• Should social media accounts be personal, professional or corporate?  Should they be a mixture of all three?  If they are a mix, can this distort the message?
• If people use personal accounts, is there a danger of contacts leaving with the staff or people misrepresenting the company?
• Who, in a public sector organisation, engages with twitter on an official basis?  The comms team?  The managers?  The frontline workers?
• For Twitter or facebook engagement to truly take place the conversation is important.  Can this conversation take place with a comms team, rather than a subject specialist?

However, the first comment here was from LouLouK at Blackburn & Darwen Council, just up the road from me, who pointed out that some councils have got it right.

I need to be clear that a lot of good work is going on and that, especially in these times, it can be really hard to get people motivated to try things.  Where this stuff is going on, it needs to be shared.  Maybe it is being, and I’m out the loop.  When you’ve read my post, stick to my action plan….or just skip past it and read LouLou’s comments….what they are doing there seems to be better than any action plan I can produce!

–

It’s getting cold out there.

I don’t know who reads this blog in terms of location. I’d like to think we have a readership in exotic places like Hawaii, California and Walton-on-the-Naze. Those people may well not be aware that we’re approaching winter and have snow heading our way, apparently before the end of the week. If or when the snow does come, we’ll inevitably ignore the fact that this happens every year and, in a wild panic, close the schools, shut down the shops and make worried calls about whether we should attempt the journey into work.

Last year, this joke wasn’t even as unfunny as it is now. A heavy covering all over the country left everyone frozen to the spot and local government, schools, colleges, public transport and every other public body scrambled to find the resources to cope. In the mess, everyone realised there was a lot to gain from social media in a crisis and many of the commentators had got it right in predicting this.

In the wake of snow, there was much reflection. Some great examples of the use of technology emerged, some lessons in how not to use technology were learned. Alastair Smith, then a comms man at Newcastle Council, ran a workshop about this at last years UKGOVCAMP and I followed that up with another at LocalGovCamp YH. The details were compiled in my “Told you Snow” post.

So, as the snow approaches again, it’s interesting to see more people on board than last year. Just the other day, Leeds City Council announced that they would be running a feed similar to Kirklees Councils’ “Kirklees Winter” feed (dubbed The Gritter Twitter), giving out information about the closures. It’s fantastic that more councils are looking to social media now and they are right to do so; I certainly use Twitter and Facebook more than ever in emergency situations, and we’ve seen some great examples of Twitter’s use in crisis since then.

What’s disappointing, though, is that many of the lessons have not been taken on board. Again, Twitter is being used like an RSS Reader to roll out news releases that could be on a website.

In many council approaches, the conversations element, where people can ask questions and get responses via twitter extremely quickly is missing. Isolated, cold, damp and fed up people don’t need to know details about every school closure.  They do need cheering up.  A bit of conversation, when time allows, is as valuable as those road closed details.

The strategy for incorporating information into general twitter feeds and facebook pages is missing. This is particularly worrying if an inexperienced person has to update all the social media because management can’t get in.

The social media mashup element, where tweets can be placed on a google map to chart disruption hasn’t materialised. The lessons about wider access to open / mobile working to prepare staff for working from home have, amazingly in a time of austerity, been ignored.

There were some great Twitter stories last time. Newcastle Council’s Twitter worked with Sky News while Sarah Lay got Derbyshire Council working with volunteer 4×4 drivers through social networking. Part of the reason this worked was because, rather than inventing their own hashtags, they used existing conventions like #uksnow. It wasn’t just social media either. A huge percentage of people accessing school closure information did so using games consoles or television compatible browsers…how many councils test their web space with those?

It seems that, as the cold returns, councils are just rolling out the Twitter gritter with the traditional ones and no one is listening to the innovators who tried this last time round. So, what should local authorities do?

• Look at whether they need a separate Twitter feed for the winter or whether their existing feed with a hashtag can cover the job
• Find out existing hashtags and conventions for Twitter (so for snow use #uksnow followed by a postcode followed by any information or a number out of ten to rate severity of snow fall eg. #uksnow bd22 Hebden Road closed or #uksnow bd22 9/10
• Put together a communications plan.  Ensure that the social network tools are accessible from the office and from home, that people know the passwords, how to use them and conventions for using them
• Make sure that as fewer updates as possible are needed.  For example, updating a page with an RSS feed can automatically update twitter (using something like HootSuite), a facebook page and a website at the same time.
• Check that your website updates don’t rely on flash, java or other technicalities that could make it unusable from some smart phones and games consoles.  If it has to rely on these, make sure there’s a link to something that doesn’t
• Think big – this isn’t just a tool for you to roll out news releases, it’s a tool for people to report things to you, for people who’re stuck to talk to you, for the media to keep in touch with what you’re doing.  The feed isn’t just about you locally, it could be used nationally to paint the picture
• Use the right hashtags on Twitter.  Use you own by all means, but make sure you use the nationally trending ones, so that others can pick up on your feeds
• Have a plan – if you need to rope in emergency services, volunteers, community wardens etc, can you get information from them onto social media quickly?  How?  Maybe they have their own feeds you can re-tweet or share on facebook.  If not, is there a comms number/email accessible outside the office to keep the information up to date.
• Above all, make sure if you start this, you finish it.  There’s nothing worse than a twitter feed that shuts down at five when the snow starts at 4.  Make sure you don’t use the feed one day and not the next.  If using separate feeds, don’t neglect your original feeds. Have plans in place for how to do this.

With the right thought processes, another snow crisis could mean some real innovation in local authorities….I just hope it’s not a snowman that melts with the thaw, but one that stays with local government for a while, because, let’s be honest, it’s getting cold out there.

Maybe that’s why, despite columnists, broadcasters and union leaders ranting on about it, the cut word hasn’t really crept into the public sector and voluntary sector blogospheres as much as I thought it might. Nobody wants to talk about it. Partly because they don’t want to enter into political territory. Partly because they are worried that, if they stick their head above the parapet, their neck is vulnerable to the public sector guillotine heading towards us in October.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a lot of events where some or most of the delegates were from the private sectors. I’ve found a lot of people completely unaware of October’s comprehensive spending review and the unimaginably massive impact this could have on the public and voluntary sector if the worse of the rumours are true. More to the point, a lot of people are staggered to find that public sector morale is at rock bottom. We always say that though don’t we, us whining, unionised, cushy-jobbed public servants? The fact is, this time it is true. I’ve not met anyone in the public or voluntary sector in the past two months who isn’t in in fear of their job, their service area and, frequently, the difficulties their service users might experience if it all comes crashing down.  However, despite this morale crash, people aren’t aware. They are not aware because no one will talk about it.

Then, yesterday, I saw a post from Katie Brown, a friend and co-innovation enthusiast at Leeds MIND, the mental health charity. Katie’s blog is the first I’ve seen that really spells out how low morale is – but it also makes another point, one that is actually very important.  These points together persuaded me that I really do need to write this post.

Her second point was about the vision she had presented for taking forward MIND’s Information for Mental Health. It involved savings. It involved rationalising. It involved, in part, the use of technology and social media to achieve this. But it didn’t involve cuts. No jobs were going to go.

There are very few people reading this who will be under the illusion that the public sector doesn’t need to save. We’re in tough times and, while some may have it considerably tougher than others, the sound bite that we are all in this together is true insomuch as we are all part of the same economy. It’s also true that, in some areas of the public sector there are more ways to save than others. One way of saving money is to rationalise, making use of free, or open source, technology, using social media as a form of communication and embracing mobile working not only as a environmental and productivity raising tool, but also as one that can save organisations huge amounts of money.

So, in a time of cuts, is the public sector embracing this? Well, let’s narrow this down. Is local government embracing this? No, in a word. Recently, I helped organise an event around public sector innovation. Every local authority Chief Executive was aware of this event. Yet, Chief Execs, Directors or even Heads of Service were only really notable by the absence. The promising things that are produced from time to time from organisations representing ICT in the public sector appear to come to nothing. Councils, as a generalisation, still require employees to come to the office every day, still block useful professional networking tools like Twitter, and still see social networking as a novelty that someone in the comms team does. That person in the comms team isn’t usually even a comms officer.

At a time when the private sector are talking about crowd sourcing, social marketing, corporate blogging and putting live chat rooms in their websites to allow people to get on-the-spot customer service, councils are creating a Facebook page but barring discussions in case anyone says something they don’t like. They are implementing text message systems to keep customers informed, but not allowing them to text back. It’s not that they don’t see the use in technology. It’s that they don’t see the vision.

Social media is all about communication and the transmission and organisation of information. It’s no coincidence that this is what much of life as a whole is about and, while it could be argued that money is at the root of all evil, I think it’s fairer to say that communication is often a factor in the issues of a community. People who are unable to communicate effectively, people who struggle to receive and process communications are often the people who councils are supporting.  But, it’s not the comms department doing the supporting.  Communication is at the heart of almost every council frontline service and essential internally to keep the organisation working.  But social media is seen as a way of marketing, and limited to a cupboard in the comms team office. Bosses see it as something to replace news releases, a way of people interacting without the need for people.  This, in turn, sparks a technophobic, and often union backed, backlash of people worried that the computer will replace them. Community development workers have been using the telephone for years, saving a lot of time and money, but people don’t want to press 1 to receive support. They want to speak to someone, the support coming along the way. Social media doesn’t need to cost jobs…and can still save money.

I’ll take you back now, to Katie’s post, her vision that didn’t include job cuts. There’s a bigger picture here, a future that’s much brighter than the confusion we have tonight. But that bright future depends on people listening, people responding and people changing. Right now, we’ve got some room to breathe in the eye of the storm. We’re spending the time battering down the hatches and clinging on to the safest tree.  Not only that, but we’re so busy clambering for higher ground that we’re not looking at new ways to stay afloat.  Let’s look beyond that and start that innovation right this instant.

I suggest a simple action plan.  Let’s think about how we communicate.  Internally.  Externally.  With people.  Not just in term of formal, public relations.  How do we support colleagues, how do we support customers, how do we support each other?  There are new, easier, more effective, cheaper ways of doing this.  Let’s change.  Let’s move forward.

This blog is a-political. But that’s not important because, let’s be honest, if the public sector can’t respond and change now, it will destroy itself. It won’t be a case of blaming the Government.

I’ve known David Wright MP for many years.  I’ve met him in a professional capacity as well as in a personal capacity, having lived and worked in the Telford area for many years.  As someone who is vocal on local and national issues, I’ve often approached David and always found him to be a responsive MP.  By and large I’ve agreed with him or seen his point and he’s always struck me as honest, so when he says his twitter account was hacked when the message was posted, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  I should point out here, by way of a disclaimer, that I’m not connected to any political party nor am I endorsing that people vote for David….I’m simply putting forward my opinion as a former constituent.

My worries about the story were confirmed when I tuned into the media today and realised that the anti-twitter stories that seem to fill the media daily had reached the political stage.  David’s comment, be it a misjudged throwaway comment or malicious hack, had thrown him into the political spotlight and, with it, the use of twitter by politicians trying to engage our interest.

Local BBC radio was quick to pick up the story and keen tweeter Jim Hawkins did a fascinating phone in show about the use of Twitter by politicians.  It kicked off with an interview with Steve Molyneux (@profontheprowl), a fellow social media buff and learning technologist, who has seen the dark side of Twitter himself.   Steve rightly pointed to the dangers of making sure your social media site isn’t compromised.  He also questioned, however, the use Twitter is as an engagement tool for politicians.  More on this point later.  A later  caller summed up my feelings sting: “it isn’t Twitter that’s at fault here – it’s how people use it.”  Another few stated that twitter was simply a “trendy” tool of the moment and that they would “rather see their MP” than hear them on Twitter.  Meanwhile, Conservative HQ, keen to defend themselves against the comments, claimed that: “This is exactly the sort of politics that voters are so sick of”.

What I wondered, looking at all that, was whether this was the sort of politics people were sick of, or whether people were also sick of the politics where a throwaway comment gets blown out of all proportion.  Anyone who reads David Wright’s tweets can be in no doubt of his dislike of the Conservative party.  No one takes issue with this.  He is, after all, a Labour politician.  Even if he had posted his controversial “scum sucking pig” comment, it would not have shown him as a hypocrite, nor devalued his opinion on any policy.  It may have shown him to be juvenile but, if the British public are so sick of juvenile comments, why is it that we crave the controversial guests on Question Time and why is it that Jeremy Kyle still gets such high viewing figures?   Actually, in terms of the latter, why is that?

My worry here is that there are a large group of people who do not engage with mainstream politics but do engage with social media could be engaged in the political process through the use of Twitter.  David claims to be and, to my knowledge is, the only Shropshire MP using Twitter.  Even his critics were quick to congratulate him on using Twitter on Jim’s radio show.  But maybe, as that caller had said, it was how he used it.  Politicians need to maintain some decorum on twitter.

Problem is, when I was recently asked what one piece of advice I’d give to someone starting out their brand in social media, I said: “Think of your brand as a person – a social media account that does not have personality is worse than none at all.”  So, how do you justify this if you can’t make the odd throw-away comment?  After all, we all do this, all the time.

I’m not sure what the answer is, however I do know that, in a world where people are getting on social media, comments will come back to haunt people.  Sometimes, rightly, when they expose that person as someone who is not being honest.  However, when they simply go a bit over the top, I think we should simply demand, and accept, an apology.  If politics becomes about who said what to whom and when, in a world of social media, it will descend into a farce and the tweeters and facebookers, like their “real life” cousins, will join the apathy club.  Maybe I’m not the normal mainstream.  But I want my politicians online.  I want them to make mistakes.  I want them to be human.

It’s taken a long time for a lot of the smaller charities and community groups to cotton on to these ideas, and a few still haven’t. However, it’s at this point that social media comes into play.

Social Media is a branding exercise. Brand has stopped being something that is the domain of the multi national. It’s stopped being the tools of large organisations. It’s even stopped being a sidethought by grassroots campaigners. Brand is now truely in the domain of the individual.  Even the most open facebook user needs to recognise that they are not really sharing everything about themselves – they are sharing select information with the intention of influencing people and affecting how they are perceived.  Like the great multi-nationals, logos, reputation and crisis management are needed.  The logo is the facebook profile picture, the reputation is the groups you join, the photos you comment on or the wall posts you make and crisis management is what you do when someone posts a negative comment on your photos.

I’ve experienced personal brand myself.  At various meetings of the past six months, I’ve found people don’t know me or who I am, but do follow and know about “kevupnorth” (my twitter name).  So, kevupnorth is a user that is known beyond Kevin Campbell-Wright, someone who has his own reputation and on whom people have made their own judgements.  I can’t help but wonder, if I put particular effort into it, whether I could build up a totally inaccurate portrait of kevupnorth, or manipulate his reputation without effecting my own.

The problem is that brand management has been a skill used for decades (or possibly centuries) by incredibly clever operators who we now call “spin doctors”.  It has been honed by exchanges of practice and education.  Yet now, everyone needs to have these skills to make good use of their social networking presence.

To bring this back round to the point of this blog, how is this relevant for communities?  One of the questions in the discussion today was whether I felt every brand would one day be represented via social media.  While I said that they would, I also emphasised that brands would change.  In a world where we are all brands ourselves, it will stand to reason that every community group, every community activist and even every community problem and challenge will be a brand, which will require its own ideas around reputation management, key messages, logos and PR.   If we’re going to tackle digital literacy seriously and support communities in acheiving what they want to, we need to do more than just teach them how and why to use the net and tools for safe usage.  We have to allow them to develop their brand – and give them the skills to manage it.

There were lots of sessions on lots of topics and I can’t even begin to cover every thought and idea that passed my way.  The best thing to do it read the Twitter stream and see all the hundreds of comments.  There were lots of people to meet too, some people who I knew from Twitter and some new faces too.  I won’t list them all, partly because I can’t remember them all and partly because I want to get to the core of this blog post.

My running theme for this GovCamp was, unintentionally, the three Cs:  Community, Crisis and Communications.

Alastair Smith ran a really productive session around social media and the response to the recent snow.  The conversation strayed off into emergency planning as a whole and the role of local and national government alongside the role of media and volunteers.  There were some great stories of how local government had responded using social media, how local government had rallied volunteers and how the media had used council social sites like Twitter to gather information.  Despite a general feeling in the hierarchy of many local government bodies that social media is something for the kids, the snow showed huge hit counts of web media.  One posting even reported 21,000 hits.

However, these great stories were also diluted with the inevitable ones around social media failing during the snow.  There were calls for a greater consistency in the way councils used things like twitter – for example using a #schoolclosure hashtag nationally, so that media organisations could follow everything (which SkyNews did).

In terms of planning for future emergencies,  there was a definite consensus that web officers, ICT professionals, comms officers and emergency planning officers need to work together more to plan for these eventualities.  Somehow a 24/7 approach needs to be agreed.  Other questions raised were:

• What is an emergency – what defines a time when it’s ok to get the boss out of bed to get a tweet?
• How do press staff respond – are press releases the way forward, or is a twitterfeed more useful?
• How does the organisation respond – some schools give their closures to the BBC, not the council PR team
• How does the comms team work with the emergency services, roadwatch and other external agencies around this?
• How is web content updated?  Can key staff access the CMS from home to make web updates?  How do they plan for Twitter or Facebook crashing under increased demand of a major emergency?
• Most importantly, how do they respond to customers?  Obviously emergency queries could be answered online, but is it over the top to assume a 24/7 conversation can take place?  What if someone replies to a school closure with “well that school would close, it’s rubbish”.  How do comms staff avoid engaging in debate?  Should they avoid engaging in debate?

Following on from this nicely, I went to Eve Shuttleworth’s session around how journalism is changing and, more to the point, how comms should relate to the media via social media.  There was strong feeling that video and youtube type content submitted with press releases needed to be in keeping with the spirit of the medium.  There was little point making corporate videos for YouTube.  A lot of doubt was raised that content like this would be used at all, especially as many media bodies won’t use content developed by a council because it’s weighted.  Jim Hawkin’s, from BBC Radio Shropshire, joined in the debate via twitter, suggesting that media releases should remain as text and that actually linking to other content was largely irrelevant – it was a quick, accurate and simple product that journalists wanted.  Despite this, one local newspaper had already agreed that they would take YouTube content for their website.

The final session, run by Robin Grant, looked at how we use the data we can get for consultation.  There were lots of methods suggested and ways of analysing the results were also debated.  My favourite, though, was the feeling that consultation could be crowd sourced, ie that, as part of a formal conversation, we should be tapping into where peopel are talking about the issue already.

I’ll finish this post on a note that really summarised the day.  The first session I attended was a “Local Authority Group Hug”, just a session to catch up where local government was in terms of technology.  There was a real mix form the very innovative to those with complete lockdowns.  The session was facilitated by someone I won’t name, who had come unofficially.  Social media wasn’t recognised in their organisation.  Innovation wasn’t  encouraged.  But that didn’t matter, because staff came from all over the country to see how they could make the change in their organisation.  How they could innovate past the barriers.  It’s that passion for the future that really makes UK Gov Camp.  I’ll certainly be booking my ticket for next year.

There are many arguments for and against having these restrictions and I don’t really want to open the vast can of worms that those debates would involve.  Additionally, I don’t want to go over the whole “your employer, the council, might search for you on google” debate, which has been done to death.  However, having read a recent article re-posted on Twitter by community development consultant Mike Chitty, I did have to think about how this could apply to social media.

The article, from Montana in the United States, revolves around a City Council asking job applicants to submit usernames and passwords for all their social media sites as part of the job application.  They’ve taken legal advice on this and apparently they can do this.

This is an extreme example of councils probing into people’s private lives.   The legal implications of asking people for passwords which, as the article points out, they are bound not to give you by the terms of service, probably means this won’t go any further.  However, I doubt it’s the end of the social media fit for office debate.

Currently, most public bodies I’ve experienced ask you, on application, for the following information:

• To declare any criminal charges or, if relevant, any accusations that have been made against you
• Submit to a CRB Disclosure (police check)
• To declare (and normally to cease) any business interests you have
• To declare any membership organisation you belong to (such as the freemasons)
• To declare (and if applicable cease) any political office you may be involved in

So, would it be that surprising if they started asking you for lists of your online presence?  Do you have a website, are you a member of facebook , what does your LinkedIn history say about you?

There’s always that argument that if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to hide, but the fit for office argument gets tricky here.  What if you’re a member of the facebook group  “I was born in the UK so why don’t I have as many rights as immigrants“.  To some, this is a legitimate, humanitarian debate.  To others it is a political, right wing, cause.  To others still it is an unfounded, racist and prejudicial statement.   If you went to a physical rally around this subject it would be quite easy to determine if it was political or not, based on who had organised it.  You’d be able to judge the tone of the rally and decide if your presence brought the council into disrepute.   However, on a facebook group it isn’t quite so simple.

The standards board ruled some time ago that a politician who posted arguably racist comments on a facebook page had not violated standards because it was a personal account.  So where does this leave public bodies?

Looking back at the guidance from Darlington Council, I note that even politically restricted persons can display a political badge on their person or vehicle…so what about on their facebook account?  What if they also conduct some council business over facebook?

The answers to this, sadly, are policy and guidance.  Applicants, staff and political members need to be clear about what they can and can’t do politically via social media – otherwise we’ll end up with job application forms asking the questions that they do in Montana.

So, I’ve put a list here together of all the posts I’ve found on the subject, so that this can be a one-stop-shop for cases studies about technology could, or did, help the public sector respond to the recent snow “crisis”.

The list is a bit small – please, send me links to yours (tweet them to @kevupnorth) or leave them in the comments section

My recent post on social media in a crisis, my guest post on NOMAD about mobile working in the snow , a round-up of the snow discussion at UKGovCamp on and older posts on snow and emergency planning

John Popham from DIGITAL 2020 on how the internet could be used through twitter or learning platforms

Tim Hobbs, director of Bartec on how Twitter can get the word out in the snow

Dave Sugden from Village E-Learning on how the education sector could prepare for snow days

Donald Clark from UFI LearnDirect on the problems of closing schools (personal blog, not technology related)

James Clay on closing schools – should it matter – and when will we learn?

Ingrid Koehler from IDeA on examples of how councils used social media in the snow

Sarah Lay on how local gov snow-sites were not just accessed via the PC, or even the iPhone

Not too long ago I did a post about how Twitter and other social media being used in emergency situations.  Now, I don’t claim that millions of people in local government read this blog, let alone act on it, but very few people could have failed to notice the phenomenal rise in social media this year – and local government, along with the media, now think they are on board.

The first problem is that social media is a 24/7 media.  It doesn’t just work within working hours.  The second is that social media is not simply a new hi-tech version of old media.  Both of these problems were highlighted over the first weekend of 2010 and in the week that’s followed.

Firstly, a week ago, when a huge gas explosion ripped through a shop and flats in central Shrewsbury.  Like most news these days, I found out through social media, or facebook to be exact, when a friend living nearby changed his status to “WTF WAS THAT????  It sounded like a bomb”.  The media was on board too, with BBC Radio Shropshire and their presenter Jim Hawkins, amongst others, using Twitter to keep people informed of the situation.  The council’s Theatre Severn also made good use of Twitter, explaining the cancellation of the closing night pantomimes and the injury of one of the cast members in the explosion.  However, the main local authority twitter feed remained silent, a single Tweet from Friday warning people to avoid a bad batch of chick peas.

Meanwhile the people of Shropshire, or certainly those I follow on Twitter and Facebook, began talking about the story.  Photos started appearing and the BBC snapped them up and put them on its site.  Citizen Journalists fed out the story.  However, there was an issue.

Citizen Journalists, unlike their professional cousins, do not always filter news based on fact.  Rumours of deaths and exaggeration of facts spread quickly.  Luckily, the BBC provided sanity in this conversation, however the local authority, whose buildings were damaged, whose roads were closed, whose citizens needed reassurance, remained silent.  Wy have a twitter feed if you don’t want to join the conversation?  This isn’t an argument AGAINST local authorities using Twitter – it’s an example of why they need to think about how they use it and use it effectively.

That was the end of that story, but it wasn’t the end of my week of local authority let-downs.  Over the following weeks the snow really took hold and I was surprised to see how badly twitter and facebook were used by local government to put out information.

There are lots of issues around technology and snow, I’ve outlined them before and Digital 2020′s John Popham has also done an excellent post on the subject, so I won’t repeat it.  However, there were some points raised that do require further commentary.

John refers to mobile working practices being a solution to the snow.  It’s true that this would have alleviated many businesses problems and, as someone who is able to work flexibly, I was able to carry on close to normal working from home.  I say close to normal because mobile working is currently a fledgling idea and, in the way local authorities have often jumped into social media without a strategy some organisations have used the snow to do the same with mobile working.  We work from all locations and are used to it, but people who are used to the social banter and processes of the office can’t simply be told to work from home…it’s a major culture change that, while productive in many cases, can be damning if implemented without thought.  That’s not an argument against it, and, like John, I think a link to project nomad is needed to show where that thought and planning is taking place.

John also mentions being irritated by “heroic” attempts to get to work.  While I’d agree that it is always stupid to put lives at risk and that many people try to get to work when they don’t need to, I think that many people could easily have got to work if they tried.  This would have kept the systems of this country running better and meant the snow was far less of an “emergency”.  I went to work on the days I could and was very grateful to social media for keeping me informed about bus and train delays and closures.  Social media from other commuters and West Yorkshire Metro, I should add, not my local Bradford Council.

However, elsewhere, parents were panicking about whether their schools were open.   They weren’t as lucky in terms of social media help.  Back in Shropshire a local independent radio station got some school closures wrong and facebook was full of discussions and questions.  A conversation among citizens where everyone participated, except the local authority. Luckily, some inspiration was at hand in the form of Kirklees Council, whose Twitter feed (@kirkleeswinter) kept people informed about school closures and gritting and, in a pretty innovative approach for local authority Twitter, actually interacted and responded to questions citizens posed.  A great example, which I hope they’ll follow with a KirkleesEmergency so people can follow it for any crisis.

There will be sceptics reading this who wonder whether this is just the voice of geek, telling local authorities how communities work when really no one is reading social media.  To that end, I’ll put up this that I noticed on facebook from family in The Wirral.  I’ve blanked out the names and schools, but this gist is clear.  A teacher walked round the estate to tell parents when the school was open.  Why, one the parents enquires, couldn’t they have just put it on facebook?  Why indeed.

However, now that I’m back here, I thought it time I put key to computer again and got a blog up  – so maybe it is a bit odd that I’ve chosen the same subject as last time.

As a commuter and new parent of a very young child, I am naturally paranoid about Swine Flu and have therefore been following the stories closer than I normally would.

Today’s call to close schools to curb the spread of the flu is not a shock and I fully expect the closure of other public offices as the virus spreads.

So, now is perhaps the best time for organisations to be sorting out their online presence.  With the aid of social media there is nothing stopping this country continuing to function without any major disruption even if the vast majority of office staff are at home.

In a recent meeting through work, the developers of an online learning platform told me that they are receiving more and more enquiries in light of possible swine flu closures – so what’s stopping the rest of the public sector looking at the same?

If this pandemic does reach the epci proportions predicated, we’ll have a lot of people staying at home who want to be kept informed – and social media will be the west way for that to work.

This isn’t rocket science – but it doesn’t seem to be happening in the UK.  New York City recently looked at how facebook could be used in an emergency - and it would be good to see plans like that over here in the UK

Birmingham City Council have recently completed a great wordpress powered site to put all their new output in one place, providing breifings for journalists and other interested parties to keep them informed.  Similar sites could do the same with Swine Flu (or indeed other emergency) information.  Here are some other features I think they could add:

• Find a flu-friend (sign up to volunteer to drop off food or medication to someone hosuebound by flu – or sign up to locate a flu friend)
• Online chat room to support people with expert advice or a place for a chat if you’re bored indoors
• Links to national support websites.

It should olnly take moments to set up – so let’s hope someone sorts it.