We use an Access database to record our interactions with our residents, its called Capture. If you phone, email, write or fax my department then our Customer Service Team take your details and create a record so that your request or enquiry is recorded as is our staff's response. If you have previously contacted us then any further contact will be logged against your record. This was being put into place when we first started using our social media channels so it made sense to use the same method to record them.

Here is an example of how it works. A customer tweets us to alert us to an issue with fly tipping on their street.

1. The staff member monitoring the account when the request comes in replies to the customers tweet saying that this will be passed to the team to investigate.
2. The staff member then emails the customers tweet/request to the Customer Service Team. Included in the email should be the customer's username and real name if given.
   
3. The Customer Service Team either create a new record if this is the first time the customer has contacted us or logs this request to the already existing record.
4. The request is assigned on Capture to the correct team to deal with, in this case our Environmental Wardens. An email is automatically generated which goes straight to the team giving details of the request. The team now have 10 working days to respond to the customer. When the request nears it expiry date the team will recieve another reminder email.
   
5. The Environmental Wardens recieve the request in their inbox and carry out an investigation.
   
6. Once the Wardens have completed their investigation they send their response to the customer by email to the Twitter account managers CCing in the Customer Service Team.
7. The Customer Service Team close off the customer's enquiry on Capture and record the response from the Wardens.
8. The Twitter account manager tweets the customer with the Environmental Wardens response.

This is the basic process by which our social media conversations are recorded. We didn't have to create a seperate process to log them as we already had a process for other media. I've raced through this but if you have any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them.

At the end of my street there has always been this horrible little walled "park", for want of a better word. You couldn't see into it from the street which meant it was great for the local alcoholic fraternity or whoever else wanted to get up to no good. 

But just a couple of months ago myself and the future Mrs TheBuddster got a letter through the door telling us that a new community park was going to be built where this eyesore was standing. Great news.

Since then great progress has been made and the park is now all but finished. Great but I felt this duty to say thanks and publicly. My area of the city also has a local Council Facebook page based on the one I set-up in the area of the city I work. So, what better place to publically say thanks to the officers who made this happen. But then I got the fear. Should I post on this page? I am a resident but also an officer. Is it right for me to use this facility?

I suddenly became Woody Allen. Instead of New York I had Leith and instead of Diane Keaton or Mia Farrow my neurotic ramblings were about a social media channel. Should I post on it? Would I get grief for doing so from other residents or my employers? Should I post saying my piece and adding some trite caveat; "Please note I am an employee but am currently using my free time to post this and the views which I am indeed posting are most assuredly my own."

In search of a little sanity I reached out to the Twitter world and got a consise and positive reply from a number of trusted sources. So I did it. I posted a wee photo of the work and said "thanks".

And nothing happened...apart from the local team saying "thanks for saying thanks".

Even then it was about a day or so after that I relaxed after doing so.

Am I the only one who has had a similar sort of dilemma? Any local gov bods out there who have had a similar experience or should I seek professional help...or start writting scripts?

Working with various different teams I get a lot of interesting copy from them. Its fair to say that what one person thinks is a great story another person would use to line the budgie's cage. I've always managed to find the story in the copy I was sent, however, the other day though I got some rough copy which totally stumped me. I'll take you through it step by step.

I get an email in my inbox with an article from one of the team leaders and open it.

• Its a library event for children. Great! Our libraries have won awards for their work with children and young people. Its always great to hear about their good work.
• Its a history event. Again, whats not to like? History is an important subject and in the past we've had some brilliant social history projects which have helped bring together our older and younger members of the community.
• The staff made fake poos and the children dissected them. Errrrrr.........you...ah........I........what?

I was stumped. What am I going to do with this story? There was a lot of good stuff in this rough copy BUT its wrapped in......fake poo.

Luckily Mr Ally Tibbitt and Ms Catie Guitart saw my comments about a story I was having issues with and were keen to take it on. I don't think they knew what I was about to send them but hats off as they did a cracking job with it and turned that rough copy into this finished article. (Although I know for a fact that the rough copy, when they first received it, very much devided opinion amongst their colleagues too.)

It was tweeted this afternoon and rampant poo based punnery is now sweeping the tweets of Edinburgers. So once again social media comes to the rescue I guess.

Most of those who replied to me also said they were keen to see what else I found so I've thrown this together. If you were one of the people who responded to my tweet then thank you!

Monmothshire's Gone Digital - Wordpress blog post by Monmouthshire County Council (from Helen Reynolds @HelReynolds)

Visit England pilots QR Codes for tourism - BBC article (from Craig Murphy @CAMURPHY)

Real QR Statistics from Tranport for London - blog post by Terence Eden (@edent)

Say Yes! To better broadband in Norfolk - Campaign which has just started. The QR Code is on the poster in the Toolkit section. (from Susie Lockwood @SusieinNorfolk)

Quick Response Codes - blog entry on Communities of Practice website by Richard Overy (@richardovery)

Also had a few people contact me to say they would give me information on their projects once they were further along with them. I'll add new such info to this post as I get it.

Hope this post been of use to people? If it has tell me, if it hasn't tell me!

I got into Twitter when I saw the potential through the tweets of PC Ed Rogerson, @hotelalpha9, a couple of years ago. For those of you who don't know he is a Community Police Officer in Harrogate who tweets while he's working. This can be while he's out and about, when he's waiting at court to give evidence or doing the necessary paperwork in the office.

This was a bit of a revelation for me as it was a perfect example of a large organisation humanized through a persons experiences. Another reason, and this cannot be underplayed, was: What he was tweeting about was interesting. Not just in a best practice, studying sort of a way but in a genuinely engaging "I wonder what real police get up to?" sort of a way. And I've never been to Harrogate so I can only imagine what it must be like for you if you live or work there and you follow his posts.

Sooooo, after a few months of us launching our Twitter account I was able to set-up a days pilot of getting one of our Environmental Wardens to follow PC Rogerson's example and "tweet on the beat" for a shift.

For reasons that I'll go into in the full post I wanted to keep it low key. This was the only part of the pilot that failed. It was very well received by our residents AND the Warden who took part, Diana. We even got a little coverage from the local press and one of our local Cllrs blogged about it.

I'm reeeaaally please that it went well but unfortunately as a result I'm also unable to sleep and have been up since 4am. But again I'm posting this and therefore keeping one of my new years resolutions so its not all bad. :-)

(I'll warn you now this is a bit of a boring one to start with)

I work in one of the Council's six Neighbourhood Offices. From these offices local services are managed such as housing, roads, community safety and libraries. Over the past year each of these offices has begun using social media to engage residents in their work. Four of them have launched their own Twitter accounts and the other has launched a Facebook page. To date we are the only one who have both.

Earlier this year ours was the first Neighbourhood in the Council to set-up a hyper-local Facebook page to get people involved with shaping all these services. So far its been going well. We have a number of "fans" and regularly, and publicly, share stories and posts with pages of local media sites and community groups. Then to co-incide with the 24hr UK tweet-a-thon we launched our Twitter account. Again this account has been well recieved in terms of followers and interaction from local residents, groups and media.

However...one thing has been nagging away at me. I know its going well because I manage the accounts and know its value but how do I prove that to others.  Every week I get emailed stats about how many people have been served in our reception area. I get sent spreadsheets of the number emails we have recieved. I go to meetings where people have discuss the number of phone calls our admin staff have take. All of these are important means of communicating and interacting with our customers but more and more our social media channels are becoming another medium for our customers. And if I want our staff to realise this I need to put our social media interactions in a language which they are used to.

I need to show them the figures.

So, for the last couple of months I've been working with my colleagues to look at ways to produce accurate and consistant performance indicators for all our accounts. Facebook has Insights but we needed something for Twitter. In the end we went for Hootsuite Pro. Some nice features such as schedulling tweets, its online so we don't have to install any software (and all the associated hassles) and, most importantly, it has analytics built in.

Earlier in the week I agreed some performance indicators with our performance team based on the REAN model, which we use for the Council's websites.

For the Facebook pages we will be reporting monthly on;

• the number of impressions from our posts,
• the number of Wall Tab views,
• the number of likes and comments
• the number of engaged users.

And for Twitter I'm proposing we report;

• our month on month follower growth,
• amount of clicks
• mentions by influencers.

I also want to report our monthly impressions from our tweets but finding a tool that will do that is not proving easy.

Today I met with the manager of the other Facebook page and agreed these indicators with them. Next up its the Twitter-ers....

Then in a couple of months I can start emailing my stats to everyone else AND THEN setting targets. After that I suppose its world domination.

I've started this blog about social media and my projects in local government because I want to share what I'm doing with others who are doing similar things, or thinking of doing similar things. I hope some people might find my posts interesting because they can learn from my mistakes and hopefully in return I can learn from theirs.

I started working for the Council 8 years ago in the library service. The libraries I worked in were not the traditional model of what a library was like. In the less fashionable areas of the city these libraries were more community centres. I LOVED working in the libraries. Met a lot of really great people and found out I really enjoyed working WITH people in these communities.

Since then I've had a couple of different roles in the Council based around communication, consultation and community engagement for different departments. Now I work with a wide range of Council and external services on everything from health to parks as a Partnership Development Officer. I still enjoy working with people to create their own communities and now I get to develop my interest in social media as part of my job.

Currently I manage two social media channels for the Council; a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and also a couple of webpages, South West and Pentlands.