How to work with online communities

Of all the projects I worked on at DIUS/BIS, the one I am still most proud of is still going strong, if quietly, today: the Mature Students partnership with The Student Room and Directgov. When I wrote about it in February 2009, I explained:

There have been some good examples of ministers engaging with online communities as part of consultations, notably Lord Darzi and Netmums as part his Review, as well as the semi-formal partnerships for discussion we set up alongside the New Opportunities white paper. But more sustained engagement with these forums is still a rarity, despite the fact that communities’ interests and those of government are often very well aligned.

Nearly 18 months later, I’m not sure much has changed, and that’s a huge missed opportunity. These big, interest-based communities are the yellow brick road to the Big Society – the epitome of cognitive surplus put to good use – demonstrating the kindness of strangers, the warmth and passion of human beings and the magnetic pull of experience every bit as strong as that of place. Dave Briggs, as ever, got there before me:

Those spaces which include forum-type elements are pretty much always the most popular. Think about the Ning sites you belong to, or the Communities of Practice. Try as you like to get people to blog, or contribute to wikis, it’s the forums they always gravitate to first.

It’s not that government doesn’t want to engage with online forums, but rather that the different models of engagement aren’t very well understood yet. The Netmums ministerial webchat is almost a cliché now, but direct engagement with forum administrators to achieve something longer term, or as a source of insight or feedback, isn’t very widespread or sophisticated, at least from what I can see.

So it was lovely to catch up  yesterday with Jamie O’Connell, Marketing Director of The Student Room at his funky Brighton HQ (pool table – check; dartboard – check; guitar – check) to chew the fat about how the relationship between government and big forums like his can be deepened. And let’s be clear, it is big. This is no hyperlocal forum – the site has 2.8m unique visitors a month, with 500,000 registered members and around 27,000 new forum posts each day. To describe it as a forum is a bit misleading, as there’s a whole load more functionality including wiki pages of high quality user-generated advice on everything from homework to relationships, and a fully fledged social networking platform and insight service (@TSR_Insight on Twitter) in the pipeline for later this year.

Why try to rival Facebook though? Interestingly, The Student Room’s members have told the team that when they want to collaborate with classmates who aren’t necessarily friends, they’re forced to create duplicate profiles to separate the friends-only pictures from the more career-safe stuff. Conversely, in a forum on the scale of The Student Room with its team of volunteer moderators, the anonymity of abstract handles like bunty64 and doughboy actually allow for more frankness about personal experience, and willingess to engage constructively with strangers, and in fact don’t tend to lead to systematic trolling. There are dozens of these kinds of insights, drawn from the team’s willingness to engage with users when designing the platform. They’re also a fascinating bit of good PR for yoof in general.

There’s more in the slideshow podcast below that I recorded with Jamie:

But anyway. What really interested me was the kind of models that Government in particular might adopt to work more sustainably with big communities like The Student Room, Netmums, Patient Opinion, Army Rumour Service, BusinessZone, Pistonheads, Horsesmouth and the many others. Here are some:

• One-off webchat with a senior figure/expert (e.g. swine flu webchat with DH expert on Netmums)
• Asychronous Q&A by video (e.g. Yoosk.com on Army Rumour Service)
• Policy team watching a forum thread to get insight into issues (e.g. BIS Credit Card consultation)
• On-site sponsorship/display advertising (e.g. UCAS, Red Bull on The Student Room)
• Identifying key communities members and ‘sponsoring’ them to be ambassadors (e.g. Apprenticeships on Horsesmouth)
• Commission community platform, with some tweaks, to deliver a key policy programme (e.g. Patient Opinion Trust feedback, School of Everything directory of learning opportunities for BIS)
• Establishing online community as a distinct space for peer discussion at arms-length from government, but with reciprocal links to official information (e.g. financial support for mature students BIS/The Student Room)

but there could also be:

• Recruiting community members to tell their stories as bloggers
• Analysing data on topics discussed/anonymised member profiles as a source of customer insight/trends
• Using forum moderators’ expert skills to moderate other projects at low cost, e.g. government crowdsourcing websites
• Tapping into technical skills of online community teams, to create platforms and tools for government campaigns/projects
• Working with communities to host widgets encouraging feedback on government policymaking initiatives
• Getting moderators to kick off well-signposted discussion threads about new government strategy launches or proposals
• Recruiting community members to low-cost online focus groups or audience panels to help road test or co-design new services or policy options
• Running competitions to source stories, images, films, ideas or whatever from target audiences
• Equipping community members to become peer-supporters or buddies, e.g. about mental health issues
• Recruiting new staff via communities, getting existing staff to engage online with potential recruits to answer questions

… and so on. In short, there are as many ways to tap into and use these incredibly precious resources as there are facets to human nature. And it’s because of this humanity – and hopefully goes without saying – that communities need to be treated with respect. On the one hand, there is a strong current of volunteering and willingness to help good causes. On the other, there’s the need to eat. Sure, Government is strapped for cash, but there are lots of ways Government can help without spending much money:

• Reciprocal linking should be the basic minimum, ensuring communities who work with you get a prominent link and/or badge on your site back to theirs, sending them helpful Google juice
• Connecting front line staff or policy officials to the community so they become actively involved with the site and listening to discussions helps to cement the relationship and keep the feedback loop working
• Inviting community admins to government events and launches, Q&As with the Minister, press conferences and so on, helps demonstrate that they’re taken seriously as a route to important audiences
• Offering prizes for competitions, showcasing the creative work of members on a national platform, offering work experience, internships etc
• Making sure agencies are clear that you want to deliver campaigns/policies via existing online communities – they’re probably less constrained procurement-wise, but don’t necessarily have those community relationships
• Keeping in touch is often overlooked, but is the basis for keeping each other updated about potential opportunities you might not hear about otherwise

The next step: Meet The Communities

But there are many other ways to build relationships, and lots more experience to share. To help explore this further, I’m helping to convene Meet The Communities, a free, one-off event probably in Central London during September, bringing together some of the leading online communities with the government clients, PR & digital agencies for an afternoon of storytelling and speednetworking. It will be a chance to put faces to names, hear how other organisations work with online communities, and make some personal connections.

If you’re interested in taking part either as an online community owner, potential government client or agency, leave a comment below or send me a private message via the contact form and I’ll put you on the list.

More for less: three cheap ideas to do now

I’ve been chatting to quite a range of folk grappling with the issue of what to do – on a shoestring – in the digital space with their Department in this brave and uncertain new world. It’s fair to say that digital plans in government right now have to take account of three realities:

1. There’s no money left, so to speak. An exaggeration of course, but all round central government at least, there’s appetite to do things at low or no cost – not just do ‘more for less’. Perhaps more than I predicted, the squeeze is accelerating senior leaders’ appetites to make strategic bets on digital channels as a solution now, instead of the mañana approach which has tended to prevail in recent years.
2. Like most leadership transitions in big organisations, there’s a change curve being followed, with the sense of pace and excitement in the early days, whilst still there, now being overtaken by the process of reviewing, reorganising and strategising, before the full weight of delivery really kicks in. It’s a crazy busy time in some parts of government, but still an uncertain, wait-and-see game in others.
3. Perhaps most seriously, communications and marketing especially as a discipline are out of favour politically. The freeze on advertising and marketing spend is as much mood music about the tone and purpose of communications under the Coalition as it is a way to save actual money.

Here are three ideas I would be looking at:

Build links with online communities

Everyone know Netmums, of course. But there’s a big wide world out there from The Student Room and Moneysupermarket to Pistonheads and Shooting People; The Poultry Keeper to Runners Forum – plus a thousand hyperlocal and hyperniche blogs some with suprisingly influential readerships.

Members feel ownership of these spaces, so it’s not good enough just to buy ads or spam a discussion thread (though buying a few ads might be a nice way of showing support). If your team feels comfortable moving away from broadcast messages and branded campaigns, working directly with online communities offers a way to talk directly with a highly-targeted audience and build a two-way relationship with them. That sounds like a cliche but it can really work, with discussions and links in these spaces living on longer than any PR agency retainer would have done.

Start to map out the forums and communities in your arena using good old search tools, Twitter lists and Facebook groups. Put out feelers to the admins and moderators, pay some visits their offices if they have them and buy some coffees. Find opportunities to work together so when something comes up, you can phone a friend. Will Perrin reports some good stuff from HM Treasury along these lines, supporting the Budget last week.

Help colleagues learn to tell their stories

A key element of achieving a more authentic tone in communications is giving voice to members of staff to tell their stories, within the constraint of remaining a cohesive organisation. DFID, UKTI and the FCO do it with their bloggers, fast-growing startups like Huddle do it on Twitter or like Abel and Cole on their blog. The Auckland Theatre Company’s Posterous blog lets interested audiences into a virtual green room to learn more about the company.

In times of austerity, encouraging staff to tell their own stories is paradoxically thrifty: it develops and extends their skills, it increases their engagement with their work, it helps them build new partnerships with people who can help on the outside, it helps the organisation make links between different areas of work, and become more comfortable collaborating with others. And of course, it presents a human, open account of what the organisation does to the outside world. Which in turn becomes more appreciative of what an ambassador, a policy official, a faststreamer or – gasp – a press officer, actually do.

Set up something simple with Posterous or Tumblr, or something a bit cleverer with WordPress.com. Recruit half a dozen varied interested amateurs to get involved, and expose them to how other bloggers think, write and respond. Help them film things on their phones or take pictures when the words aren’t coming easily, and channel their posts through someone in Comms who has the gift of common sense.

Put together a listening strategy

This is also a good time to develop a plan for how monitoring and feedback will be gathered and used – the scale of response to the Programme for Government and Spending Challenge suggest that Britons in their thousands are potentially willing to contribute their ideas to the Coalition.

But it goes without saying that there’s no point inviting comments unless you can review them properly, and even then, it’s better to be able to point to a timescale and process for responding in a way which makes the exercise worthwhile for all concerned. So it’s good to see the Spending Challenge team setting out that they will monitor blogs, social networks and WikiLeaks (excitingly), and provide some indication of how ideas will be filtered. But to save yourself time and pain later, put together a short listening strategy now, setting out:

• The organisation’s goals in reaching out to new/different/larger audiences online
• The key principles that will guide online discussion and listening (openness about scope, any constraints on debate, moderation policy, commitment to review feedback and so on)
• Some of the channels and tools that the organisation will use to listen to its audiences, how these will be listened to and by whom across the organisation
• How listening will be followed up by the people who can do something about the feedback, and what help is available to those team

This isn’t just another notorious Twitter strategy (fine as that was). By thinking some of these challenges through now, Ministers and policy officials will get better advice not just on what tools to use, but on how to make digital engagement something sustainable and credible in the coming years.

Photo credit: Here’s the thing…

Ada Lovelace Day: A new kind of civil servant

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science, and I’ve taken the pledge to write about a female heroine of science or technology.

My everyday heroine is Marilyn Booth, a civil servant, working in Science & Society policy in a central government department not a million miles from my own. To my knowledge, Marilyn’s not discovered any new elements, won many Nobel prizes or authored many W3C specifications (though I could be wrong). But she’s at the forefront of a revolution that should and must happen if government is to start engaging online in any meaningful way.

Marilyn tweets, about her work and her life. She retweets eminent scientists and stakeholders, including the minister and the department’s official channels, and has built up a 600-strong following. She runs a Facebook group, helping promote the work of her team, long after its original intended purpose was concluded. She sets up stakeholder events in Second Life that would terrify me, logistics alone. She uses low cost web tools like Eventbrite to manage events, saving taxpayers thousands of pounds a time. The bottom line is, she has her ear to the ground, knows her stakeholder audience well, thinks laterally and courageously about how to use the new tools, and won’t be thwarted by the limitations of corporate IT.

It’s great for government departments to set up social media channels and talk to their audiences in new ways. It’s even better when ministers and senior officials take the plunge personally. And it’s critically important that people in my kind of role walk the talk.

But we’ll only change the way government works when bureaucrats deep in the bowels of policy departments take the step of using them regularly and for professional purposes. When they know who’s influential and interesting beyond the formal steering group, and informally involve them in solving public policy problems in the open. Soon, that won’t be the difficult and at times brave step that it is today. For now, three cheers for the Marilyns showing us the way.

Au revoir

Shortly after the forthcoming General Election, I’ll be leaving the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Tomorrow will mark my second anniversary of working at BIS, and its predecessor, DIUS. It’s been a fantastic couple of years, which has introduced me to some phenomenally talented and creative people in and around government. I’ve been privileged to have the time, space and trust to experiment with how a policymaking department might use social technologies, though I’m conscious we’ve barely scratched the surface.

But it’s time for a change. I have virtually no idea what I’ll do next. I appreciate that this is, in the words of a long-time colleague, insane. For those curious: my departure is at my own behest, is on good terms, and isn’t a result of civil service cuts, linked to my own use of social media or in any way politically-motivated (I’d be happy to serve pretty much any government).

I’m optimistic that it’s a good time to be a general purpose webby. There are exciting opportunities for digital engagement around government, and lots of clever folk drumming up new ones. It would be interesting to step back into the private sector world of digital marketing, or the fast-developing world of digital campaigning in the third sector, and learn more about how things are done there. Or maybe it’s time to go back to my roots as a market researcher. In PR and digital, there are some smart young agencies and startups doing exciting things. And I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur manqué, so perhaps this is the moment to listen to Lord Sugar, take the plunge and turn some of those crazy tools and techniques into grown up products and services myself.

If you have a project or venture you’d like to discuss with me, I’ll be all ears for the next couple of months – I’m hoping not to rush into anything too quickly. You can contact me via this blog, DM me on Twitter, or contact me via LinkedIn.

Thanks all for your support over the last couple of years. I’m looking forward to whatever comes next.

Photo credit: Kisforkate

Round-up

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the BIS webbies (not for me though; I’ve been putting my feet up for the last week in rural Suffolk). A quick round-up of some of the highlights:

A new website for BIS: Neil’s team, working with our corporate IT unit and EduServ, have been working ferociously hard, at times uphill, and for the last umpteen weekends, to merge the old DIUS and BERR websites into the new site which launched over the weekend. Neil has the skinny. There’s a huge amount of work and care gone into the site, some really clever technical touches and some solid planning to help us adapt to whatever Providence throws our way. As Neil explains, we’re aiming for some fairly radical openness about the site going forward – you can easily see what it cost, (and what it will save), what its predecessors cost, what customer insight it’s based on, and what our real-time web traffic statistics are – and tell us what works and what doesn’t in a new GetSatisfaction forum. Fantastic work, chaps.

Like Simon, I’ll admit to waving a bittersweet farewell to the interim, WordPress-based site which helped us manage f0r 9 months. I’ve got a future blog post brewing on the pros and cons of lightweight tools, and plan to say more there.

Who Gets The Tip? We’ve kicked off a little campaign to encourage hospitality businesses to be transparent in how tips and service charges are divided, by encouraging consumers to ask the question ‘Who Gets The Tip?’. It’s a very brief, rather unusual project combining social media and traditional PR as equal partners and working with the excellent Diffusion on the online aspects. I particularly love the intro video, made in-house by, and starring, the team. Top stuff, led by Jenny. When you’re out and about, ask your waiter; and if you know someone who runs a hospitality business, suggest they generate a pie chart of how they split their tips, and add themselves to the Google map.

Company Charges consultation: We’re still experimenting with formats for online consultation, and the latest project is a niche consultation on changes to company regulation. We could have just whacked some PDFs up there and had done with it, but the policy lead was keen to offer more scope for online interaction between respondents (who don’t tend to dabble in mainstream social media). So the interactive response site built entirely by the talented Alistair Reid is an interesting WordPress/Scribd hybrid, which hopefully makes a big document more navigable and, well, interactive. We’ll see how it goes. It’s a sad consequence of the tightening of public sector finances that we’re having to say goodbye to Alistair at the end of his contract. He’s a fantastic all-round webby, social media maven, copywriter and colleague. For goodness sake, somebody hire him, quick.

Social Media channels survey: back in the autumn, we conducted some popup-survey and focus group user research into corporate site visitors – but what about our social media channels? With audiences consuming our content through RSS, email subscriptions, desktop clients and web interfaces, how can we get quick, cheap, useful feedback to help us evaluate those channels? Alistair and team have come up with a neat approach to promoting the survey: make a video, take a picture, send some tweets. Give us your thoughts.

As you can tell, I’m hugely proud of the team. They’re awesome.