So how can you ‘socialise’ a local council and make it more
responsive to citizen’s needs?
With most Councils in the UK using social media I decided to
have a look and see what they were using Twitter for. Obviously there are other
‘platforms’ such as Facebook but I was interested to explore Twitter as it
seemed to me that the brevity of the Twitter tweet might be best suited to
quickly responding to local citizens requests.
Being based in the Thames Valley I would expect there to be
a rich community of locally based tweeters (and indeed tweets from Reading postcodes
have increased by over 60% in the last year). So what is everyone talking
about? And more particularly what were our local councils tweeting about?
A quick glance around the last month’s tweets of the 6 local
councils in Berkshire showed a reasonable amount of activity. The first thing
to be recognised is that at the moment most tweets are one way, that is they
are broadcasts to the followers and are aimed at telling people what the
council is doing. An initial analysis would suggest that 70% of tweets by
councils in Berkshire fall into this category. Whilst this in itself is
understandable it does appear that the opportunity to enter into a two way
conversation with a citizen is not always explored.
Nearly all councils respond to tweets that ask questions
such as ‘when are my bins going to be emptied?’ and this shows the power and
simplicity of Twitter, a quick simple response that tells the citizen what they
want. ‘But what about our CRM system’ I hear you ask? Yes it will either have
to be added manually to the CRM system, or heaven forbid, it won’t be logged in
it at all. And this brings me to my first concern and initial conclusion.
Is the current trend to drive everyone to self-service what
the citizen wants or is it just a desire to reduce costs? I suspect a bit of
both. But the retail sector has already been down this route and built world
class ‘vending machines’ that can dispense any product without human
interaction, and what are they finding? Well their customers don’t want a
shopping experience totally devoid of human interaction and many retailers are
turning to social media such as Twitter to engage customers in conversations
that are locally based and relevant to the locality.
In a recent article Pete Doyle, CEO of the SocialRetail Group discusses how he has
trained staff at local branches of Maplins to ‘tweet from the shop floor’ and
drive up local turnover at little to no additional marketing spend. Could this
approach work for a local council to drive up two way conversations about
important issues in a local community? Training staff to tweet responsibly and
without damage to reputation or ‘brand’ is key to this and I am currently in
discussions with one local council about this.
Socialising a council, or So-Co as we have started to know
it by, could mean many things, and different things to different people, but
using Twitter to move ‘broadcasts’ to conversations might be a good place to
start.
In the last month Slough Borough Council topped the
Berkshire ‘league’ with 41% of their 120 tweets being conversations. West
Berkshire Council were bottom with 8% of their 92 tweets being conversations.
Of course simple numbers don’t tell the whole story. Many of the Slough conversations
may have been responses to requests from citizens and may not be engaging them
in a two way dialogue about the latest borough plan, for example.
Having a clear strategy and well trained staff would seem to
be a good starting point, and a ‘hot topic’ that could enthuse citizens to have
their say. Knowledge of local hashtags as well is vital to ensure the best
possible coverage.
My research will continue and if you know of any good
examples of what I have discussed here then please tweet me @worsant
One passing thought, and this goes back to the vending
machine analogy (which I ‘borrowed’ from Pete Doyle) is it wrong that a
citizen’s ‘service request’ is not logged into the corporate CRM system? Well
surely if the citizen gets what they need, that’s all there is to do? Oh, but
don’t forget that Twitter keeps ALL conversations so there is always a record
of the conversation. And its free, it’s just that the data isn’t ‘owned’ by the
council which is a whole other area I have written aboutelsewhere.
So could we see contact centre staff using Twitter as
another channel to respond to? The range of options is increasing, and this is
why I would advocate a strategic approach to using social media and not the
rather one-way approach which seems to be prevalent at the moment
No comments:
Post a Comment