Friday, December 27, 2013 10 predictions for local government communications
New Year. It acts like a blank page and a line under what went before. It's time to take stock and see what is down the track. Here's what 2014 could look like...
by Dan Slee
“I’d rather not predict,” US Democratic strategist James Carville once said, “I’d rather affect.”
Seeing as the only thing I’m affecting between Christmas and New Year is a large cake tin and a box of celebrations I’ll be ignoring the man who helped put Clinton in the White House.
But first here’s a few things I predicted 2013 would have in store for us in my corner of local government communications on my own blog in 2012.
For those who'd like to point and laugh here is my 2011 predictions too for 2012
The ones that came off…
Comms teams have been becoming smaller. The recent comms2point0 survey revealed to 31 per cent thinking their team would shrink as against 19 per cent who thought they would grow.
Twitter defamation lawyers4u will become a reality. Partly true. The Speaker’s wife Sally Bercow settled in the High Court over a defamatory tweet and action was taken against scores of others. But ambulance chasing hasn’t quite happened yet.
Innovation will wither as spare capacity is cut. True. It’s certainly harder to experiment in a far smaller team just as the need for experimentation has increased.
The private sector has been better at innovating in digital comms. They’ve the budget and the will. But this doesn’t always mean private is better than public in all cases. They have different decision making processes.
Social media box ticking needs to be guarded against. True. “We need Twitter,” is replacing “we need a press release,” as the non-comms call to action. No you don’t. Not all the time any way.
The LGA-backed localgov digital project is a good idea whose time has come. Is bang on the money and chair Carl Haggerty winning a digital leadership award at The Guardian awards proves this.
Social media is fracturing. Is true. While 10 platforms were mentioned in the 2012 comms2point0 poll it now stands at 30 in the same poll a year later.
The ones where it’s too early to tell…
Smart comms people will realise that channel shift may the reason they survive. The jury is still out although it’s fascinating to hear some case studies where people have been experimenting with this.
People will see social media isn’t a golden bullet. People are gradually waking up to the idea that while this is important it’s part of the mix and a Facebook page on its own won’t change the world.
Digital comms specialists are needed. Skills need to be developed and shared.
The one that didn’t…
Facebook as a local government platform is over. There are some god ones but with fewer and fewer people seeing updates from pages it is no longer the wunderkind. Give this one time.
10 predictions for local government digital comms in 2014...
There will be more shared comms teams. People will look at how this can work across a geographical area and also between authorities.
Teams will continue to get smaller. The ones that fail to grasp the nettle and look at what they are doing will wither.
Heads of comms will become fewer. As a result of the first two.
Better evaluation is needed. The 1980s idea of story counts and positive, negative and neutral need to go. Now. What will replace will be shaped by results. Like channel shift or user growth targets. Failure to do this will see teams become irrelevant.
Local government comms will become the poor relation of public sector PR. With training budgets gone, workloads increasing teams will struggle to do the basics without major recalibration.
Digital will continue to mainstream. But the digital specialist will need to be a jack of all trades and must be able to shape content for all manner of platforms – from the village magazine to YouTube to Twitter to a press release and web content.
Teams will be outstripped by the pace of change. When revolution is needed slow evolution will be allowed to occur.
Digital comms will step up a gear from simply tweeting press releases to tackling the really thorny problems. In local government these insoluble issues are called ‘wicked issues.’
Digital comms will continue to be a frontline officer task. Giving people the tools in the field will continue. Policy and training will need to come from the centre as the role of digital comms becomes part of all areas and not just a specialist.
There will be a major emergency in 2014 where digital comms plays a decisive role. And they'll do a good job and more people will see the worth. But senior officers will still roll their eyes.
Teams will need content creators. Not press officers.
Teams that overlook internal communications – and in particular telling their own story internally – will suffer.
Dan Slee is co-founder of comms2point0.
Reader Comments (7)
A thorough list, Dan, and there are several things there that I can directly relate to. I can certainly see a number of those falling under next year's "The ones that came off…" heading. Elsewhere I've seen it predicted that there will be fewer social media manager roles required, so it will be interesting to see whether that prediction affects local government over the next 12 months.
Don't write off facebook yet!
For our council (East Ayrshire), although we have fewer people following us on facebook than twitter (a stat I encourage people not to focus on!), the actual engagement with the content (click-throughs to the website, shares etc) on facebook is far higher. For us, this is due to a different audience. Our twitter followers currently tend to be local professionals and business owners, whereas our facebook fans are mainly local parents. We post different content on the platforms to match each audience.
In our case twitter is still not heavily adopted by people in the local area - but facebook is. If you told me I had to close down either our facebook or twitter profile today I would probably close down twitter!
I think other councils should give facebook a chance if they've got the resource and the content.
That's very interesting, Tricia. Have you used a tool to analyse the demographic of your Twitter followers? I would certainly agree that Facebook is not going anywhere, and for customer services it is going to remain useful. But for informing our citizens of the latest news in the Bradford District I don't think we have any more engagement on Facebook compared to Twitter.
Yep - it probably depends on the demographics of each area as well as to which is more popular.
We use a broad range of analysis tools (as we have to stumble about in the land of free tools thanks to no budget for digital!) but have come to a very broad understanding of our audiences using a mixture of looking at what content gets the most clicks/RTs (we have defined a list of categories to keep track every week) and from looking at the biographies of our followers. You can speed up that process by using followerwonk.
For example, our top topics for engagement (clicks) on twitter included council news (eg budget workshops), local events and roads and transportation news, and people were most interested in sharing general/national incentives and information about local jobs. The most popular words appearing in our followers' bios were things like: 'services'; 'business'; 'leading'; 'solutions'; 'work'; 'training'; 'company' and 'management'.
Like I say, not at all precise compared to what we know about facebook fans but it helps!
We're still working on a daily basis to try and make/promote content that the different audiences want to see - and sometimes the reaction is the complete opposite of what you expect! Maybe one day...
As a side note - if anyone has any free tool for analysing the approximate reach of tweets then please let me know! I used to use crowdbooster until they started charging...
Thanks Tricia. I too have used Followerwonk, but only to check the "best" times to tweet. I'll have to have a dig around with it to do some more analysis of our followers.
I admire your thorough, empirical, research of Twitter engagement. That is certainly the most reliable way of doing it, and if I had time I would do the same.
"sometimes the reaction is the complete opposite of what you expect" - Oh yes, I'm certainly familiar with that feeling. ;)
In terms of free tools to analyse the reach or Tweets, we post our Tweets using Buffer and their stats aggregate the potential reach of Tweets, which is very useful. It only analyses Tweets sent through Buffer though, and you may already be using another tool to post your content.
One that I've not tried, but which might be of use to you, is Tweetreach. I suspect that, like Crowdbooster, the free version may not be much use for a local authority.
Thanks Albert - will give them a try.
I'd add for 2014 that local government managers will continue to obsess over ROI on social media, at a micro level.