FUTURE TACKS: Why every organisation needs a digital comms specialist
Posted: March 9, 2013 Filed under: communications, Public Relations, social media | Tags: digital, digital communications, PR, Public Relations, traditional comms 7 Comments »
Right, I’m going to say something bold and then directly contradict myself. But just stay with me on this, okay?
We all need to be doing more of this digital communications stuff from the hard-bitten pr to the frontline officer.
There shouldn’t be a digital comms team and a traditional comms team in a different part of the building.
There should be one. Which doesn’t mind if frontline people use digital too.
But this is the tricky bit. Every organisation now needs a digital communications specialist to help make this happen.
Let me explain.
Why there shouldn’t be a divide between digital and traditional comms
Back in 1998 the newspaper I was worked at with reluctance set-up email addresses. Our office of 12 reporters had one email platform rigged up to one machine. We gathered around like a bunch of Marconis as the first e-mail landed. “Oooooh!” we cooed as it landed and someone plucked up the courage to type a reply. When the inbox filled we didn’t know what to do.
Back then email in the office I worked in email was seen as specialist job trusted to just one person. Times change and now every new reporter there gets an email address. Which is as it should be.
When digital communications emerged to greet the social web a whole new series of skills were required. Cutting and pasting a press release didn’t work so people re-discovered conversation and informality. It became clear that the language of each platform was different to each. People’s media use splintered and people could no longer be found in one place but several.
This is something I’ve blogged about before and others have too and GCN’s Ann Kempster has written:
I don’t see how a modern press function can operate in isolation, not taking up modern communication methods and solely relying on press cuttings and column inches. The world just does not operate this way anymore. We all need to be able to operate across comms disciplines. That goes for digital too – we need to grasp marketing and press and internal comms.
And also Jeremy Bullmore in Campaign was at it in 2008:
As soon as everyone realises that digital is nothing to do with digital and all about interactivity and that interactivity allows brands and people to interact as no other medium does then trad and mod will all regroup under the same roof.
To communicate over a range of platforms needs new skills
According to Google, 90 per cent of our media consumption takes place via a screen. Sometimes several screens at once as the Newsnight TV audience contribute via their smartphones to the debate on the #newsnight Twitter hashtag, for example.
Acording to Ofcom’s annual survey, in 2012 more than 50 per cent of adults have a social networking profile with 78 per cent of those aged 15 to 24. It makes fascinating reading.
In short, if you want to communicate with people you need to use a variety of channels.
A press release is no longer your gateway to the media.
A press release, web update, a picture of a nature reserve posted to Twitter on a mobile phone, a sharable Facebook image, a Soundcloud audio clip of a politician speaking or a LinkedIn group contribution from a named officer is. But the thing is. It’s not always all of those things. Knowing the landscape means knowing which will be relevant.
Which is why we need a digital communications specialist.
But won’t a digital comms specialist mean that people think ‘oh, that’s their job?’
I’ve heard it said from people I rate that having a social media officer or a digital comms specialist means that things get chucked over to them to tweet, or whatever. That’s certainly a fair point.
But the specialist whose job it is to share the sweets, advise and train others is vital and won’t let that happen. Think about the teams you’ve worked in. If you are lucky you work with great people who come up with great ideas. But not everyone in the team is always like that. Often, you can only be as good as your least enthusiastic employee and if their grasp of digital comms is poor their delivery will mirror it.
The pace of change in technology is frightening. It’s unrealistic to think that everyone will be equally across it.
Which is why we need a digital communications specialist.
What a digital comms specialist should look like…
1. A trainer…
2. A geek…
3. A solver of problems that aren’t problems yet…
4. A horizon scanner…
5. A builder of an internal community…
6. A source of help…
7. A winner of internal arguments…
8. Someone who knows the channels. Trad and digital…
If you have someone who is already doing this full time you’re quids in. If you’re not your organisation risks falling behind.
Some great work has been done adhoc with digital communications across local government. But without mainstreaming the advances at best will be patchy.
Creative commons credits
TV logo http://www.flickr.com/photos/jvk/6701931811/sizes/l/
Talking http://www.flickr.com/photos/yooperann/7830838870/sizes/l/
Screen http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_t_in_dc/6754500383/sizes/l/
LINK LOVE: 16 blog posts that have inspired me in 2012
Posted: December 31, 2012 Filed under: blogging | Tags: al smith, Ann Kempster, Ben Proctor, birmingham, campaign, campaigns, Cannock Chase District Council, comms, communications, Dan Harris, digital communications, janet davis, Jim Garrow, Jo Smith, john kirriemuir wordshore, Matt Murray, new street, new street station, PC Rich Stanley, Phil Jewitt, podnosh, PR, Public Relations, steph jennings, Tom Foremski, weekly blog club, West Midlands Police 3 Comments »
Back in the day my glittering media career was launched with a review of the year in the Stafford Newsletter.
Two days I spent going through old editions of the paper in the corner of the aircraft hanger of a newsroom.
Proudly I picked up the next edition to read a double page spread with my name on. What do I recall of that? Very little. There was a nun who got charged with drink driving and the Holstein prices at Uttoxeter were especially high in March that year.
Over this past year I’ve read scores of blog posts and news pieces links. At times I’ve been stopped in my tracks by a turn of phrase, a perceptive argument or just a good piece of writing. Here are 14 from 2012 that I’ve rated particularly highly.
CAMPAIGNS ARE DEAD: Nobody has done more than Jim Garrow in 2012 to challenge my thinking. He has a skill of turning a vague idea you may have had into a compelling argument engagingly written. He also asks questions of things people take for granted. Jim does public health emergency planning in Philadelphia in the US. He’s brilliant. His blog is worth subscribing to and there’s plenty of good ones to choose. This one here on the death to the campaign is particularly good. Comms people love campaigns. It makes them feel as though they’ve changed things. No they haven’t he argues. You can read it here.
WEEKLY BLOG CLUB: If no one single blogger has done more to challenge than Jim then the Weekly Blog Club is the website has been the best collective source of writing and inspiration. The idea is simple. You blog something once a week and post it on Twitter using the #weeklyblogclub hashtag where it finds a ready audience and will be collated into aweekly round-up. Janet Davis has taken this idea, polished it, showered it with love and made it something that brightens my timeline. You can read it here.
RAILWAY INSPIRATION: Good blogs shouldn’t just be about your corner of the world. John Kirriemuir is a librarian who often writes creatively. This carefully observed piece on a fellow traveller in Birmingham New Street Station is powerful. All too often we can pass through without looking at who we’re travelling with. John does. You can read it here:
RE-SHAPING PRESS TEAMS: Ben Proctor is a digital specialist who has experience in local government and working as a consultant. His modest proposal to get rid of press offices suggests that change is inevitable and gives a few ideas on what this may look like. You can read it here.
FUTURE COMMS: The Cabinet Office’s Ann Kempster sparked a creative and much-needed debate on the future of press teams and digital teams with this cracking post which generated a cracking set of comments that show the vibrancy of debate in the public sector in 2012. You can read it here.
FACEBOOK IS DEAD: A former colleague Matt Murray is now doing great things in local government in Queensland, Australia. For a while I’d been wondering uneasily about the turn that Facebook had taken when Matt wrote a post that spelt out why it is no longer the go-to platform. You can read it here.
DIE PRESS RELEASE: This is actually from 2006 but I’d only chanced upon Tom Foremski’s Die Press Release, Die! Die! post earlier in 2012. It spells out why the traditional press release is dated and what the thing that should replace it should look like. You can read it here.
CASE STUDY: Hackney Council’s Al Smith doesn’t blog enough. This post from his time at Cannock Chase District Council shows why he should and spells out the steps he took tio help crack down on domestic violence one Christmas.It’s imaginative and effective stuff. You can read it here.
GOOD WRITING: Tom Sprints‘ post about a chance encounter in the shadow of a mountain was lovely writing. If you missed it you can read it here.
DIGITAL STATS: Emer Coleman of the Government Digital Service wrote this cracking piece on the measurement of social media and what we should be looking out for. For anyone looking to get a handle on the changing landscape it’s essential. You can read it here.
A GOOD REMINDER: Sometimes we can spend too much time online. Sometimes we can spend too much time not doing the important things. This short post from Phil Jewitt asks us to re-assess and think of those around us who matter most to us. You can read it here.
FRONTLINE BLOG: People on the frontline should be given access to social media. Comms people are often resistent. Walsall police officer PC Rich Stanley is a case study of why access should be opened-up and the sweets shared. You can read one of his posts on his day job here.
OLYMPICS GAMESMAKER: Jo Smith founded Vindicat PR in what has been a difficult year for her. She spent time as a London 2012 Gamesmaker and saw close-up how the city fell for the 
games. Volunteers like her were part of the secret. How did they manage it? Good internal comms. You can read it here.
DAN HARRIS: If London 2012 was joyous then the memory of seeing BBC News 24 carry pictures of medal triumph with the confirmation of Dan Harris‘ death on the ticker was a bitter memory. I’d met him a few times and corresponded often. His death devastated those who knew him far better. He’d agreed to write for comms2point0 a website I help with and had written this fine post a few weeks before. You can read it here.
GANG MEMBER: Digital can bring people together and can share stories. Steph Jennings of Podnosh’s account of meeting a former gang member at a social media surgery was arresting. You can read it here.
ANOTHER LONDON: Gillian Hudson of 10 Downing Street’s digital team wrote a cracking blog to capture some of the work she had been involved with over the Olympics. It spoke about comms with a human face and it was cracking. You can read it here.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Why solutions, not shiny matters most
Posted: October 8, 2012 Filed under: local government, social media | Tags: 10 by 10 WM, carrie bishop, Coventry, coventry city council, digital communications, digital futures, futuregov, local government, martin reeves, shrewsbury shropshire county council, social media 3 Comments »
Sometimes you can hear someone say something that makes complete sense.
Twice in the last few weeks that’s happened to me.
Firstly, at Digital Futures in Shrewsbury Futuregov’s excellent Carrie Bishop spoke of using ‘just enough of the internet’ to get something done. That feels such a perfectly weighted, perfectly observed comment to make from someone who can comfortably grandstand by talking shiny tech.
Secondly, Coventry City Council’s Martin Reeves at the 10 by 10 WM event in Coventry.
The chief executive popped in to deliver a 15-minute speech to those that had gathered. We’d just finished hearing 10 examples of really good innovation across the region and were feeling just a little bit pleased with ourselves. There’s some really good things happening in the region and I’m really proud to be part of that.
“You are doing great things,” Martin said. “But I’ve just spent a few days locked away with other chief executives to discuss things that face us. Not once. Not once was social media mentioned in that time.”
The fact that Martin, who is one of a growing handful of chief executives who tweet, was telling us this was significant. Martin is an advocate. He’s a believer.
“How do you need to change that?” he asked us. “Stop being evangelists. Stop talking about the technology. Talk about the solutions. Talk about the solutions that may just have social media as part of it. Then you’ll get people listening.”
It’s a brilliantly clear, well thought through approach to take.
If there’s one thing that social media people are is passionate evangelists. Sometimes that passion comes from a belief that if only others could share this vision then the world will be a better place. The reality is that some people just don’t think that.
It’s not the shiny technology that matters to most people.
Thinking it through the good things at my own council have happened it’s been around finding a solution.
How do countryside people find better ways to connect? By having a ranger like Morgan Bowers on Twitter. How do we dispell rumours in a crisis? By using Twitter alongside people like the police. How do we stop people thinking we don’t grit? We tell them on Twitter.
But that hits one of the great conundrums about social media for an organisation. Organisations use it to get real life results. They want ticket sales or units shifted. But social media is a conversation. If you use it well you’ll use it with a human face and with a human voice.
So, maybe we need to be two things.
We must talk with a human voice when using technology to those outside the organisation.
We must talk solutions to those within.
MOBILE FIRST: On augmented reality and communications
Posted: September 10, 2012 Filed under: augmented reality, communications, government, local government | Tags: ar, augmented reality, comms, communications, digital, digital communications, local government, mobile, mobile first, PR, Public Relations 11 Comments »
A few weeks back my son got a new Nintendo 3DS for his birthday, the lucky lad.
Excited and smiling he took it out of it’s wrapping in the living room. Light blue and shiny it was. It fitted into his hands perfectly. A while later that day after all his cards other presents were opened I found him playing with it on the settee. He was moving the device around as if chasing objects around the room.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Shooting aliens in our living room?”
“Well, they’re not aliens,” he says. “They’re pictures of mum on my new augmented reality game.”
Leaning over his shoulder I could see what he was doing. He’d used his new Nintendo to take a picture of his mum and he’d transferred them onto bubbles which he had to shoot down as part of the game. On the screen, there was my living room as the backdrop for the game. The image came from the device’s video camera. As my son moved the device so what was on the screen moved too.
What’s augmented reality?
Rewind to earlier this year. I’d heard Mike Rawlins of Talk About Local talk about augmented reality at a Brewcamp session in Walsall. He’d spoken of the experiments him, Will Perrin and others had been doing with augmented reality by effectively placing blog posts, pictures and news updates on a map. In effect each item was given its own co-ordinates and through a platform called layar people could use their phone’s GPS system to find it. Of course, each items was on the web anyway. It’s just that they can be accessed a different way.
In short, augmented reality is adding an extra layer of information to what you are looking at. You point a phone at a building, an artwork or a landscape and you can opt to access content related to it. It also works with print too. Point a smart phone at an image and you can access extra content. You can link to a video clip or even buy the item.
To me, this is just a little bit amazing. To me as a communications person it starts to get me thinking.
A mobile first strategy
Back in 2009 I read a blog post that utterly changed the way I think about news and the future of news. Going back to it today Steve Buttry, it’s author, seems like some kind of Tomorrow’s World visionary pointing out the obvious. In short, he wrote that he spends lots of time in airport departure lounges. In the past, people had killed time by reading paper newspapers turning each page literally. Increasingly, he was seeing people killing time by reading their mobile phones. So, he suggests, isn’t it smarter to think about mobile first? In other words, he describes a mobile first strategy.
Steve suggests that newsrooms take a deep breath, stop using antiquated titles like reporter, photographer and editor and just think of themselves as journalists. They need to get used to the idea of metadata. That’s the tags of extra information that help categorise an item so it can be found again. In other words, a story about a £5m leisure centre in Brown Street, Oxdown would be tagged with Brown Street as well as Oxdown, as well as leisure, Oxdown Council, finance, the ward name and the co-ordinates of the new building. That’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just the who, what, where, when and how that’s always been the cornerstone of news.
The mobile first approach, Buttry says, also includes links to the back story. The pieces of content that have already been produced which are relevant. The approach also allows journalists to crowd-source a story or views on a story.
It’s what most national news organisations do today and what The Guardian do very well.
Yes, yes but public relations?
What’s relevant to the news landscape is also relevant to communications landscape too.
I love newspapers. I started my career on them before I moved into local government communications. But I’m long past the point that Buttry saw of seeing more people look at their phones rather than look at their local paper. Only, I’m not catching planes. I’m catching a bus or a train and I’m in the Black Country in the English Midlands.
For me, I’m less interested in shiny technology than I am with communicating with people. If shiny tech can help reach an audience then I get to be really, really interested. Where news, the media and ultimately residents are heading then I believe that’s where communications people must be there too. Or even be as one of the first so they can get to understand what’s over the horizon. Maybe it echoes Buttry’s call that newspaper titles are obsolete but I’m getting increasingly convinced that the phrase ‘press officer’ and ‘PR officer’ are getting irrelevant. What does a press officer do when there’s less or no press and we still need to communicate with people?
We’ve changed in my corner of communications to adapt to social media because that’s what people are doing. We need to start to tentatively think about augmented reality too.
Yes, yes but how?
Now, I’m, not saying for a minute that we need to change everything to add everything we do to include an augmented reality – or AR to use the buzzword – element. The communications team that ditched print for the web in 1993 may in hindsight be seen as visionary. They’d also be a bit silly too. For me, it’s just being aware of the curve and investing a little time and effort into a project that’s going to be a learning process.
That’s probably where something like The Guardian’s n0tice platform can really start to come into play. Set up earlier this year, it aims to add news to maps on its platform. It has a small but growing following. There’s a board for Walsall which I’ve very tentatively started and I’m looking to head back to soon.
There’s also plenty of mileage in creating getting to know platforms like http://www.layar.com/ or seeing if a friendly webbie can work with you.
As comms teams are looking at changing the way hey do thinks through digital press offices this is something that can add some value.
How can augmented reality be used in local government?
Just last week I was in my car giving a lift to a town planner and somehow amongst the football banter, the work gossip and the cricket talk the subject of websites for planning applications came up. Yes, yes. I know. That’s just how I roll. The discussion turned to augmented reality. At this the light bulb above my planner mate’s head really lit up. Planning applications could be accessed. Maybe artists impressions could be added too. With links to allow people to comment.
Looking at other parts of local government and the opportunities are vast. Local history. Leisure. News. Content to help explain areas of countryside, habitats and what lives there. The truth of it is, we don’t know how local government can fully use augmented reality until people start to use it more, start to innovate and to try things out.
But in the back of my head I always think of my Dad when I hear of digital innovation. The real tipping point is when it opens up for someone like him with his very old phone and his late adopter use of the web. But if you wait until then to start to look at the subject you’re already far too late.
It’s far better to know what’s on the other side of the hill so you can spend a little time innovating and making a few mistakes when there’s not many people around to see.
If my eight-year-old is already using augmented reality it’s probably time grown-up organisations started to think about it at a comfortable pace too.
Some extra reading
Steve Buttry’s blog post on how news organisations can put mobile first
Talk About Local on hyperlocal websites and augmented reality
Augmented reality. A useful six minute YouTube starter
Will Perrin of Talk About Local demonstrating augmented reality
Philladelphia History on using augmented reality in local history.
Creative commons credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/6197150925/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/4659579077/sizes/l/
