Over the last year at Public-i, we’ve worked hard to develop a new product, the Social Media Audit – which we’re now ready to start talking about a bit more on the blog. That’ll take the form of a few case studies – and we’ll share them as they arrive. But for the moment I thought it might be helpful to take you through what the audit is, by way of an introduction.

What is a Social Media Audit?

For the uninitiated, the Social Media Audit is really a piece of consultancy research in which we carry out a detailed search of a client’s social media communities, providing them with a picture of these communities and advice on how best to engage with them. The ‘development’ I make reference to is really the work we’ve put in to creating a number of things:-

• A methodology, which we’re pretty sure is unique. It takes information about our clients and applies it through search terms to social media and then qualifies this data.
• A Social Media Audit tool, which we use to undertake the searches for us.
• A refined project management process that ensures a swift delivery of the audit, but also allows our clients to play an active part in the audit and see a clear route at the end to developing a relationship with the public that really responds to the opportunities social media provides.

It’s unique, but why?

Well, there are three reasons…

1. It’s dedicated to our market (public-sector, governmental clients).
2. It’s focused on civic content and civic content creators (i.e. the folk who are most important in creating civic content).
3. Its chief aim is a co-productive relationship where social media is a tool to helping the public and public sector solve problems together.

So… while there are lots of people out there claiming to find the valuable conversations that involve you online, they’re not necessarily going to help you make decisions – not on their own. We take the view that what’s important for our clients is understanding how the connections between your organisation and the public can be enhanced by social media and how that’s really a learning process.

It’s about understanding how the rules have changed and the implications those rule changes have in terms of resourcing, best practice and strategy. And it’s about the people. Because social media is just a means to make contact and share information with people, it needs an approach that concentrates on those people – and we think that’s about identifying the key individuals who are now operating online and how you can build a new kind of co-productive relationship with them.

Telling you about the audits

We’ve carried out audits in quite a few places, so over the next few months we’ll be introducing some of the stories behind those audits – what we’ve acheived, what has happened as a result of the work and how and why they were undertaken. We have a growing list of clients, which includes:-

• Cambridgeshire Renewables Infrastructure Framework – as part of delivering the engagement work package for Cambridgeshire Horizons
• East Sussex and Sussex Police
• Wolverhampton City Council and West Midlands Police
• Cumbria County Council and Police
• South Cambridgeshire

I hope to give you the stories behind each of these client’s audit in the next few months – so we can help people to better understand their value and what they can lead to.

Find out more

We’re always keen to talk to people about the audit (that’s while we’ll be writing about them – and as much as anything it’s about learning more), then please leave a comment or get in touch with us.

Tags:

• Civic Creators
• co-production
• CRIF
• Cumbria
• East Sussex
• Local Governement
• Online Communities
• Social Media Audits
• social web
• Solace Summit 2011
• South Cambridgeshire
• Sussex Police
• Transparency
• West Midlands Police
• Wolverhampton

Advertising on local government websites is not the unthinkable idea that it was a few years ago.  The public is now full of more sophisticated web users and, as a result, is more used to seeing ads. The tools are also more sophisticated (thus reducing the risks), and more importantly the public sector has been forced to re-evaluate its attitude to income generation and start to look at its websites as assets.  As you can see below, a number of authorities are already experimenting – and some are generating reasonable income. Or they say they are (more to come on that).

The obvious risks of putting ads on your website are around reputation (Porn! Gambling!! Loan sharks!!!) and being seen to endorse something you would rather not (low scoring care homes with talented marketing officers). The more amorphous risk is the effect on your moral authority – on your position as a leader of your community – if you are seen as being just like all the other sites.  Moral or political ambiguity is also an issue – Local Government has a philosophical fault line along the issue of outsourcing, for example, and services which meet all the acceptability criteria above may not suit the political stance of the council.

The reason this is popping up here at Public-i is because we are looking at whether we should add an ad widget into our Citizenscape platform, and we thought it would be helpful to share our research on this as we went along to try to get some views from people on this.

My personal view is that while ads in the right circumstances and with the right ad engine (see below) could work on your transactional site, I think you want to be very cautious about using ads on more democratic sites.  As anyone who reads my stuff at curiouscatherine knows, my main interest is in the construction of civic spaces online and it’s very clear that design matters enormously as part of influencing behaviours in a space.  However – it could be that I am just being a bit purist about this, so I will see if I can weave some questions about this into my field work this year.  Nonetheless, it’s clearly not my call and needs to be the decision of the individual site owner – which is why we are thinking of it as an optional widget.

What’s the right ad engine?

Clearly it needs to have the right revenue share and it needs certain technical attributes that I will get Ady to blog about when we get a bit further along with this (sorry Ady).  However, these are the main points I think in terms of managing risks and also in terms of turning this into a useful community information tool:

• Excluding the porn is relatively easy – but you also need to be able to exclude on the basis of hot topics and campaigns to make sure your ads are not contradicting your corporate messages.  This is either going to be a really clever ad engine or the ability to moderate your ads – which is going to take time
• You want to be able to insert your own ads into the feed so you can promote local events and services – you may even want a different revenue model to support ads that you want to provide
• You need to be able to geo-target ads to postcode level so that you can serve ads that are very community specific
• I also think that you need an ad partner who is going to be happy making the revenue data etc open to the public – not sure how this will be received by companies

Now – it may well be that there are loads of ad engines that do just this – but I have yet to do the research – we’ll share it when we do so please comment if you have specific questions.  The research below seems to highlight the mysterious Logo.Serve2 (see below), Logo-net, Addiply and Google Adsense.

And so to facts

Below is a list of Councils I’ve found who are serving ads, the service they are using and anything else we know about them.  Where possible I have linked to their advertising policy:

We have also put this in a Google doc and it would be great if anyone who comes across anything else could add it in – or just comment here and we will add it.

How much cash are we talking about?

This is really not clear – the only number was from a Google case study that claimed £3000 in a year (from Flyde) and a claim of just £60 per year via Google adwords from Rate My Place, which hardly seems worth the bother to be honest.  However I can’t believe that this is the best data and I will be trying to contact some of the other examples to see if I can find out what they are earning from adverts.  I am not expecting to get much joy with this, however, so if you are able to help gather this data it would be generally useful I think.  It’s the kind of thing that ought to be #opendata at some point – in the meantime it just doesn’t seem right to FOI it just because I am curious.

Outliers and other things I’ve found

Lincolnshire is interesting as they had ads but they don’t seem to have survived the website rewrite.  I am intrigued by that as the informal feedback we had on this at our User Group indicated that they were getting a decent revenue stream from it.  And a little debate in Scarborough here.  And the folks at Aylesbury Vale have asked the public.  The team at West Oxford have a statement about trialling it and Dover has a statement but no ads.

And I’m not sure what is going on at Nottingham City as I can’t find any ads but Adrian Short seems to know and has sent me some examples.  And there is a fairly comprehensive leaflet.  Thanks to Sarah Lay for info on this.  Sarah also found this blogpost about ads at Newcastle City Council – but again no sign of any ads that I can see.

The Providers

We found four main providers.

• The most popular is logo-net with five.  They seem to be working in the south of England and, though they don’t have a lot of information on their site, I could at least find it.
• This is more than I can say for whoever is serving ads from a server called Logo.Serve2.  This may be my technical limitations but I can’t figure out who is running this.  I did a whois search which returned  NETWORD CORPORATION LIMITED – also a dead end. I have someone a little more skilled than me digging into this and will let you know when we figure it out.  Whoever they are they have four sites.
• Next up is Google Adsense with three.
• And then the relative newcomer Addiply with one site at present.

We also found  two sites who seem to be managing the process themselves.

I’m going to check whether there are other suitable providers out there and then do a post with a bit more detail on these (or ask Tanya to do it – sorry Tanya).  We will also check them against the criteria that I laid out earlier if we can (or amended criteria if people have other ideas).

Conclusions and some next steps

This is really a first go at this and needs a lot more work – including checking whether or not I have caught all the examples out there.  We also need to do more work on the providers and the specification which will be the next step.  We will also be talking to our client base and getting an idea about what the appetite for trialling something would be, so please shout if you are interested in being involved.

However, the big question is clearly the revenue.  There is no doubt that there are some compromises involved in putting ads on a website, and the revenue that they can generate will affect the view of how acceptable these compromises are.  So – I am now going to try and find some proper comparable data as to what these ads have earned – wish me luck!!

Tags:

• Addiply
• Advertising
• Adverts
• Council Web Ads
• Google Adsense
• Income
• Local Authority
• Local government
• Logo.Serve2

Following on from Catherine’s blog post on the subject of Openness, I thought I should lay out the roadmap that the Development Department is going to travel in order to provide our clients, and their clients in turn, with open data from our applications.

As I am in the main a man of structure, process and words, I’ve started by laying down the two types of document that will be created to support the process. The very simple mind map (right) shows these (click on the picture to expand). Firstly, I am working on an “Open Data Application Policy” document that will define how our applications will implement access to their data, and which also defines the structure of the second document type – the “Application Open Data Specification” – that will define, for each application, the data that a client can expect to get from the application.

Is this process necessary, or should we just get on and “give you the data”, as the Open Data evangelists would, well, evangelise? Personally, I think that it’s important to have this framework in place: it preempts a number of questions from the developers; it ensures consistency of implementation across applications (and, let’s face it, Linked Data is our ultimate goal, with Open Data being just a small step towards it); it promotes reuse within the organisation; and finally, it’s easier to correct mistakes in documents and processes than it is in code. Also, I hope it may be of use to others who are in a similar position – it is my intention to publish the policy document under a Creative Commons licence, as part of our move toward open practice.

As a taster for what’s to come, here are a few bullet points from the Open Data Policy document (remembering that it’s a work in progress):

• Access to data via a RESTful, read-only API
• API interrogation data will be available via the API. (I.e. you can ask the API what things people have been asking for.)
• Clients can opt out of providing their data through the API, but it is open by default
• Application’s UI will provide a clear link to the API documentation
• Data will be available in a number of formats – XML, JSON, CSV, (and various RDF formats for linked data)

The plan
So the plan, then, is as follows:

1. Finish the Framework document
2. Define an Open Data Specification for the Connect product
3. Implement the specification in the Connect product
4. Repeat 2 & 3 for our other applications

I don’t have any concrete timescales at this point, but I would expect to complete the Framework document before year end and have it published early in the new year. A template document for the Open Data Specification should follow swiftly thereafter.

I am in discussion with a client regarding open data in the Connect product and will define its Open Data Specification, and get the framework developed, with their input and support.

Look out for further blog posts as we work towards our goal of providing access our application data in an open, well defined way.

Tags:

• open practice
• opendata

Summer 2010 will see the launch of a new social web platform into the marketplace: Citizenscape. The initial aim is to enable public sector organisations to use the social web to effectively listen to their community.

“Whether councils like it or not, their publics are already interacting with each other using a wide range of social media tools. Now is the time for local government to start using social  media as an integral part of the communications mix”

Simon Wakeman, Head of Communications, Medway Council

Citizenscape is designed to be a modular, fluid solution; adding or removing content takes seconds to achieve and you can also send your content out into the wider web. It’s the importance of this last point that really cannot be stressed enough, and forms an essential tenet of Citizenscape – you must be able to liberate your content, to better engage with the social web, and eliminate the need for web users to visit your site.

But what has this got to do with webcasting?

Social Webcasts

The introduction of high-speed internet connections has had a massive impact on the type of content available online, not least of which is the exponential increase in the use of video. Even the most casual web user will be aware of the impact that video has had on the internet, and one of the most important  recent developments is the ability to quickly and easily share content. No trend spreads as quickly as it does online, and the ability to share video has become not only widely accepted, but widely expected by web users, over an incredibly short space of time. With these points in mind, we have been working hard on the next incarnation of our webcasting service, to be rolled out this summer. Dubbed Connect, clients and users will automatically have access to improved video players, with better quality video and enhanced design, but also – crucially – the ability to share formal content for the first time.

Current users will automatically be upgraded to the following:

• New Rich-Content Video player, including video sharing functionality
• ‘Embeddable’ video player, allowing clients and users to display webcast content on other sites, including their own websites, blogs, and social networking pages.

Microsites

In addition to the above, all existing microsites will be upgraded to ‘Citizenscape ready’ platforms. They will on first glance be very similar to existing sites; all of the current functionality will be retained, and look and feel will be improved.  While they will not look significantly different, however, the real changes are under the skin. Existing functionality converted to widget technology includes:

• Webcasting widget (Embed Player & Listings) – A widget specifically showing the webcasting as Embed player or as a list showing all current and past webcasts.
• Microsite widget – Reproduces content from current Microsites into CitizenScape including: Welcome text, FAQ Questions & Answers.
• Instant Update Widget via Twitter – Allows admin to use Twitter to update the CitizenScape site with a short instant message by pc or mobile using Twitter.

Clients will have the option of upgrading these new platforms to include new social media  functionality; at a cost, sure – but at a fraction of the normal cost of implementing the solution from scratch.

Upgrading, first and foremost, ‘turns on’ the previously static widgets, so all existing static widgets become travelling (i.e. can be embedded on other websites), and clients gain full admin control of the page, including setting up new pages. I won’t list the other features verbatim, but they include:

• Calls to action. Each element that makes up the current microsite will be able to include a call to action, allowing clients to bridge the gap between informal browsing and formal democratic action, for the first time – giving the viewer the opportunity to take direct action for the first time.
• Tag Cloud. Nothing new, right? Actually the tag cloud at the heart of Citizenscape aggregates all the sources of tagged data from across the site, whether it be from blogs, webcasts, tweets – you name it.
• Travelling content. It will now be possible for clients to post their webcast content elsewhere on the web, and have them auto-update when new content becomes available. Webcast listings, for example, could be posted on the client homepage, or their page on a social networking site, making it much easier and more cost-effective to attract viewers to webcasts.
• Taxonomy and administration. Clients will be able to easily administer their own webcasting information much more freely and quickly than ever before. The upgrade also grants access to the Central Taxonomy Server – making searching for tagged content simple, even if differing keywords are used.
• Interactive Video Player. The player will introduce even more functionality for users, allowing them to chat and interact with each other live while watching the webcast, and a host of other features.

So, all in all – a busy and exciting summer ahead. Watch this space for roll-out news.

Tags:

• Broadband Internet access
• Online Communities
• Social media
• Social network
• webcast