Sorry for the two re-blogs from other organisations – just happened to log in this morning and see there’s lots of great stuff going on! Great post here from Helen Reynolds on use of language and making our social media more sociable.

Social for The People

I work in digital communications. In the public sector. If there’s one obsession both disciplines share, it’s the quest for ‘engagement’.

It’s often said about digital engagement that ‘we’ (organisations) need to go where people go. What that actually means to me isn’t ‘the people use Facebook so we’ll use Facebook and build a page there’. It’s ‘let’s go to a Facebook page that people use and talk to them there’. There’s a difference.

Often when we think of social media we can forget what ‘social’ means in the real world. The ‘social’ rules offline are the same as those for online.

So this is my case for why I think we should behave online like we do at real life parties.

Asking the right questions

At a party, if you’re introduced to somebody you don’t ask them to please comment on the party or feedback on their life so…

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Looks like a great event here – well worth checking out. We’ll be at a conference on that day or we’d love to be there!

Why we’re blogging

Blogging has been something we’ve advocated as a team for some time, but we’ve not yet embraced it as a medium. Until now!

At our All Wales Participation Network, we held a session looking at what people want from our website, as a new version is currently in development. We asked why people go to our website. One response was “Because you remind me to”, which a few people agreed with. This got me thinking about the way that our information service operates. How can we communicate with you more effectively?

A couple of weeks ago, we held our biannual Creative Thinking Day, where we bring ideas about how we can improve our work. We have monthly team meetings as well, but these are often crammed with so much work we have little space to examine innovative ways of changing the way we work.

So my session at the Creative Thinking Day looked at our Communications plan and how we can improve the way we communicate with you! The team conducted a SWOT analysis of our information service, which highlighted gaps in what we’re currently doing and ways we can improve.

My initial fears on blogging were that it would be another task that was simply added on to our workloads, but actually, managed properly it’s something that should just fit in with what we do on a day-to-day basis.

We’re already hearing about lots of amazing work being done through our networks, but until now haven’t had a way to tell people who couldn’t make it to the session about that work. We’re already going to events and learning about new developments, but unless you’re on Twitter at the moment we’re tweeting, you won’t see them. We’re already writing reports for other networks and groups we’re part of, but if you’re not members of those groups you won’t hear about what’s going on.

Blogging will also give us another way for us to hear from you about what you think about the work we’re doing and the latest developments in citizen engagement in Wales.

So we hope you enjoy this blog and find it useful!

– Dyfrig