25 October (Part 1) - Comms cons - and pros
It really is about time that something was said about the Communications
Scrutiny Sub Group meeting which was held almost four weeks ago. It was the
first I had attended after the Bexley Buffoon had imposed her new restrictions on
members of the public who like to see what is being done in their name. There
was as expected no Press Desk but neither was there a barrier. Only three chairs
had been provided for the public and two were occupied by the Chairman and
Vice-Chairman of the Resources Scrutiny Committee,
Councillors Steven Hall and Maxine Fothergill. Fortunately no one but me was
nosy enough to put in an appearance.
Also present was Councillor June Slaughter, I remember that because she made a
point of speaking to me, maybe because she has been told not to.
Present too was Gill Steward, the Buffoon in person. I’m not sure why because
her only contribution to the meeting was to tell us that when she was at West
Sussex County Council they used to Tweet about traffic conditions on the A27 and
in Hackney, where she lives, the Council runs an “exceptional” website. Better than Bexley’s anyway.
When the meeting ended I found myself thinking ‘What was the point of all that?’
We had the Council’s Communications Manager, the only one who might be an expert
on the subject, being given the benefit of Councillors’ views. Maybe they are
better able to give the views of the average man in the street but on the way
out of the building a Councillor posed the same question to me. “What use did I think
the meeting was.”
Right at the very end of the meeting all the Councillors were asking what the
objectives of the Sub Group was, no one seemed very sure.
The Council acknowledges that times are changing when it comes to communications
and it has fallen behind those times. In ten years the borough has lost much of
its weekly newspaper coverage and social media has done much to fill the gap.
And its website is poor to say the least. One might also say ‘technically fragile’.
It has already agreed to use targeted email for both communications and
marketing, to make more use of social media and refresh the Bexley Magazine; and
a fat lot of good that will do for me. Since Bexley Council engaged London
Letterbox Marketing to do the distribution I have not seen a single copy. I
would not be surprised if I have been blacklisted.
Before the meeting began the Sub Group went through the pretence of electing a
Chairman. Without any debate they unanimously selected Councillor Nick
O’Hare (Conservative, Blendon & Penhill) who by an incredible coincidence was
already sitting in the Chairman’s position and had his opening speech ready.
John Ferry the Communications Manager (photo centre) was asked to summarise the
current situation. “The website is key but we all know it is not our strength at
the moment. The new one is expected to launch in April”.
There is a new email system and the Council has gathered 86,000 addresses and
profiles of individuals from its various departments and residents will be able
to subscribe to the subjects which interest them. A pop up on the website will
encourage sign ups. using residential addresses and ages the Council will be
able to target its emails.
Social media is “very powerful but demanding on resources”. The Council’s use of
it “has been building very slowly”. Distribution of the local newspapers is
shrinking as is the editorial space so the Bexley Magazine has become
progressively more important.
“There are Councils which do not respond to newspapers.” Bexley is not one of
them according to Mr. Ferry. Even so, news releases have fallen from 60 plus a
month to under 20. The Legal Notices in the News Shopper cost about £12,000 a
year but its distribution is “not what we would like”.
The Chairman then asked Councillors to inject their own thoughts on the
Council’s use of the new communications opportunities.
Councillor June Slaughter (Conservative, Sidcup) said that people “are always
moaning about how difficult it is to get around the website”. She was not an
enthusiast for social media “life’s too short” but because of her membership of
the Sub Group she “will have a go”.
She thought the Bexley
Magazine “was valued” but the advertising revenue covered
only 40% of its cost. A full page advertisement costs £1,500.
Councillor Joe Ferreira asked how communications priorities are set and reviewed
and asked about the website’s compatibility with mobile devices. He said he
found that it “struggled” and there were “thousands and thousands of pages which
are out of date”. The number of Twitter followers was low too. He didn’t think
sufficient use was made of video either. Finally he wanted to know what the
Council would do if the Bexley edition of the News Shopper ceased publication,
some editions have already gone.
Mr. Ferry
began to say that the website content was badly in need of a good
weeding but the Buffoon decided she would say it for him. When he was able to
say so he said the new site would be “shorter and much more to the point”.
No money has been spent on social media and “it was hard to know how much
appetite there is for us on there”. There would be more video and it would be
more mobile friendly. Statute dictated that Public Notices must go in a local
newspaper and it was unclear what happens where there are none.
Councillor Caroline Newton (Conservative, St. Michael’s) asked about
“the reach of the Bexley Magazine and the poster sites” and she was interested in
placing blogs and forums on the new Council website.
There is little good information about ‘reach’ but Mr. Ferry thought it was
better to join residents on the popular media channels such as Streetlife rather
than attempt to tempt them into moving elsewhere.
Councillor Sharon Massey (Conservative, Cray Meadows) was responsible for the most insightful comments of the
day, she said that an on-line presence was extremely costly and even the world’s
most visited website (The Daily Mail) had been forced to make 400 staff
redundant. “We must be really aware of what we decide in here.” It’s no good
having “all dancing media and we can’t afford to empty the bins any more.”
“It is brilliant that we are on Twitter and Facebook, it is not scary. It can be
good news stories all the time but we are very aware how lies get published
about Bexley Council, there’s loads of people making up stuff. Councillor Newton
saw stuff on social media today, it’s almost laughable how some of the stuff
gets made up but one of the things that really bothered me was during the
Northumberland Heath concern and there was a big social media story about
someone being stabbed and somebody had died and that had loads of legs before
the actual reality came out. Do we have the legal power to do almost a police
bulletin saying what the reality is? Can we address something that is particularly
shocking to hear that someone had been stabbed and murdered when it wasn’t true?”
Mr. Ferry said “we have made pronouncements on something like that in the past
but in partnership with the police. I think we would only do it with their
blessing”. Councillor Massey wanted to know if the Council could use their
86,000 email addresses. The answer was No, what was needed was an out of hours
media presence. In passing, Councillor Massey said she did not trust emails from
London Councils, she “just deleted them”. On the other hand, the Chief Executive
said she thought “the Local Government Association Comms Group was really good”.
Councillor Massey did not think it was a good idea to “allow
residents to chat on our website to each other, I know people who run Facebook
pages and they have to really monitor it. People shout and row with each other.
You only have to look at the News Shopper comments after an incident.” She did
not want to see “racist and homophobic comments on our website”.
Coming out with more good sense, Councillor Massey warned about too many
adverts. “On the News Shopper site, it is so full of adverts you can’t even see
the news any more.” I never dreamed I could agree with Mrs. Massey that much.
After that there was not an awful lot left that Councillor Oppong-Asare
(Labour, Erith)
could say but she warned about the website being too text heavy and put forward
ideas for increasing the number of Twitter followers. She recommended more links
to Council meeting webcasts and obviously wanted to put BiB out of business by
suggesting a summary of meetings for people who don’t have the time or stamina for the webcast.
Mr. Ferry took the Twitter suggestions on board and
the subsequent discussion revealed that the webcast
audience was very small, never more than 30 and sometimes only four or five or six.
With the discussion concluded, Councillor Fothergill said that her business
experience is that emails are increasingly left unread or missed because of
the deluge of spam, but surveys have shown that texts to mobile phones are
answered within three seconds. Perhaps the Council should harvest mobile
numbers. I wonder how many people are like me, I reluctantly signed up for a
mobile phone but I haven’t a clue what its number is.