engagement – Tim O Lloyd

Tackling the messy space between campaigns and BAU

We’re seeing more and more interest in our work to help staff at all levels of organisations to use social media in interesting, authentic ways, to talk about their work.

In a fumbled attempt to explain this to an audience the other week, I used this wonderful photo by Pedro Lastra as a visualisation of the communications landscape we see in so many companies and government departments.

On the left hand side are the bricks and mortar of large, well executed and functional campaigns, each with their owners’ creativity stamped on the inside. Most places seem to do campaigns quite well these days, on some level. I guess in part because the tools are there and a time-bound project, often with a budget attached to it, helps focus minds.

On the right hand side is business-as-usual comms. It’s evolved from a few different places over time. It works because it delivers what it needs to. By now the visualisation is stretching thin, but I’m sticking with it.

In the middle you have the necessarily untidy bit: the people, pathways and constantly changing space that isn’t really controlled by any one person. Here you’ll find colleagues connecting with each other on social, experimenting with different ideas and navigating their way through problems and opportunities.

This is where the skunkwork websites come from, or the influencer you never knew you had in your office. It’s where staff talk about the campaign you just launched with their friends and family, spurring good and bad feedback that ends up with the press office, insight team or government relations, to be applied next time.

Most teams we meet have more playbooks, strategies, plans and models than they know what to do with.

Few are brave enough to tackle the vast, messy, but fertile space in the middle.

Saying more than the good stuff

I’m on a bit of a mission to set out some good practice around how individual public servants use social media as part of their job. Having been a civil servant and responsible for helping lots of colleagues join social media, I feel heavily invested in seeing this done well.

Plenty of public servants use social media as part of their work. But only a minority do it really well, and I think there’s a risk their efforts are diluted as more and more personal professional profiles become broadcast-heavy and unaccountable to their audience.

I set out some criteria, which we’ve been experimenting with, when public servants ask us for help with social media.

Basic entry criteria: Must be a real person, running their own account (as far as we can tell)
Frequency of posting = 1 pt
The quality of their response (does it answer the question or continue the conversation or provide relevant info?) = 1pt
Extra credit, for example responding to a difficult question = 2pt
Remove credits for = avoiding talking about live issues, linking to information that could easily be blogged or tweeted, using twitter when the debate is happening elsewhere

Since first blogging about this a fortnight ago, I’ve received quite a lot of feedback. It’s all been brilliant: either to help improve my rudimentary ideas or build a list of exemplars (updated in the original post). In one or two cases the feedback has told me that I haven’t explained my position on this very well.

This is about current public servants using social media to describe their work in the public sector, and responding to questions from the public.

Matt Cain said in a few words what I struggled with in a blog post: “it’s not just the good stuff”.

Marilyn Booth said she thought it was mean to deduct points from people who don’t respond to difficult questions. It is mean, but when you look at the benchmark set by those on the exemplar list, answering difficult questions is what sets them apart.

I’m still looking for examples and I need your help: central Government departments, local Government and NHS in particular.

And of course I want your feedback on the criteria: what do you disagree with, or want to see strengthened?

Dealing with real people, not logos

I’m seven months in to an experiment with how I spend my money online.

if I can’t buy something online because a website doesn’t work, or keeps trying to force me to a call centre…
…I look for staff on social media, and contact them to try and complete a purchase, or get an answer
if this doesn’t work, I buy somewhere else

Why? Because I don’t like organisations advertising at me, when they can’t get the basics of customer service right, online.

There was a difficult decision to be made in January. I had a friend visiting and I wanted to take him to my favourite local pub/restaurant. Their online booking form doesn’t work, and they don’t respond on Twitter. We went somewhere else, and I felt bad for the pub, but still determined.

Runners Need benefited from my spending when I needed new trainers and one of their staffers came to my aid on Twitter, in February.

I’ve also made some fairly sizeable decisions around hotel and venue bookings, based on how usable the online service is, or if it isn’t (frequently the case), then the speed and personality with which staff come to my assistance on social media.

I was spurred on by Nottinghamshire Foundation Trust, who read my original post:

@timolloyd the open culture & shift @NottsHealthcare is partly due to http://t.co/tAVUdXeuvg #nhssm & trusting our staff to speak on #SoMe

— Jane Danforth (@JaneDanforth) February 4, 2015

I also saw this, which made me laugh, and persuaded me to get more ambitious in terms of retailer and money spent:

@ThomsonCares @MattNavarra You follow 6 accounts. pic.twitter.com/gxSTnyJHHp

— Kevin Blundell (@kevin_blundell) February 8, 2015

Things were going OK for a while: I booked an entire weekend’s worth of logistics in Norway, online. Partly thanks to an OK airline booking experience (Norwegian Air), but also having had to resort to Facebook for accommodation, because the Norwegian tourism website is a bit of a mess.

I elicited some real-staff reaction from a very big brand, after blogging about some thoughtless advertising.

However, things have started to go wrong when it comes to moving house.

Solicitors and estate agents are tricky to procure online. I accept there needs to be some real-world interaction (not meeting people was never part of my plan), but websites lacking in information, and rambling email correspondence is totally at odds with my world of work.

Cancelling my TV licence was a nightmare thanks to a poor online transaction. I basically gave up, and didn’t bother pursuing any staff online, which was a mistake. The transaction that I abandoned somehow landed in someone’s in tray, and now I’m £65 better off. Bonus.

Car insurance is the one transaction where I have completely buckled. Again, I understand that they need certain types of information, but the basics such as quotes and changes of address should be serviced online. Rather than find a company who supports this, I broke my commitment from December and went with the cheapest option, which involved three painful phone calls. And stamps.

So how am I doing? A mixed bag at best, but I’m going to stick with my resolution and see how far I can take it.

Better policy making

Today was a good day for thinking about how the web can be used for better policy making.

I spent the morning helping with a workshop hosted by GDS, starring Demsoc and with a healthy cross section of people from across central government who work at the sharp end of policy making.

There were some neat examples from Health, Communities and DFID, but everyone agreed that much, much more could be done.

In the afternoon I ran a similar workshop with policy people at BIS, as part of our Social Media Week London activity. It was refreshing to discuss, in honest terms:

‘how should we use the web, together, to open up policy making to a wider group of people?’

‘how will we demonstrate that people’s participation has made a difference?’

‘once we’ve started this, how do we make sure it doesn’t fizzle out after a few consultations?’

The catalyst for a lot of this is the latest Civil Service Reform Plan, but there’s a more compelling case made in this post from Mike Harris.

I will be writing more about this as we go along, but in the meantime there were some common themes from both sessions:

who is actually responsible for the design of consultations?
lack of tools and platforms is not the issue…
…and even if it were, the web cannot deliver better policy making on its own
engaging with audiences is a 365-day-a-year task, not to be saved only for consultations (by which time it might be too late anyway)
engagement needs to happen wherever our audiences can be found, not in the town hall or Whitehall (online or otherwise)

If you have made it this far, you could be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders. I’ve only worked in government a few years, but this all sounds very familiar. However, as one colleague (who works in a policy team) said to me this afternoon ‘we have to keep trying new things and demonstrating the value’. A good day.

You can get involved in this project on the Open Policymaking blog.

Keeping on track with digital engagement

Sometimes it’s hard not to take things personally.

I am responsible for looking after a number of different online channels, and people will sometimes criticise the way an organisation uses those channels, or the choice of channel itself. For example, ‘why is the Department of Health wasting its time with Twitter’ or ‘this crowdsourcing platform is rubbish because it won’t let me do XYZ’.

Most of the time I believe these comments are aimed a little higher up the decision tree, and reflect a general lack of satisfaction with a broader policy. Social media channels are a quick and easy way to vent that frustration.

But, if you have spent hours carefully creating a space, or choosing the best possible channel based on your audience’s needs and also cost; these types of comments can be dispiriting. Many a time I have wanted to respond straight away, and, to be honest, let rip. Particularly when I feel the person making the complaint should better understand the resource constraints behind the scenes, or, as is the case with #nhssm, appreciate the fact that the work is voluntary.

But it’s no good getting worked up and then coming across as unprofessional.

If I’ve had a busy week, or a lot on my mind, I like to unwind through exercise, or maybe wash a car (very therapeutic), or even better, drive one around a race circuit as fast as I can. Not always practical when you work in Elephant and Castle.

However, the principles behind driving a race circuit are similar to dealing with a difficult comment online:

Approach the corner: plan where you want to be, and get yourself in the right position (what do I need to say, to leave this conversation in the best shape possible?)

Adjust your speed: brake, change gear, get the car in shape (slow down, and think before you act)

Clip the apex of the bend as you planned (make your point, and make it well. Get it wrong now and everything else will unravel. It’s hard to recover)

Accelerate away (move on, but bring the conversation forward. Take the person who was unhappy with you and maybe turn them in to an advocate for what you are doing)

The last one might be a bit optimistic, at least in terms of digital engagement, but if you get everything else right there’s a chance you can make a friend out of a detractor.