Stap isi

6 February 2010

So your council wants to blog?

Blogs are boring. In the Clay Shirky sense. Even in government.

Pitching a blog to your managers in council may still cause consternation, but most authorities are at least working towards a ‘social media strategy’ or ‘policy’ – the human equivalent of dogs turning circles before laying down – and blogs are mainstream. Your senior staff have probably read one, even if it’s just part of a newspaper website. Even better, there is now a considerable range of practice and evaluation on which to draw.

One of the best implementations is FCO Bloggers from the the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office blog

Stephen Hale, Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy, has spoken openly about the process since its inception and this very generous post – Evaluating our blogs – is a must.

It’s a blueprint for managers and bloggers.

Our advice isn’t the same for every blogger, but we are using our findings to encourage our bloggers to be personal (say things that only they could say), real time (if it takes days to draft or check the facts then it’s probably not a blog), integrated (with other things they’re doing on and offline), responsive (responding to comments), and targeted (writing about things that people are already talking about online).

The advice is based on real-world experience and web metrics. From a large government department. With staff around the world.

I would also point you to The benefits of blogging by Julia Chandler and Simon Davis from the Online Content team at DFID Bloggers, a similar staff blog portal from the UK Department for International Development.

Having said that blogs are mundane, there are still not many examples of blogs written by local government officers (as opposed to councillors or community activists). Here are a few to illustrate to senior staff and prospective bloggers what a blog can be:

• Weymouth Relief Road – Dorset County Council blogging a major works project
• Chasewater Dam – Lichfield District Council restoration works
• Out Of Your Mind – North Sydney Council
• Hands On Handsworth and life in lozells – Neighbourhood Management, UK

(If you know of other blogs by local authorities, please leave a comment.)

Gallereries and museums offer great examples of how and what to blog. See Brooklyn Museum bloggers, MoMA’s Inside/Out, the blog of the National Media Museum, Bradford and the Powerhouse Museum’s Photo of the Day.

Council blogs will change the way we communicate with residents. Read Stephen Hale’s piece. And do it well.

— b3rn   blogging, web metrics   Feb 6, 07:44 PM   #   Comment

3 January 2010

Baboons! Baby-snatchers! Bashi-bazouks!

The raw number of comments on a blog or forum isn’t necessarily an indicator of its success or failure. But it’s one of those metrics that carry a lot of weight. Compared to pageviews, they often look disappointing! What’s good?

The Sydney Morning Herald is a high volume site. Last week, according to Hitwise, it was the 17th most visited in Australia.

Matt Crozier of Bang The Table blogged about the number of comments it had received on its most discussed stories in 2009:

1. Roads are for cars, not Lycra louts – 478 comments
2. Internet censorship plan gets the green light – 459 comments
3. Your call is important to us – 435 comments
4. Cyclists do not have the same rights as motorists on roads – 412 comments
5. Hated without cause: faith’s high price – 363 comments
6. A plague of atheists has descended, and Catholics are the target – 331 comments
7. Science cooks the books, driving sensible people to screaming point – 316 comments
8. Sharia in Australia: sanity or shocking? – 308 comments
9. God is good, but just be sure not to take Him too literally – 293 comments
10. Cyber attacks smite atheist websites – 287 comments

Crozier compares the ratio of comments to visits with Bang The Table’s busiest consultations – “way less visitors than the newspapers and way more comments” – and suggests that people are more likely to participate if the decision makers are present. Score one for community engagement.

“If we think someone who has influence is listening to what we have to say then many more people will participate by commenting or voting.”

The SMH also attracts a very broad audience – with an accompanying shallowness when it comes to local or niche issues.

This story about a Sydney council attracted 76 comments – a significant number. But how would you rate the usefulness of the comments if they were part of your council’s planning or consultation process?

Compare with this discussion taking place amongst a much smaller group. There’s a good number of comments, perhaps more than would be posted on a council web space, and with a high ratio of quality to quantity.

Seems to me that:

1. no matter the raw number, we should value constructive comments highly because they are clearly difficult to elicit (whether online or in person); and
2. in some circumstances there will be more value in working with one or more existing communities than building our own sites.

— b3rn   comments, web metrics   Jan 3, 11:01 AM   #   Comment

22 October 2008

The case for social media #3: Reach

Craig Thomler has just posted a very helpful article called Putting Australian government web traffic in perspective.

We – local government web workers – collect things like page views and visits, but we don’t have much context for these figures. It’s just another KPI that gives good graph.

A few NSW Councils have been sharing their stats on the LG Web Network. Over in the UK, a number of municipal bodies have made their’s public. See for example Stratford-on-Avon District Council’s website statistics. I hope to collate these figures soon in a table, anonymized, to allow some comparison.

But Craig Thomler’s calculations for July 2008, even if a bit out, confirm what we already know. That we’re not getting much attention.

• The total government sector (6,634 sites) accounted for only 2.26 percent of all tracked website visits by Australians.
• Local government’s 1,596 sites accounted for 6.51% of all Government traffic and 0.15% of visits to all tracked websites.
• The Bureau of Meteorology accounts for almost a quarter of all visits to Australian government sites!

The answer? Thomler says engage citizens on their own turf.

— b3rn   stats, the persuader, web metrics   Oct 22, 06:36 PM   #   Comment [1]

3 October 2008

Fantastic voyage

Was exploring Google Analytics and stumbled upon the fact that internal staff made up a significant proportion of our Council website users. Something like 15%+.

That figure is probably inflated by PCs in public areas (like the Library) that automatically open their browser at certain Council web pages when booted.

But even so – factoring in those ‘dumb’ visits – the percentage was high.

Previous statistics – generated from the server log – excluded staff accesses. I would argue against doing this! Your staff are just as valid a user as any other.

When I began our website redesign process, I had ‘Council officer’ as a user type to test against. But never guessed it was such an important user group.

With Google Analytics, you can set filters to look at user groups discretely.

This is something I learnt from one of the most interesting presentations at Web Directions South 2008. It was by Hurol Inan, called Informing experience architecture with quantitative insights.

He gave the example of tracking users who visit your employment page as a unique group. You already know who they are. What are they doing on your site? How well does your site respond?

— b3rn   google analytics, web metrics   Oct 3, 10:48 PM   #   Comment