The Campaign Company Blog

The TCC Blog has moved

Dear blog readers,

Over the past months we have rolled out the Wiki platform 'Central Desktop' across The Campaign Company for our intranet, company website, project websites and blog.

The project has been a great success the new tools we are using (Central Desktop, Del.icio.us, Humyo, Skype, Google Apps) allowing us to work more closely and more effectively than ever both internally and with clients. We'd recommend making the move from a traditional server IT model to an on-line, Web 2.0 model to everybody!

This does however mean that our blog has moved, so please goto www.tccblog.co.uk to read our latest posts...

If you want to keep upto date with our blog RSS feed the url is:

http://api.centraldesktop.com/na/wsxml?q=726153913e5215d313cdd02d2313faf715c73e8-72615409-rss-2.0

Many thanks

The Campaign Company

More from the "Web 2.0 and Beyond" Conference

This is my second post about this event. Further items of interest included:

• The current stats - 1.3 billion internet users, 400 million social network users, 120 million bloggers. When you add to this the 3 billion mobile telephony users, then in less than 8 years we have truly collectively created a global phenomenon.
• Google Alerts picks up about 75% of the web coverage on your organisation. There are paid for services like CyberAlert covers more.
• 20% of journalists blog. If you want to know who influences them, look at what they read on their blogroll.
• It was implied you can understand influencers by audit trailing them. TCC would probably disagree with this as the only only approach. We think the mix should also include quantitative and qualitative sampling to understand the motivations behind any audit trail. Later in the day reference was made to developing "knowledge currency" where you develop algorithms to measure usage quality and not just quantity. TCC would argue part of the quality is understanding motivations and the emotions that may drive them. This cannot be done automatically. Also later in the day mention was made of the creation of "social graphs" to track influencers - this already exists in a rudimentary form on Facebook.
• Online Videos can be very effective at spreading bad news. An example of a recent closure of a U.S. abattoir was cited. Videos can be very effective in backing up news blogs and can more effectively tell stories, thus strengthening your narrative. There is a trail off in viewers when a video is viewed, so the first 10 seconds are the most important.
• The name of an organisation or individual is likely to be used as a tag for sites like Flickr and Youtube, which means it will be difficult to control your visual image. Trade marking a name is unlikely to keep up with the rapidity of images being uploaded and distributed.
• Ted Talks is a great website on future developments in social tools. The Sir Ken Robinson lecture on children and innovation/creativity was mentioned and it makes important points as well as being extremely funny. The Ted conferences sounds like a U.S. version of the Hay Festival to me.
• Your new "first impression" in future is not as you walk through the door but your digital identity.
• Identity fraud is increasing. Have a look for what you can find about yourself and others on the web. Look at Wink, Zoominfo and QDOS and see how much of your identity is recorded on the Internet.
• Develop internal social networks. Visible Path is an example of this.
• Avoid simplistic metrics. Measurement of the success of web 2.0 products should be by business outcome not simple volume. Measure actual usage: edits and tags rather than just "hits". In other words measure the energy expended on using the webpage.
• Polls/Surveys of experience of a service should be immediate and not "moderated by time".
• If you are setting up a social network, pre-populate content as well as think of polls as well as customisable front pages to make it as interesting and interactive as possible. Reward contributions - develop a points system to encourage usage. Both the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns have this.
• In future parents might want to check out whether there was an available internet domain name when choosing the name of their baby. This may be the best way to protect online fraud?

Overall this was a good event with lots of thought-provoking ideas. It was certainly a conference of the future with a lot of us blogging it straight on to the web like this posting as well as it being podcast too. It even had a great definition. Web 1.0 was "watching the television", whilst Web 2.0 was "going down the pub". Will this eventually lead to "binge collaboration"?:-)

More Live Reports from "Web 2.0 and Beyond" Conference

Following Ben Wild's Blog from the Web 2.0 and Beyond Conference yesterday, today it was my chance to attend.

A number of interesting points were made this morning:

• 70% of the US workforce are now knowledge workers.
• Knowledge Management is vitally important to deal with the plethora of information we now all face. Examples include evolving your knowledge systems rather than simply creating them fully formed and improving searchability of wikis.
• A value retail chain has benefited from blog/Facebook - which might sound surprising. It is possibly looked at by value conscious mavens/connectors collecting and distributing cost information. 100 Facebook friends each with an average of 100 friends spreads value. Echo chamber effect - 360% increase in referrals as a result of web 2.0 marketing. Cost of 12p per contact much cheaper than direct mail.
• With traditional media you have a list of contacts. In web 2.0 you have to research yourself who the influencers in the market you are operating in. This is exactly what TCC are developing as tools for our own use and to operate on behalf of clients.

How Web 2.0 reduces business over heads

It's striking coming through from many of the presentations is how Web 2.0 provides business tools at a cheap rate, Will Wynee from Arena Flowers makes several of these points especially around marketing...

• Marketing - You can spend alot of cash on Google Ad words but relative to traditional advertising it works at a wider variety of scales so more businesses can access far larger audience for less cash
• Content and knowledge management - What used to be IT systems that cost huge amounts for cash can now be bought off the shelf for free or a small monthly outlay
• Collaboration - working closely with people and orgs in other countries is expensive if you're flying people around the globe, if you can use web meetings/conferencing and wikis for co-production then this kind of international approach becomes accessible to small business and voluntary and community organiations.

From Elliptical Galaxies to Potholes......

I have previously mentioned Grid Republic as a social network for a scientific or medical purpose, whereby a community of people across the world get together to use their spare computing power to do distributed computing with a capacity in terraflops - ie very big - through a rather clever screensaver download.

However this is a passive form of science where one just allows one's computer to be used for a wider purpose.

Yesterday evening I discovered Galaxy Zoo - a far more exciting piece of scientific endeavour where you can directly contribute to the scientific work online.

In this case you are helping astrophysicists to map distributions of various types of galaxy (elliptical and spiral are the two broad forms, but there are lots of sub-groups) by joining the online team (now 115,000 strong since the project started in July 2007) assessing photos of over 200 million objects taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This will assist with a far greater understanding of the lifecycle of galaxies, many of which go through mergers to move from spiral to elliptical - our own Galaxy's probable fate.

Whilst computers can be used to assess many things, when it comes to indistinct photos of two merging galaxies edge on to earth view the eye and the brain are still superb tools. However the sheer amount of data being generated means scientists and their students do not have the time to do this themselves and should they be wasting their discovery time anyway?

This is a project where anyone online at home can help.

You need no prior knowledge to take part in the work. Once you join Galaxy Zoo you are given simple online tutorials and in order to start assessing pictures you then take a short online test where you have to get 8 out of 15 pictures right - this is because they get up to 35 people to look at each photo and then recheck any disagreements between viewers.

Having passed the test you can then assess photos. For someone like myself who spent every non cloudy night from the age of 10 to 11 outdoors in the evening doing astronomy, this is a much warmer experience and could get quite addictive in a Sudoku sort of way! I did 45 galaxies last night and have resisted doing it tonight only so I could blog about it.

Apart from its benefits to astrophysics, I have started to think whether such a system could be used in other more terrestrial areas of activity.

A few came to mind:

• Assessing the millions of earth satellite photos to identify issues such as climate change and land use. On a more local level TCC has a project called Carbon Crime Stoppers and I wonder whether a photo assessment system could work with that?
• It could be used for community engagement where residents could both submit and assess street scene photos that either other residents had taken of the Council regularly took from its front-line staff going about their daily duties with handheld PDA's. This of course would be a culture change for local government where it effectively employed teams of online resident non-professionals. However creating resident buy in with the prioritisation of street scene issues could be a great way of developing community cohesion in the future.
• Assessing biodiversity in local authority parks and gardens through the taking and assessment of photos. Again this could bring together communities in worthwhile projects.

The above are just tentative thoughts and I would welcome further suggestions.

What is interesting is that this sort of project could give young people a strong and empowered role in any local activity. Galaxy Zoo says it has young people from 8 years old upwards assessing photos.

Therefore in years to come both science and community cohesion could strongly benefit from online communities collaborating to solve problems. What might have started as project to understand galactic evolution could be just the thing to massively expand the collaboration between local authorities and the communities they represent.

'Ninging' the debate on healthcare back to life...

Having been commissioned by the Cumbria PCT to consult the public on changes to health care services, we recently embarked on a tour of different locations in North Cumbria to obtain responses to the proposed reforms.

To keep TCC staff, the PCT and interested parties updated on our progress, I created a 'ning' site.  Ning is a DIY social networking site, rather like a Facebook group, on which you can post blogs, forum discussions, photos and videos to discuss with an invited audience.  It proved to be a fantastic small-scale project management tool; a great way of keeping in touch and facilitating debates on different aspects of the health service that were, perhaps, particularly prevalent in the days engagement activities.

The question of whether 'nings' are best suited for internal discussion or public consumption was brought into sharp perspective when members of the public were inadvertently invited to join the site.  Ultimately, it sparked off an interesting debate between professionals and local people on the changes proposed under the consultation.  I would have no hesitation using a 'ning' again for a similar purpose, but it is vital to establish exactly what its purpose is to be before beginning...

Googling Alone! - A quick way to assess local social capital

You may have heard of the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam where he surveys the decline of social capital and suggests how it can be revived. The evidence base is generally drawn from American sources, however the points he make are very much applicable to other developed democracies.

Putnam conducted a lot of research for his book, but many working in their community trying to assess social capital for their area do not the time or the academic resources Putnam had.

Perhaps there is a web 2.0 solution?

If you are reading this article, there is a good chance you use Google or another good web search engine. If you use Google a lot you may be aware of many of its search facilities. One of the most interesting is if you type a full postcode in you get many internet entries associated with that geographical area.

As someone who was a Councillor for 20 years, I was fortunate in having a pretty good understanding of the social geography of my area. As a result recently I started typing in postcodes for some of the wealthier areas of my borough and some of the poorest.

The results were reasonably predictable. In areas that were quite wealthy you would find postings for people who ran their own businesses or were in community groups. In poorer areas you would generally find websites that related to wider public sector bodies but little community or small scale enterprise activity. At times I found up to 10 times as many pages for a relatively well-off residential road with no other facilities compared to a poorer area of flatted social housing.

Of course some might say it is all about access to home computers between poor and well off areas and that in poorer areas it is the mobile phone that has much more usage. A fair point. However in this much more connected world access to and participation on the internet can be a reinforcing factor for developing social capital in wealthier areas. The fact that the gap is so wide in the number of Google pages is a useful proxy indicator for quickly assessing levels of basic social capital and social connectedness.

What can we do about this?

One idea I had was that Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) could trawl every postcode in their locality and ensure they are connected with every group listed. I suspect there is good software that can automate much of this process. This in itself might go some way to increase the overall stock of social capital across a local authority area as more groups and individuals would be connected to key local stakeholders. A far-sighted LSP might even seek to connect people within a community together through encouraging the development of geographical based social networking software similar to Residents HQ that I have previously blogged about.

Another thought was for Local Strategic Partnerships to identify 10-20 postcodes with low Google pages and perhaps conduct a pilot survey of them regarding internet access. It may be that residents are not using free facilities in local libraries? Some extra publicity and perhaps even the sort of doorstep engagement that TCC recommends for many projects could be easily provided. This could be linked to an offer of simple computer training.

This sort of approach might go some way to connecting people up and creating the sort of network effects that can perhaps start to increase the stock of social capital in some poorer communities.

An E-Bowl of Sugar!

An interesting new approach to social networking, which is normally associated with widely dispersed communities.

This time it is to reinforce a real geographical community.

Residents UK is a social network site for people living within modern blocks of flats to communicate with each other. In other words people don't ignore their neighbours or have a chance meeting on the landing but actually move in and check out who lives in the block and who might share an interest with them or who can help them.

It will be interesting to see whether it takes off and whether developers of these blocks encourage it? The danger is that it might increase social segregation by making such electronically "gated communities" even more cohesive and less connected with surrounding poorer communities.

I would therefore love to see a local council kit out one of its own housing blocks with home computers and encourage people to join a local block social network - a sort of "e-tenants association". Could such a network go some way to tackle the generally lower levels of trust in poorer communities and perhaps enhance community cohesion?

You tube becomes "Viewtube"!

Youtube has brought all the UK Political Party Youtube sites into one portal to make them easier to find.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched the site appropriately through a Youtube Video!

This should be a useful resource to all citizens or "netizens" in the coming years and is likely to receive a lot of hits at the next General Election. It should reach out to groups such as young people, who are hard to reach through other campaign techniques.

It will be interesting to see whether unofficial videos made by individuals rather than political parties are also placed there?

TCC uses web 2.0 systems such as Youtube and wiki sites for community engagement where the public can add their own content on websites. We believe this has a lot of potential for social marketing and community cohesion work as well as more general campaigning.

As online video becomes easier and cheaper to upload, we could see entire debates conducted through video blogging (Vlogs) and through sites as Youtube. This has potential to revolutionise how the public express their views and could make politicians much more accountable to the public they serve.

Internet TV - An aid to Democracy?

Two websites have just been launched that cover political campaigning and political participation by young people. Both are internet TV channels. Is this a new trend?

Catch 21 is described as "the political internet channel run by young people for young people".

CampaignTV is a broadly pro-Labour site that has just been launched and featured in an article in the media section of the Guardian today.

Sites like these join established political internet TV sites like 18 Doughty Street.

With a General election now unlikely for at least 18 months and with the speed in which websites can become essential to use in just a few months, will Political internet TV be a key communication medium by then?