Many of the tweets are trivial and banal (Atomant77)

Taken out of context, just about everything is trivial and banal. The time of the next bus from here to the town centre is trivial and banal unless you’re here and you want to get to the town centre.

But that’s what happens when you release comprehensive information about something. Most of it isn’t of interest to most people. Conversely, there tends to be something for everyone. Just look at the Freedom of Information requests that people make.

I don’t live in Walsall but I was very interested to see that there was a clairvoyant appearing at a council library to teach Tarot. As a rationalist, I don’t think this is the kind of thing councils should be subsiding. Does it happen in my area, too? It turns out that it does. I’ll be following this one up.

When you’ve got information on a computer you can slice and dice it any way you like. Cut through the mass of information you don’t care about to find what you do.

Twitter isn’t a good medium for reaching Walsall’s residents. It’s just for the “chattering classes”. What about my 85-year-old gran? (liberalcynic)

As Chuffy and HenryHomer said, this is an experiment. It’s not a new council service and they won’t be doing this every day.

If councils are going to improve their services over the long term they need to experiment with new ideas. This doesn’t mean committing massive resources to untested ideas. It means doing exactly what Walsall is doing here: Short, one-off projects that are cheap and have no adverse impact on other services.

You don’t have to have a very long memory to remember when councils didn’t have websites. And if you remember that, you’ll probably also remember the people who were resistant to councils having websites. The internet was just for geeks and the chattering classes, they said. Well, look at it now. No, we still don’t have everyone online (nor equally good access for those that have it) but I hope no-one seriously still thinks that the web is a waste of time.

With half the country now on Facebook, councils learning how to use social media looks pretty important, not only because there’s already a huge audience there but because most of the other half will follow soon enough.

More generally, this project is about capturing and disseminating information. Just because it passes through a computer doesn’t mean that it’ll necessarily be consumed on one. Web pages can be printed out. So can RSS feeds. Data feeds can be displayed on public screens like the countdown boards at bus stops and train stations. Software can send out text messages that can reach just about everyone. I’m looking at #walsall24 and thinking, “How could we automate this? What else could this approach be used for?” I see nothing wrong with Walsall blazing the trail here for others as well as themselves. Everything has to start somewhere.

Walsall’s Twitter experiment is a drop in the ocean, but reminding people of all the shitty stuff that councils do is no bad thing. (Chuffy)

… and …

It’s just a shallow PR exercise to make the council look good (liberalcynic)

It may have “image” benefits in a PR-sense but I think this is more about engagement than self-promotion.

Many people missed the point of #gmp24, which as I remember it was to show people how much time Greater Manchester Police spent doing “social work” rather than fighting crime. It wasn’t so much “see how wonderful we are” as “see how our time gets wasted”. They wanted people to think about the role of the police and how it could best serve the community rather than affirm what a great organisation they were. What Walsall is doing with #walsall24 seems similar to that aim.

In my view, esteem has to be earned. If proper communication helps services to be accessible, efficient and popular, then esteem for the council will surely rise. (liberalcynic)

I take this point entirely. Councils should be engaging with residents and making themselves accountable to them rather than bigging themselves up. #walsall24 certainly couldn’t be rolled out as it is as a regular council service, but I’ll definitely be trying to think of ways in which some of the ideas could be applied to realise tangible benefits at a sustainable cost. Birmingham’s civic dashboard is taking steps in that direction and I expect to see far more realtime, fine-grained information being made available by councils and used across many media.

Imagine you’re running social media for a public library service. You’ve got ten libraries in the service and you want to use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

How many accounts do you need?

The simplest approach, for you, is just to have one account on each service. You might have a Twitter account that covers everything in the whole library service, a Facebook page which people can “fan” and get updates, and a Flickr account where you post all your photos.

With all these accounts, you’ll probably be doing a fair bit of cross-posting, too. Some of your photos — possibly all of them — will go on Facebook as well as Flickr. Twitter doesn’t handle photos very well so you might find yourself posting links to Flickr photo pages there. You can even automate this using an RSS to Twitter service like Twitterfeed.

This isn’t going to be much fun for your readers. People tend to be interested in one or maybe two local libraries, not the whole service. An event on the other side of the borough probably doesn’t interest them, let alone hearing about new titles in stock or changes to opening times there. So people get deluged with information that they have to skip past to get to the 10% that matters to them. Some people will unsubscribe, feeling your services don’t provide good value for their time. Others will just feel a bit ambivalent skipping past the noise every time they read your feed. It’s not a great approach for them.

Social networks make it easy for people to mash feeds of content together but very hard for them to filter them. I can mash by simply choosing what I subscribe to. And filtering is the same thing — choosing what I don’t subscribe to. Most social media tools make it difficult or impossible to filter within a feed. So you have to do this on behalf of the people who might read what you write: separate your content into as many distinct and separate feeds as necessary. For a library service, this might mean creating separate feeds for each library and possibly ones for subject areas or children and teens too. This is more work for writers, and rightly so. Managing several accounts is harder than just one. But the onus is on us to do the legwork so our readers don’t have to plough through mountains of irrelevant content to get to the good stuff. The reward is that our readers will care more about what we write and consequently we’ll probably have more of them too.

The closely related topic of recycling identical content across several media or social networks is skilfully dissected at Unlink Your Feeds.

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