As well as being able to check into places and see where your friends are, Foursquare also allows you to leave ‘tips’ about venues for your friends and followers, so when they check into that venue (or one nearby), they’ll see this tip. I’ve left a couple of tips on my personal Foursquare account (mainly plugging nights I play at, or calling out bad service at restaurants), but I’ve always thought Foursquare tips could be really useful for our tourism team, highlighting special offers and also giving historical titbits of information about places in the district.

I never really knew how to get started with a Foursquare page until I read Joseph Stashko’s post on how he added a Foursquare page for Blog Preston. I’ll leave you to read Joseph’s explanation on how he got set up, but needless to say, the sign up process is a little bit convoluted (To be fair, Foursquare say they will be changing this soon).

That said, once I’d filled everything out, got our designer to design a header and sent it all off to Foursquare, I was up and running within a few hours (together with a nice personal response from a Foursquare staffer).

You can now see the results on the Visit Lichfield Foursquare page. I’ve added a few tips in and around Lichfield City with historical information that I know about personally, together with a few special offers, and I’m looking at getting a few more tips added after talking to our Green Badge guides (who know much more about Lichfield’s history than me) before launching the page officially (bizarrely, we already seem to have 600+ followers without doing any promotion, mainly people from Indonesia and New York).

However, it’s not just tourism that Foursquare can help with, I’d love to develop something like donteat.at, which uses public data on food safety inspections in New York to warn you if you’re about to eat at a place with a poor hygiene report, and if you’re a council with a lot of venues, you could leave tips about upcoming events or special offers. The only limit, as they say, is your imagination!

If anyone else has any useful tips on local gov using Foursquare, I’d love to hear them – drop me a line in the comments.

However, with a few notable exceptions, most councils seem to prefer the ‘fire and forget’ method of sticking an RSS feed into Twitterfeed and leaving it to run. Hell, even I was guilty of it up until recently – even though I was making an effort to monitor and engage, I was still letting the news articles automatically publish via Twitterfeed.

There’s been a bit of a discussion recently via Twitter as to the rights and wrongs of this, and I’m definitely in the ‘wrong’ camp now – A few months ago I turned off the RSS feed for @lichfield_dc press releases and now do them manually. Why? Well, I shall tell you…

You don’t talk to a robot

Twitter is, by and large, a social medium – if all you’re doing is chucking out press releases, people will assume you’re not interested in engaging or are just going to generate boring content. This means you aren’t going to get followed by as many people who might otherwise be interested in you.

Auto tweets look ugly

Take this press release for example. If I were to use an auto tweeter, here’s what it would look like:

News: Everyone is invited to get into the festive spirit at this year’s Christmas Fayre taking place in the city… http://is.gd/5eZUT

Pretty boring huh? Plus the content gets cut short and can often not make sense. However, if I conjour up a manual tweet, I can tailor it much more to the Twitter medium and come up with something a lot more friendly:

This means you can get your message across much more easily and in a style that fits in with Twitter’s informal approach.

Stopping information overload

Sometimes you’ll have a press release which, while it might be relevant for the website, might not be suitbale for Twitter. If you’re blindly tweeting everything you put out, then people might be much more likely to be turned off by your content and reach for that big button marked ‘unfollow’.

This is all well and good, but…

…I can hear the objections already – ‘I don’t have time to write manual tweets’ – but how difficult it it to write a 140 character tweet? If you’re going to take online engagement seriously, it’s definitely worth just taking 2 minutes to show your followers you care.

If you really must use automated tweets, then make sure you mark your account up as such – call it something like ‘councilx_news’ and state very clearly that all you’re doing is publishing the latest news – then if further down the line you decide to engage a bit more, you can start another account for more human interaction.

I’m a massive hypocrite

However, after saying all this, I do agree that sometimes, automated tweets have their place. We do still tweet food safety inspections, and @ldcplanning has been happily tweeting planning applications for a while now. However, it’s not really practical to tweet large volume, samey tweets manually, and you don’t get the same advantages with tweeting press releases.

In fact, I recently did a straw poll amongst our followers about whether to get rid of the food safety tweets, especially as much of the content is replicated by @ratemyplace, but the majority seemed to like them. So maybe automated tweets isn’t as open and shut a case as I’d like it to be?

So, imagine my joy when I get this tweet sent to @lichfield_dc:

Now, we don’t do roads, this is the responsibility of the county council, so I came back with this response:

This is the exact kind of response they’d get by calling us up, so the council’s Twitter account has made a cashable saving of £3.22 today! It’s baby steps, but it just goes to show that actively monitoring your Twitter presence can reap some real benefits.

* Thanks to numerous people on Twitter for getting these stats for me!

Spanners Made in Birmingham England by Whiteforge on Flickr

A thought occurred to me when driving to work this morning (‘cos I’m sad like that) about the kinds of services councils need to manage their social media (in particular Twitter) presence well.

This is particularly pertinent with the demise of Twitapps, which, amongst other things, allows you to keep tracks of @ replies via email. I’ve found this really useful for both my work and personal accounts, and it’s going to be a shame when it goes.

I also use a variety of other services, such as Hootsuite and Social Oomph, as well as using Netvibes to see all my RSS Twitter search feeds in one place.

This is a lot of stuff to manage, a lot of places to have passwords, and means I’m putting a lot of faith in the cloud and it got me thinking, why don’t we put all this stuff in one place?

Therefore, I’ve put together this post to gauge interest in a ‘one stop shop’ for councils to manage their social media presence, as well as getting ideas for the kind of stuff that could be introduced – I’m thinking mainly Twitter for now because of the flexibility of their API, but we could also bring in other stuff like Facebook, and the social media firehose.

Not only would this make things easier for councils who are already using social media, it would also help many others get on board, who may be intimidated or put off by the sheer amount of things they need to sign up for.

Some of the feature ideas I’ve got so far are:

• @ reply notification
• New follower management (a sort of semi-auto follow that lists new followers for that day and allows you to pick and choose if you follow back)
• RSS feed management (because we don’t live in an ideal world)
• A sort of stripped-down Hootsuite, which allows anyone with a login to tweet or respond to @ replies quickly and easily
• Multiple account management
• Workflow

I’ll add to this list as I think of more and as some are submitted. If this gets off the ground, I’ll probably need some developer support too, so if you’re well-versed in PHP and the Twitter API and would like to help out, please let me know!

Sad Little Robot by Tom Lin :3= on Flickr

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter have recently announced new terms of service, mainly in an attempt to clear up stuff about who owns your tweets, but also to try and stop the flood of spam.

Now, as someone who hates spam on Twitter with a passion bordering on the psychotic, this is a welcome thing, spam is the scourge of Twitter and really needs a serious effort on the part of Twitter to stamp it out. However, there was on term that piqued my interest:

Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are… If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates

Now, as someone who offers two bot-based services, Localgovweb (which retweets any tweet with the #localgovweb hashtag and has 430 followers) and Twitterplan (which sends direct messages to users about planning applications in their area), this made me think – are my accounts going to be suspended because they don’t offer personal updates?

It also calls into question many council Twitter accounts, which use the ‘fire and forget’ method of setting up Twitterfeed to tweet RSS news stories automatically – could they too be in breach of the TOS?

After thinking for a bit, I’d probably say no, automated accounts are only likely to be suspended if you indulge in other types of spammy behaviour (such as mass following, spam complaints, a large number of blocks etc), so as long as you aren’t doing this, you should be OK.

However, if you do run a bot, it might be worth reconsidering how you use Twitter – yes, automatic updates can be useful, but consider breaking up the automatic feeds with more personal updates – is there an event happening in your area that you might not have done a press release about? Or has someone tweeted something about the council that you’d like to respond to?

Peppering your updates with personal stuff of this nature makes the council seem more open and more approachable (if you need some inpiration, check out Walsall Council’s tweets). Behaving like a robot is just going to make your organisation seem like just that, a robot.

Lloyds Pharmacy (who have two locations on my High Street alone) have recently set up on Twitter and, judging by the spiel on their website, they’re keen on primary care and offering health services (sometimes for free) to local communities. They’ve been using Twitter, therefore, to spread health messages as well as plug their own brand.

However, they’re doing this wrong. Instead of promoting their presence on Twitter, following a few people here and there and building up a natural following, they’re going with the scattergun approach, automatically sending out a tweet like this every time someone, whether they’re following or not, mentions the word ‘holiday’:

Obviously a lot of users are annoyed by this, it’s intrusive and spammy and certainly goes against the whole community-based, fluffy image that Lloyds tries to portray – I sent them a tweet to this effect, but obviously they’re not listening (again, a major no no in the world of corporate twittering). This just shows a major lack of research, making it seem like someone’s heard about Twitter and gone out on their own, without doing any research into what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable – very much like what happened with Habitat’s ‘intern’, who used trending topics to try and get Habitat’s tweets visible in Twitter’s search.

I’m all for learning, and I’d like to think Lloyds will realise what they’re doing is wrong, and go back to the drawing board, trying to understand more about what is and what isn’t acceptable on Twitter, but I’m not holding out any hope.