The great Ernest Hemingway once said: "There is no rule on
how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes
it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges", so
when it comes to finding a really good read, local government
publications can normally be found somewhere near the bottom of any
bedtime book choice. Not that town halls don't try very hard to
reach out to the public in every conceivable way but by its very
nature, even the brightest and most positive news stories from the
public sector rarely attract the traffic they might
deserve.
Most lately, you may have seen on the BBC Politics Show,
criticism surrounding Brighton and Hove City Council, which
advertised for a new social media officer with "expertise" on both
Facebook and Twitter at a time when other staff are facing pay
cuts. The council offered the reason for this appointment as:
"Increasing visibility, building our brand and learning about our
audiences by utilising social media."
For the cynics among you, this may sound like one more
extravagant example of a wild idea being funded by the public
finances, in the finest tradition of the Guardian appointments
section but Brighton's experience may prompt a broader debate, one
which may yet capture the interest of local authorities across the
country.
No different perhaps to newspapers and television channels,
local councils are facing two quite separate challenges in the new
media world of the internet. The first of these, is that they have
to compete for an increasingly narrow public attention span against
other sources of news and the second, that the proliferation of
local weblogs, some heavily politicised or with a particular agenda
and others good, bad and indifferent, leave councils ill-equipped
to challenge a corrosive climate of rumour, allegation and
occasionally, purposeful disinformation, often repeated as fact
without proper checks by the local media.
Efforts to leverage the social networking phenomenon of
Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube are a natural reaction on the
part of councillors and council officers to an expanding world of
instant communication that many don't understand and others would
simply prefer to ignore.
Historically, local councils spend a great deal of money on
printed communication, leafleting and their own websites, with RSS
news feeds now making a welcome appearance for more 'up-to-the
minute' information. However, the challenge remains that
community-focused news is rarely compelling or even interesting to
many people; the average citizen perhaps preferring to read
something scurrilous about their council on a weblog, than a
laudable official press release on social housing targets or
successful dog fouling prosecutions.
So how can councils use the internet and engage the new social
networking technology in more interesting and proactive ways? As I
think more deeply about the challenges facing us at my own council,
I am convinced that like ticking a series of 'new media' boxes,
joining the headlong rush to embrace social networking is
symptomatic of a much wider communications problem that needs
solving and which by simply having a presence, does not offer more
than an illusory answer.
By all means experiment and engage but at the same time, local
government as a whole, needs a collective review of an increasingly
tired-looking communications strategy, which places its
well-established channels at a distinct disadvantage, at a time
when blogs and tweets and pokes are increasingly a popular source
of information and news for the public-at-large.
Simon Moores, is vice-chairman (policy development) atThe Conservative
Technology Forumand Conservative district councillor
for Westgate-on Sea