Pezholio

It’s been a while since I first published my Beginners’ Guide to Twitter in Local Government, and since then (although, obviously not as a direct result of my blog post!) there’s been a plethora of local authorities using Twitter.
However, with a few notable exceptions, most councils seem to prefer the ‘fire and forget’ method of [...]

Certainly not me! We as councils are constantly being asked to save money, and one big element of this is front facing customer services. It’s estimated that it costs councils £6.56 to deal with enquiries face to face, £3.22 by telephone contact, and 27p for online *.
So, imagine my joy when I get this tweet [...]

Now, I’m sure you’re fed up of me banging on about the Royal Mail, but bare with me, this isn’t about postcodes.
Whilst idily surfing around Twitter using Tweetie 2 (which is awesome by the way), I thought I’d have a look at Royal Mail’s Twitter account to see if they’d had anything to say about [...]

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. [...]

Just a quick one here while I think about it. I’ve recently noticed there’s a new kid on the corporate Twitter block, and they’re not learning from the mistakes Habitat made earlier this year.
Lloyds Pharmacy (who have two locations on my High Street alone) have recently set up on Twitter and, judging by the [...]

Just a quick brain dump here, arising from a discussion that I had at the ‘unpanel’ at Localgovcamp.
The online community in our council area is getting larger and more vocal, with blogs, pressure groups and other communities cropping up. Often, there are things said that attack the council. In the ‘olden days’ (when attacks [...]

As some of you may know, I was up in Edinburgh for Scotweb2 on Friday (with Localgovcamp the day after!). I delivered a short session on Twitter and gave some examples and advice. I really was aiming at beginners and newbies, but it turned out more people than I expected were already tweeting. Hopefully I [...]

After much, uhming, ahing and “what are the roads like”ing I finally dragged myself out of the house and down the snowy roads of east Birmingham, the roads were fine until I got out of Solihull, but that’s another story.
I arrived at the venue (The Blues ground, which would horrify my Villa-supporting in-laws) expecting to [...]