The Future Place Blog

Should you try and sue Twitter?

At the moment the British press are reporting that one if its small councils, South Tyneside, has been to the US to subpoena Twitter to get the name of somebody in the UK who is saying things about three of their councillors and one of their officers which they say is untrue. The question is whether this is a good idea.

I wrote this comment after reading Steve Chu’s views on this point where his recommendation was “Surely it's better to keep your head down, get on with your vital work in these tough times, and avoid presenting yourselves as a vindictive bully? If you don't like it, just don't read it.”

In general, I think Steve is right. In a short time from now there could be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of libels out there, most of which will be heard by nobody and which would cost millions to try and combat. It is simply not practical to pursue every online comment or tweet that might be false or damaging.

In the long term the ISPs and the platforms may arrive at a challenge system which restores some sanity (but hopefully not too much control).

However, for the time being I think people and organisations need to consider the impact of a comment. If a newspaper libels somebody, it is worth pursuing them because newspapers are still believed to be true by many people. If a solitary blogger/tweeter says something, then it is often best to ignore it. Only if that something is being re-tweeted, re-posted or passed on is it even worth considering. If someone is not reaching an audience then taking action against them is likely to spread it further. Before South Tyneside took this action most of the UK had never heard of it, now some of their councillors are nationally famous!

One side effect of the story, so far, is to show that South Tyneside are not very understanding in what the public think is a lot of money. When the expense of going to the US to open court proceedings was challenged, their response was that so far it had cost less than £75,000, but in South Tyneside you could buy a house for that, and the wage of a council worker doing a manual job can be as low as £12,000 a year.

Of course, the world is even more complex if what is said is partly or largely true, which might be the case in some of the footballer and banker stories that have been hitting the press recently, but then suing is just plain daft in this day and age.

 

Paying for TweetReach

In the past I have quite often used the free version of TweetReach to see how far a message has moved. The free version looks at just 50 tweets and is often quite interesting. However, tomorrow I am speaking at the LGInsight Acadamy event in Nottingham and I thought it would be good to look at the reach of the #TestItTuesday campaign (Fire and Rescue Services around the UK tweet #TestitTuesday messages every week to improve the awareness of the need to check smoke and carbon monoxide alarms). So on this occasion I paid my US$20 and boght the paid for report.

As you can see by the image below, the full report is really useful, as well as showing that 172 Tweets in the last 7 days reached just over 89000 people the report shows the composition of the tweets, retweets, and replies and it lists all of the Tweets and the people who tweeted them.

$20 is a bit of a steep price I feel, but the full report is definitely more useful than just the last 50 tweets, which is what the free report gives you.

 

 

An #Gov2au tweetup in Canberra, March 18

Craig Thomler (@CraigThomler) and myself are organising an informal get together at the Wig and Pen at 5:30pm on Friday 18th to discuss Social Media and Government, including differences and similarities between the UK and Australia - as part of my Colmar Brunton sponsored five city tour of Australia.

If you have a POV or are simply curious, come along and have a chat with the rest of us.

 

UK Fire & Rescue Services Benchmarks on Facebook and Twitter

Over the last few days I have been pulling together (with some help from my family) some facts and figures about the use of Facebook and Twitter by UK Fire and Rescure Services.

The table below shows figures for 20 authorities for whom I could find an official Facebook page and an official Twitter page (at least pages I think were official). The table shows how many people follow them on Twitter and how many like their Facebook page and the data are ranked by the sum of the two data columns.

Although there is clearly a relationship between the two columns, the relationship is less strong/linear than perhaps might have been expected, the product moment correlation coefficient is just over 0.6, which means the two columns share about 40% of their variance. One of the big outliers is South Yorkshire who either have fewer Facebook followers than their Twitter presence would suggest, or have a much stronger Twitter presence than their Facebook numbers woudl suggest.

However, one should perhaps not spend to long looking at the relative rankings of the services, but question the overall values. Hampshire has a population of about 1.3 million people, over half of whom are likely to be users of Facebook, to a tally of 8314 users means that about 1 out of every 100 Facebook users in Hampshire likes their page. In Kent, the third highest in the table, the figures are something like 3 in every 1000 Facebook users.

Whislt all the services should be praised for starting to tackle the challenge of Facebook and Twitter, and the ones at the top end of the table are clearly doing best of all, there is a need to devise strategies that would see these numbers to rise by a magnitude of 10 or even 100. UK retailer Next has over 500,000 people liking their page, so it ought to be possible to see the best Fire & Rescue services with more than 100,000 people liking them, IMHO.

Interesting use of QR Barcode by NHS West Sussex on Facebook

NHS West Sussex are using QR Barcodes to embed messages on their Facebook presence. Like many other NHS areas (the UK's National Health Service) West Sussex use a profile as their presence, rather than a page or a group.

The screen shot below, taken on 16 November 2010, shows a QR Barcode posted on behalf of the Health Visitor.

If your phone has a QR reader (there is a free app for the iPhone, and probably for lots of others).

If you do not have a reader handy, the barcode reveals "There were 130,000 babies born in London last year."

At this stage this example is more a concept than a finished approach, but an interesting indicator of how things might go.

Public Sector versus Private Sector targeting - Online & Social Media

One important difference between the public sector and private commerce is that whilst private companies are often happy with any new customers, the public sector are sometimes try very hard to reach the ‘right’ new customers. In the context of this difference, the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can be a double-edged sword.

Good examples of online targeting include the way that the UK drugs advisory service “Talk to Frank” used Habbo, similarly the combined traditional and social media ‘Bernie’ campaign used by South Wales Fire & Rescue to deter fire-setting on the moors (which will be the subject of a future blog post) highlights how the internet and social media can aid good targeting.

However, it does not always work out so well, as the following illustrations highlight:

Health service campaigns can attract the ‘worried well’ rather than key ‘at risk’ groups. This means that staff are busy, people are coming through the doors, but the number of ‘at risk’ people seen can drop, partly because of queuing, partly because the numbers can seem good (it is estimated that perhaps 20% of UK health expenditure goes on the worried well).

A fire service reported to me that when their community safety team advertised, online and in social media, that they would do free safety inspections they were quickly booked up with visits to low risk households, many of whom would have been willing to pay. However, they were not getting to the high risk households (they only had a small team of inspectors). Their answer was to put leaflets out in the high risk areas rather than use online approaches.

Governments often target online learning (or e-Learning) at disadvantaged groups, people who missed out on education the first time round. However, whenever I have been involved in measuring the take-up such courses there has always been a disproportionately large number of people with high educational attainment, because they tend to be the people searching the web for education.

None of these examples mean that the public sector should not use online and social media methods, but rather that the way they are used needs to be carefully evaluated. For example, another great use of online approaches is to facilitate many service users to deal with their own problems, freeing up resources for those who need more help (tapping into the current memes for asynchronicity, DIY, and disintermediation).

What the examples do suggest, however, is that methods developed for the private sector might need tweaking before being applied in the public sector.

 

Facebook language issues for the public sector in Wales

Under UK law, Welsh public sector sites have to be available in both English and Welsh, which is fine for webistes, but what about Facebook?

This is a question I have been asked several times over the last few days, having run a webinar on Facebook for the public sector on Thursday and workshops for the Welsh fire services on Friday and South Wales Police on Monday.The question goes right to the heart of what social media means and the loss of power it represents for organisations (be they companies, charities, or public sector).

Somebody who runs a Facebook page (e.g. the North Wales Fire and Rescue Service) can post their copy in English, Welsh, or both. However, when people post their comments they will choose which language they want to use.

I have been asked whether Facebook can be set up in Welsh? The answer is yes, but because Facebook is a Web 2.0 service, each user can decide what they want their Facebook to be (as shown in image below, using Account/Account Settings/Language). 

Somebody who wants to create a page can set their Facebook to be in Welsh (or French or a wide range of languages), but this does not affect what the user sees. The user will see Facebook in their chosen language.

In Facebook there is a clear demarcation between the language of the application (which is determined by the user) and the language of the posts (which is determined by the page’s owner).

So, what should a Wales-based public sector Facebook do? Having spoken to several people, there seems to be a consensus that if about half the posts are in English and about half are in Welsh, that might be OK. However, I would expect to see vocal arguments from people advocating either a) everything should be in both English and Welsh (to avoid Welsh being pushed to one side) or b) everything should be in English (because that is what most people expect on the internet).

Public Sector Facebook Sites - some examples

Here is a small selection of UK public sector sites on Facebook that seem to be getting at least some things right. Nobody seems to be getting everything right (which is not surprising at this stage), but we can all learn from each other by picking the best from different places.

Love My Lancashire, created by Safer Lancashire, a Community Safety Partnership, a group that combines local government, police, fire, youth agencies, and many more.

Launceston Police, Launceston is a town in Cornwall and this site is maintained by the Launceston Policing Team and allows a wide range of views to be expressed and has some very robust conversations between local citizens.

Coventry City Council, Coventry has a well-developed social media presence which includes 7 Facebook pages. The social media page of their main website is at http://www.coventry.gov.uk/ccm/content/web-admin/online-communities.en , and their main Facebook page is at http://www.facebook.com/coventrycc.

West Midlands Police, a lively Facebook page with plenty of interaction with the public.

Nottingham City Transport, encourages people to subscribe via SMS so they can get the latest bus news (very useful in snowy weather!)

Belfast City Council, this Facebook page does not have many people ‘liking’ it (just over 1600), but it does have a lively set of posts and comments from the public.

Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service, this page has a large number of people liking it and keeps providing engagement.

 If you'd like to highlight other public sector Facebook pages, please add them in the comments to this post.

Police Forces and Facebook

A growing amount of my work in the UK is with the public sector, for example helping them explore how they can use social media to engage and consult the public. As part of that role I have been conducting research into who is doing what and I have produced a brief Snapshot Report looking at the Facebook pages of police forces in England and Wales.

You can read a copy of the report here Download Police Forces and Facebook July 2010

This Snapshot Report is not a piece of analysis, it is simply a listing of 27 police forces, their main website, their 'official' Facebook presence, and the number of people connected to them (i.e. the sort of thing I would have found useful when I was starting my research).

I am aiming to release a number of additional Snapshot Reports over the next few weeks looking at police authorities and fire services, and to extend the coverage of the reports to Twitter and perhaps YouTube.

I am sure there are mistakes. Even determining whether a Facebook page is 'official' or not can be tricky. Please let me know about any corrections, additions, or suggestions.