Engaged employees are happy employees

I was up with the lark this morning to catch a bus then a train to Edinburgh for the GovInsight/IBM social business tools seminar. There were people I know there such as Mike McLean from the Improvment Service and Ian Watt from Aberdeen City Council but for a change there were lots of people I didn’t. The topic for the event was how to use social media tools internally in an organisation for collaboration, communication and actual, real-life work. Stuart McRae used the IBM intranet as an example but there was no hard sell on the product, just the concept.

Sunny Edinburgh

This isn’t anything new to me as I’ve seen a similar presentation from another IBM social media evangelist before but it did reaffirm a lot of what I’ve been thinking for a few years now. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty here but I have Storified the main tweets from the session. It’s the first time I’ve used Storify so please allow for my basic use of this fabulous tool.

When got back to the office I was straight into a meeting that started off about a new website and ended up with a tutorial on using the Knowledge Hub – doesn’t get more social than that for us internally at the moment but, again, a fabulous collaboration tool. If you work in the public sector you should take a look if you haven’t already.

On other news I’ve been stripped of my Natural History trophy at the camera club. The president took me aside tonight, looking really serious and worried. Turns out tamed birds of prey don’t count as natural history and people had complained. He was obviously uncomfortable with the whole conversation but I really wasn’t upset. I explained that I was in the to  learn how to use my camera, not win competitions. What the judge said and how he scored the photo mean more to me than the trophy and it wouldn’t have mattered which category it had been entered into, the judge would still have thought it was a great photo. I’m happy with that – what’s more crystal doesn’t really go with the decor in the living room! Plus it means I can enter my Harris Hawk into another competition

Today I have learned:

• trust empowers employees
• don’t trust an agency with engagement on social media
• that non-existent superior being really does giveth and taketh away

Today’s recipe

Breakfast flan

Serves 4

I wouldn’t serve this for breakfast. It’s definitely dinner but the ingredients are mostly breakfast.

Ingredients

1 pack shortcrust pastry

4 slices of bacon

3 sausages

butter for frying

a couple of handfuls of mushrooms, sliced

200mls double cream

3 eggs

Method: Roll out the pastry and place in a flan dish, cutting off any extra bits round the top. Cut out a circle of baking paper and place it on the base. Put a layer of dried chickpeas on the paper and bake in the oven for 10 minutes at 180C/Gas 6. Take out of the oven and remove the chickpeas and paper and put back in the oven for 5-10 minutes till the base is dry.

While that’s baking grill the bacon and sausage then cut into bite-sized pieces. Fry the mushrooms in the butter.

Once the pastry case is ready scatter the bacon, sausage and mushrooms on it. Whisk the cream and eggs together in a jug with plenty of black pepper then tip into the pastry case. Bake for around 20 minutes or until the egg is  just cooked but still slighty wobbly.

If you want something new, stop doing something old

Last month I travelled down from South Lanarkshire Council’s HQ in Hamilton to spend the day working with Darren Caveney (@darrencaveney) and the Comms team in Walsall Council.

Kim Neville (@kimneville) and I are taking part in the LGComms Future Leaders programme, part of which is a peer review day at another council.

The programme of events was released in back in February and I knew exactly where I wanted to visit – Walsall to see the very rare but not exactly shy Dan Slee (@danslee) in his natural habitat.

Dan and I had met before and I’d heard him speak about the shift from traditional media to social media and how the Walsall Comms team has adapted and adopted new media. Aside from that Dan and I regularly chat on Twitter and I’m a total convert to the new Comms2point0 resource for digital comms, set up and run by Dan and Darren.

I must admit that in the few days before my trip south I felt like I was off to do some work experience but I left with my managers words ringing in my ears, “Campaign measurement and evaluation – find out how they do it.”

So Darren picked me up at the hotel and we had a good chat all the way through Birmingham to Walsall about our office set up and our common issues, mainly journalists with pages to fill in newspapers with falling advertising revenue and circulations.

After a quick tour of the council chamber and introductions, the Comms team did its quick 10-minute daily round-up of what everyone had in their diary for the day which is captured on their Yammer group. I really like this idea and it’s something I’ll suggest introducing to South Lanarkshire’s team. At the moment we do a weekly round-up which can run on for over an hour but 10 minutes a day seems much more manageable.

Next I had a session with Mel Lee to talk about how Walsall Council uses Yammer. Now, I’ve used Yammer before but for some reason I’d always thought that for us to use it as a council we’d have to pay for it. To discover that the basic version is free was a revelation so as a pilot I’ve set up a group for our web publishers to see what they think. I suspect that it will be a fully used, essential tool across the council before long.

Mel also showed me the Chief Executive’s core brief, the internal magazine Team Spirit and the Weekly Bulletin, all of which are on the council intranet. Again this is similar to what South Lanarkshire Council has except that we also print our monthly magazine The Works as we have 11,000 employees who don’t have access to work PCs. However the Weekly Bulleting seems like a good idea – I’m wondering if we could produce it as a wiki on our intranet. That may be a step too far at the moment though – maybe we should start with the web publishers collating and publishing the information on our CMS in the meantime.

After a quick bite to eat, Dan and I then headed off to Walsall Central Library where I met senior countryside ranger Morgan Bowers (@walsallwildlife and @brumbats) . Morgan has been tweeting under various council and personal guises and just that morning she’d announced a new strawberry seed beetle record for the area on Twitter. It was really heartening listening to Morgan – not only is she passionate about her job, she’s passionate about telling the world about it using social media and has struck up many conversations with people in the process. This is exactly the type of person and the type of job that lends itself to social media and is something I’d like to kick off at my council. I want to involve trading standards officers, environmental health officers, countryside rangers – all ambassadors for the council and the area.

The main reason for the visit to the library however, was to do some live tweeting from an author event. Steve Jenkins was born and brought up in Walsall but after an early career as a local DJ he made the move to London, then the US where he became one of the music industry’s top promoters, working with Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, R. Kelly and The Stone Roses, to name just a few. It was a pleasure to be tweeting as Walsall Council, although I may have tweeted a bit too much – but then Steve had so many great stories that he made it an easy job.

Next it was back to the office to have a chat with Kim and Jo Stewart about media monitoring, campaign evaluation and working with community groups. I learned loads during this session and it was good to see that there are many areas of the business where our two councils work in very similar ways, for example multi-media campaigns. For both teams evaluation is a hot topic – often our outcomes are actually another department’s outcomes. Often it is behaviours we are trying to change – measuring them can be tricky and difficult to pin to a comms campaign. The results sometimes aren’t visible until well after the campaign has finished. There is a seismic shift going on in comms teams across the country, not only in what our day-to-day activities are but how we deliver and measure what we do.

I had a bit of a eureka moment talking to Jo about partnership working. She was explaining how Walsall shares information for local community and third sector groups. This would be such a simple thing to do I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of it before.

Before I knew it the day was over and Dan and I were heading for Birmingham for Brewcamp where I met more people that I’ve spoken to on Twitter but had never met – always a weird experience.

I learned more in those 12 hours than I have at any 3-day conference and I reckon all services in councils across the country should consider exchange schemes. Dan is coming to see how we do things in South Lanarkshire in June – hopefully he’ll go back to Walsall with his head buzzing as much as I mine was on train back to Hamilton.