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In the near future planning for #ourday will swing into view… a day when local government posts what it does in realtime across 24-hours.

It’s an event that is close to my heart. It is modelled in part on #walsall24 a day which I was involved with six years ago.
As an experiment, at the council I was at we posted updates to Twitter from the mundane to the significant. The aim was to create a wall of noise and in doing so told the bigger picture of what local government does.
I still remember the feeling of unique stress and, frankly, loneliness when I opened the office and fired up the PC to send the first tweet. Would this work?
Bright sparks at the Local Government Association have since picked-up the ball and run with it since to turn it into a national initiative.
Six years is a long time. I got to thinking that it is maybe time it had a bit of a re-boot. This should be much more than Twitter. It should be more than council staff talking to each other although I do recognise a real benefit to this.

What should a day of online activity look like?

It needs to tell day-to-day stories… think of how best to do this.
It needs to focus on real people.
It needs real people telling their own stories.
It needs to have people who use the service and live, work and play in your area.
It needs some employees but only if they are named.
It doesn’t need offices. Go outside the ivory tower to see what people do.
It doesn’t need to Twitter, either. It is the fifth largest UK social media channel. Use other channels. Go off-line too.
But don’t just make noise set a few targets too. Sign-up for a library. Pledge to use a park. Pledge to exercise. Whatever.

Here are 14 ideas to make it more interesting

1. A Facebook Live Q&A on the local newspaper’s Facebook page with a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum stores. There is a trove of fascinating items. It would be great to hear someone talk about them. Give people a chance to see and put stories to their heritage.
2. Video clips of real people talking about the job they do for the organisation while out actually doing it.
3. Live tweeting shadowing the contact centre posting a snap shot of the calls they recieve.
4. Get people to sign-up to something. Join a library. Make the process easy to do online. Make a target. A hundred. Five hundred. Whatever.
5. Create a Facebook quiz to ask how much people know about what their council does. Do that here.
6. Use Twitter’s Periscope app to live broadcast a Q&A with the Leader of the Council on the budget. What should they do less of? And more of?
7. Plug into an existing campaign and create some content. You need more foster carers? Live tweet what a carer does for an hour or two.
8. Celebrate your area. Encourage people to post pictures on a hashtag that celebrates their area. Instagramers may warm to this. The best pic gets hosted on the homepage. Or as part of the website’s banner image.
9. Talk to people at a library event. What brings them to this book club? What book do they recommend?
10. Go behind the obvious and get others to join in. What goes on in school during an average day? There’s a breakfast club? No way? How does that work? Schools are getting better at posting their own content. Invite them to play.
11. You have a niche job? You look after the borough’s trees? Tell us about that. Give us a tour of what to look out for. Shadow the officer if needs be.
12. Adult social care is a growing issue? What do service users look like? Heck, he looks like my Dad. He even talks like him too. Can he talk about growing up in the area? And what help he gets from the council?
13. Aggregate your content in the one place. Pull a page together where people can follow all your stuff.
14. Make it live after the day. Two thirds of Facebook live views come after the event. Can you capture and share it in a storify? A pdf? An email?
Look for the real people and create some content there. Move #ourday on a notch. You work in an amazing sector so go and share some of the amazing stuff.
Picture credit: Marco Verch / Flickr

Original source – The Dan Slee Blog » LOCAL SOCIAL: Is it time for a Local localgovcamp?

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