment of resources and decision-making, but not this time. Irritating and disappointing, given this context.

Some kinda positive summary :-)

This matters.

Brighton has an incredible opportunity. It has a magnificent digitally-enhanced future available to it. Let's pull together and have a group hug and get behind it. If the City Council are up for it, it's one more force for good, and one less barrier in the way.

SUPERRRRR CITY.

Join in: Transitions Online bridgecamp, Riga 5th & 6th February

1. Social media can be navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual boosheet.
2. Social media can also enable significant REAL change in the world.

Most of us spend too much doing too much #1.
But here is a brilliant, interesting, international opportunity to have a crack at #2.

The following is written by the excellent Dan McQuillan who is the lead digital guy at The Make Your Mark Campaign (a NixonMcInnes client) and who spends his spare time doing cool stuff like Social Innovation Camp.

If I didn't already have of worky time away from home already booked for Feb and March, I'd be on this quicker than you can say 'oh, look there's another celebrity broadcasting himself through Twitter'.

Over to Dan:

i'm helping organise a bridgecamp (a techs + NGOs
barcamp) in riga on 5th + 6th Feb, run by Transitions Online
(http://www.tol.cz/) and i'm looking for a few folk who'd like to come
& contribute. It'd be on a voluntary basis, but Transitions Online
would cover travel and accomodation.

It's a wrap-up for a 12 month project to boost web tools and
strategies for NGOs in the new member states of the EU, especially
around transparency, anti-corruption etc.

i did a session at their seminar in prague last year (the blog post
has some details:
http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/crowdsourcing_for_transparency) and
it was an inspiring experience. some of these folk are really on the
frontline. On the other hand, they're not that savvy about how to make
the most impact with digital.

part of the feb event will be trying to accelerate some of the project
ideas generated from last year (http://techtools.tol.org/marketplace).
four of the projects have had some developer time over the last couple
of months but i'm not too sure how much has been achieved.

but basically they've left it up to me to propose the shape of the two
days and i'm keen to expose them to some experienced developers,
digital marketers and social media campaigners. i'm sure that if they can 'get' a few key ideas, they could make a real difference in their countries.

i'm especially interested in social media marketing / buzz monitoring / user experience types.

people can contact me via http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/contact or
dm me @danmcquillan

So if you'd like to kick up a level from navel-gazing and selling handbags to spending a weekend in Riga (cool, cool city) helping real people make a real difference to their real world, get involved :)

Noising vs. Thinking vs. Executing

For me the most attractive thing about working in this sweet scented many-petalled flower of the internet plus culture plus business plus everything else is the bees that gather, drawn in inexorably, unstoppably, magnetised by an invisible something.

It's the people, stupid :)

And the people are the most amazing I've ever spent time with.
From across industries. From across national boundaries.
I've met and keep meeting sah-weeeeet people through this Internet thing.

Fortunately we're different enough to not be a bunch of bland, beige generic robots, but there's some shared stuff:

• A love of the new (clearly)
• An associated openness and optimism
• Willingness to get stuck in
• Social conscience too

It's an attitude.
Hunkydory.

What I'm interested to see now, as the tribe grows in strength, size and gelledness, is what we can do together...

To achieve anything I sorta wonder what % of our collective time and energy is distributed across three different time-buckets: Noising, Thinking & Executing at the moment.

Noising -
Noising is the art of making noise.
It's the echoing of the echo chamber - the embellishing and amplifying of someone else's thought or message. Noising is usually higher quantity, lower quality.
It's the continuous partial attention-powered chitter-chatter on Twitter, the blogging, the unconferencing, the making of NOISE.

Thinking -
Thinking is what is says on the tin.
It's quiet time considering, reflecting and generating high quality thoughts, insights and ideas.
It is reinterpreting existing thoughts and concepts - nothing is new, as they say, but it's an attempt to move things forward.
Thinking doesn't 'do' in the operational sense, other than generating and documenting.
Thinking can be collaborative or independently done, and can include workshops, high quality conversations and dialogue, brainstorming and writing.

Executing -
Executing is getting things done.
It is the starting the company to exploit the thought or technology or market opportunity.
Executing leads to startups, working groups, new code, new stuff, new connections, teams, revenues.
Executing is concerned only with what gets done, with results and with real-world achievements and milestones.

So where does all of this leave us, as I like to ask?

• I wonder how your time splits out?
• I wonder how mine splits out?
• I wonder how the A-list split out between these groups?
• I wonder if there's an optimal blend for an individual?
• Or whether given personality types and natural strengths and weaknesess a better unit for judging the optimal blend is a team or a network - e.g. how much noise vs. think vs. executing do we need in the ideal project team (a network)?

And in a roundabout way what I'm also saying here, implicitly, is that I believe we spend too much time Noising and chasing breaking non-news and the latest social media handbag (today: Cuil, tomorrow: Crudola), and nowhere near enough time Executing.

Ratings and reviews are considered pedestrian by us strident web types - so why haven't we driven forward services and hubs exposing industries and worlds to this disruptive, brilliant innovation?

Online social networks are like SO 1990s for us - we're into microblogging and mobile social networks - but what about the company selling online social networks for vertical industries for gazillions, where did they spend their time - Noising or Thinking then Executing?

I think our personal characteristics mean we move on too quickly, bored by something as soon as we have a handle on it (I think I'm writing about me here), but too quickly to actually give something back to the world - to see how to broker the new new in a way that provides value to normal people.

Maybe a more powerful loop than constantly learning and updating every day would be getting very deep into a pocket and then exploiting and applying that knowledge for the next 6 months - 2 years, and then starting the loop again? Developing towering epic impactful tools and resources each time, whilst our lacklustre buddies are impeccably up to date on the feature set of the latest latest and still treading water, despite brains crammed with value?

Are we applying what we have to give?
Or are we continually topping it up in 0.5% increments?

Who are the Noisers, Thinkers and Executors?
What are you best at?
How can you leverage and exploit what you already have?

...impact, results, real-world change. Execution is begging you to join her.

Peer to peer spam

Spam used to be broadcast: one-to-many.
An interesting side effect of online social networks and the tools which enable user-generated content is people spamming one another in smaller but equally annoying ways.

I've had two in 2 days on Facebook - one offering me fixes to a problem I don't have (£20) and the other pumping a Facebook Poker app ('it's the best I've seen') which could also be a hacked account.

As social technology permits frictionless communication, our behaviour as technology users will need to catch up with the implications, with new codes of conduct (implicit and explicit) governing what is and isn't cool.

Sending everyone in your Facebook friends a promotional message: Not cool.

The Age of Snark

Click on image to expand

In the old days we only heard customers when we chose to.

We had to decide to listen, and even when we did, to really hear them we had to listen hard.

We heard them when we held expensive, small scale and very tame focus groups.

We heard them when we allowed the call centre operatives to eventually escalate something they and the customer base had known about for weeks or months or years or decades.

We filtered, selected, and avoided.

As organisations we suffered from selective deafness, like that old grandmother in the corner, deaf to everything but the bits she wanted to hear. Smart with it. Deaf to the bad. But noisy.

Inbound, it was all optional.
Our input mechanism was mainly a dumb terminal, a slave to the beast, feedback filtered at every stage on the way to the top: 'everything is fine', the most default finding.

Yet our output was non-optional: we broadcast and blared out. Interruption.

Importantly, they - consumers, clients, buyers - were loyal because it was hard to find alternatives.

That was The Age of 'Control' (in inverted commas).

[It felt like control. And it probably was, of sorts. Consumers were isolated and media channels were intermediated and finite. But real total absolute control never existed. See Ceauşescu, non?]

Flip forward not one but two steps from here, The Age of Control, and we find that in the new world we will have neat, simple, usable tools that flow feedback between supplier and client like stock price data in a live marketplace.

In this happy sunshiney world:

Listening will be a minute-by-minute task, not a daily check, not a monthly clippings report or quarterly customer service review.

Like it is already at the major news organisations websites, where live analytics on what's hot and what's not drive the news agenda and business behaviour.

Like it is already at smart online retailers where merchandising decisions are truly dynamic and flow in realtime.

Like it is already at the fewest of the few digital PR agencies, where the finger really is on the binary pulse.

Blurred organisational edges will permit and even welcome the effortless osmosis of information betwixt and between. Solutions, ideas and innovations marketplaces will be the norm - Dell Ideastorm will look like the simple early prototype it probably is.

APIs, affiliate programmes, widgets and other shades of distributed goodness will be givens, seeding a thousand minnows and cuttlefish around the core service/site, distributing life beyond the original source: the reef, the brand, the site, the centre of that ecosystem.

Importantly, loyalty will return because time poor clients will be happier with mature service-led organisations that truly walk the customer-centred talk.

This will be The Age of Dialogue...

But right now we are somewhere betwixt the two.

Not yet in the dreamlike sunny paradise of Dialogue, yet not any more in the similarly comfortable Age of 'Control', instead we are in the turbulent transitory rolling seas of a different age.

A temporary age, thank god.

A painful, confusing changed ocean away from this Utopian destination where instead we are caught with rudimentary and dated Age of Control ways of working, processes, tools, people and expectations from our publics, but where the feedback we receive is entirely different, entirely unmanaged and unmanageable by our current systems, entirely uncontrollable.

Today is pain and confusion, fear and loathing.
Today's business is badly equipped for the world today...

So welcome, friends, to The Age of Snark.

Like boiling bilious lava, white-hot furious consumers vent wherever they find an outlet - spraying burning fluorescent looping lances of aggregated, unified rage.

Customers like me and you are disloyal and resent having to be so for the time and hassle it costs them.

At conferences with an internet savvy gamut, audiences pour into public and private online spaces to poll one another and quickly establish consensus before the speaker has finished, long before she has left the platform, and an age before the tired organiser has collected the lies and gladhanding half-truths scrawled on yellow paper questionnaires.

See Innovation Edge, Future of Web Design or Chinwag Measuring Social Media. All well respected events produced by well loved people. All now exposed to the ruthlessness of public, immediate feedback.

Worse still, our inner cowards prevail in such circumstances: it's easier to leave a nasty review than ask for the manager; to snark at the back of the conference rather than find the organiser and feedback face-to-face.

What will change and when?

My view is that right now we're in a unique point in this transition, at the very fulcrum of change, where the consumer conversations have flooded online but the organisations don't yet have the infrastructure and time to tap into and address those conversations.

Only 10% (at most) of the people in groups I work with at major brands have even Google Alerts set up. Online monitoring, umm, hmmm, ahem, yeahhh.

Very few major brands have yet invested in proper buzz monitoring solutions so they simply don't yet even have an ear to the networked chatter. Or a regular, known presence on places of online congregation (such as consumer forums).

And until they do, they won't think about how to respond, who should respond, and what to do with that new incoming knowledge within the business.

This is The Age of Snark (complete with capital letters).

As those things (the listening devices, the community engagements, the processes and skills, and so on) change my expectation and hope is that we will enter a more harmonious time where the flow of dialogue between the players in every marketplace will be frictionless, will be immediate, will be transparent and open and available.

The truth will out.

And consumers will act more respectfully and more maturely, because service providers will be listening to them (really) and responding to them, often publicly, transparently, and rapidly.

How long will this take? I have no idea. When you look at mature disciplines or principles in online such as usability, accessibility or even search engine optimisation, it is normal to find very patchy awareness let alone regular and consistent use of these core services amongst leading brands. So I must temper my natural optimism with the practical experience gained and guess that this will be years. Years and years, for the laggards.

In the interim, don't expect too much level-headedness, maturity and decency from the great unwashed masses (that's me and you, as consumers) online.

Do expect big-talking anonymous cowards, raging frustrated unheard ex-customers, playground social dynamics with polarised opinions and cosy cliques and gangs, and lots of Godwin's Law.

The Age of Snark is fatiguing, depressing, polluting, childish, unreasonable, bitter, cowardly, and in the main, absolutely deserved.

Social Innovation Camp: the moo-vee

I am fascinated by the emerging ways that social media and internet-fuelled innovations can be leveraged 'for the good'; that is, to solve profound problems in the world.

So Social Innovation Camp, which I couldn't attend, has been rocking my world, from afar.

I find the energy in this little film about the Camp absolutely inspirational and deeply exciting. Hope you enjoy too.

 

Twitter: 11 Pointless Personal Observations

1. Represents something important culturally - the asynchronousness, the lean feature-ness, the humanity of it actually, it's wonderful - we will look back at Twitter as the first whiff of an essence that sticks around for a long time
2. Most enjoyable online social network I have ever belonged to, no question
3. Most addictive web service I have ever used - I neeeeed it, not so much in terms of output, but input, to scrolly-scrolly and read the updates
4. 50% of my consumption reading-wise of Twitter is on my N95 using the m.twitter.com mobile site - lean, mean and good-to-go
5. I never used to care when it was down, I was really chilled out about it, now all of a sudden I find it as infuriating as others did way back when the bad juu juus started - it took time, but eventually I flipped too (but what is the justification? I pay nothing, I give nothing, yet I demand...)
6. When I read the Twitter tech/scaling updates I feel for those guys - it seems like they are in a world of pain, and it doesn't seem to end - I have a horrible feeling that there is a dark heart to Twitter's technology woes and that soon some very ruthless decisions will need to be made
7. How cool that Evan Williams started blogger and now twitter - that's going down in history type contributions as an entrepreneur, not bad going..!
8. I have truly formed and developed real relationships with lovely, interesting people I haven't yet or may never meet in the real world - in that respect it's much more like a forum than a Facebook
9. A-listers don't work for me in Twitter - too noisy, too newsy, too me-me-me - my favourite people in Twitter belong to Brighton or to the social media (inc. tech PR, enterprise software etc) melting pot, my real world communities
10. That said, I see nice decent people that I follow successfully engaging with A-listers internationally via Twitter - it has a unusually level feeling to it and a sense of accessibility and informality that is wonderful; if you want to make new and valuable contacts it's definitely there to be had
11. Originally my Twitter time destroyed my RSS consumption - that's bounced back now

Permaculture and the web

Credit: pen3ya

I was just reading about Permaculture on Wikipedia (as you do) and thought about how fitting the 'Holmgren's 12 design principles' are to operating online, particularly with online communities and this social media malarkey:

Holmgren's 12 design principles

David Holmgren has developed 12 design principles for permaculture:

1. observe and interact
2. catch and store energy
3. obtain a yield
4. apply self-regulation and accept feedback
5. use and value renewable resources and services
6. produce no waste
7. design from patterns to details
8. integrate rather than segregate
9. use small and slow solutions
10. use and value diversity
11. use edges and value the marginal
12. creatively use and respond to change

I haven't got a clue what some of these really mean in a permaculture context yet they seem to map so well to the web:

• apply self-regulation and accept feedback...
• integrate rather than segregate...
• use edges and value the marginal...
• creatively use and respond to change...

Lovely stuff.

Can you see what I mean or does it sound like I've been drinking meths again?

Umair on the challenge for brands

Defending the noise in signal vs noise

Credit: robsv

It's easy to denigrate various forms of internet media as having bad 'signal vs. noise'.

I'm wondering if that's one, actually a bit of a cop out, and two, whether that it will become a saying of the quaint old times.

The non-technical definition from Wikipedia is: "signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is."

And there's no doubt that online media have a much poorer signal-to-noise ratio than traditional media for a variety of reasons, particularly:

• the lack of enforced filters on the output - e.g. most user-generated content does not pass through an editor, an A&R person, a curator or a professional code of conduct
• the low cost of creating noise - we are operating in a world of abundance, not scarcity, which again can reduce the 'need' for quality/'signal'

I agree that, untreated, online media has typically worse signal to noise than traditional media, and I agree that various forms of online media have comparatively better or worse ratios (for example podcasts seem to have better signal than blog posts, and some might argue that both have better signal than lifestreaming or twittering).

So my issue isn't so much with the complaint as with the complainant.

Online media is by its very nature abundant and disintermediated.
This is why we love online media and social media so much, for the untrammelled blossoming of a million meadows, and for the free and easy access to wade through each field, to discover the rare and delicate orchid amongst the swaying sea of sunflower (OK, I know I'm stretching the metaphor now).

Credit: pictoscribe

We love that abundance and disintermediation - we celebrate the permissiveness of an ability to self-publish without an editor's approval or a cheque to a media owner, and to find the long-tail needle in a haystack, that compilation or article or technical fix to the exact itch we needed to scratch. The miracle of the web, no?

To then turn around and complain about signal vs noise, well, at the risk of sounding like my mother, it's just a bit much.

This is the web tradeoff. The exchange. The quid pro quo. We need noise to get signal.

Since the content is infinite and our time finite we must be our own filters.
Filters used to be at the production end, the editor, the radio DJ, civil servant taking the committee meeting minutes, the powerful few.

Disintermediation puts the onus on us, the audience, as well as on those who wish to re-intermediate: new form aggregators, memetrackers, ideamarkets, social news sites.

If you feel a particular online medium suffers from particularly bad signal-to-noise ratio then you're staring a business opportunity in the face.

And you're probably not effectively filtering your own web finding-and-consuming, with a couple of options you can take:

1. Don't like it, stop whingeing, accept the web tradeoff, and move on
2. Learn how to filter better, search on google better, scan an RSS reader better - the inexorable rise of GTD and hacks
3. Or as I say, start a business to solve the problem

Finally, we should ask ourselves, will the volume and ratio of noise get better or worse? My personal belief is that the web tradeoff will continue to boom and that signal vs noise will become a dated notion.

In fact, we are already in this position (see: Peak Attention; Continuous Partial Attention), we just haven't caught up and admitted it yet. Everyone is drowning in a sea of available data and information and media and messages. In the near future we will not dismay or scorn at this inevitability - we will turn to our pattern recognisers, our data analysts that see outlines and stories where we see only numbers, our personal and corporate filters, tools and sieves, and scoop out our generous handfuls of web content, knowing full well that for all the noise, we will find the golden dust we seek. Whinge, we will not.