Things social media cannot do

Introduction
Social media channels pervade our lives, we use them all the time for networking, socialising, marketing and so on. It’s easy to get drawn into the positive spin that surrounds them. With so much media attention, and with so many advocates (every marketer seems to have the inside info on how to use them to promote your business), it’s easy to see how many business have come to regard social media as the magic bullet for increasing their sales and brand. They have become seduced by the increasingly pervasive influence of social media.

The harsh reality of course is that social media cannot solve every business problem, no matter what the pundits may have you believe. Nor is it a quick fire solution for achieving rapid marketing or business objectives.

Social media should instead be regarded as an enabler to change, rather than the change itself. It is the catalyst for change. It cannot create what does not already exist.

To manage expectations, it is as important to know what social media cannot do, as to know what it can do.

So what sorts of things can social media NOT do:

• Social media cannot replace a marketing strategy
• Social media cannot change the intrinsic appeal or success of your brand
• Social media cannot be a success factor without a realistic level of investment

Social media cannot replace a marketing strategy
Many businesses think that having a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a Youtube channel is social media marketing. Understanding the opportunities within social media, and how your marketing strategy can be executed is what makes for real marketing – not the vehicles themselves.

Without a clear marketing strategy, you are prone to quantifying simple metrics such as number of fans, followers or friends as benchmarks of success. These numbers are often taken without any context, and without any relevance to how they impact on the business.

Social media cannot change the intrinsic appeal or success of your brand
Nothing can save a bad product or service, no matter how much it is dressed up by social media. You still need to have a product or service that adds value to the customer. Unless your brand gives the customer some tangible business benefit, no amount of marketing will save it.

Social media cannot be a success factor without a realistic level of investment
Setting up a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a Youtube channel are inexpensive, and so are often referred to as “earned media”, meaning that they are free or cheap. It’s true, setting up these things is cheap. However, a well developed, integrated, ongoing social media strategy will incorporate a host of tools, technologies, applications, design and so on. You will also probably require monitoring and analysis tools, not to mention the time and effort to maintain all these elements on an ongoing basis.

Summary
Social media is not a silver bullet. It is not the solution by itself. It requires planning, investment and creativity to make it work. You still need to have a valuable service or product. You still require a strategy for marketing that service / product. You still require investment to ensure you can maintain an adequate level of marketing across your chosen social media channels.

Bridging the Human and Data Webs

Introduction
“Today's web is built predominantly for human consumption. Even as machine-readable data begins to appear on the web, it is typically distributed in a separate file, with a separate format, and very limited correspondence between the human and machine versions. As a result, web browsers can provide only minimal assistance to humans in parsing and processing web data: browsers only see presentation information.” W3C RDF Primer

Web pages are written using a language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). Without going too far into a technical explanation of what that is, it is basically a means of adding specific attributes to your web page that is then rendered by your browser.

For example the attribute (more commonly referred to as a tag) for adding bold to a piece of text on a web page is to use the bold tags and

<b>This is bold text</b>

The above text when viewed in a browser will appear as bold courtesy of the bold start <b> and finish </b> tags. HTML consists of many hundred such tags for formatting text, adding links and images and all manner of other formatting types. All web pages are built from HTML, so it’s a very important language within the world of the web.

Web pages are naturally created for humans to look at. Humans visit web sites, buy things online, read blogs and so on, so this makes perfect sense. But there are scenarios when it may be useful for the web page to be understood by other applications or programs. Say your web page is an events page, containing dates, times and places of events. Wouldn’t it be really useful if these events could be added to your Outlook calendar by simply marking them up in a specific way.

By creating more intelligent web pages we are more able to build intelligent applications that are able to use the additional information from the web page. Applications will be able to act upon and respond to this additional information, merge related content, update other applications, all based on additional information (or tags).

RDFa
This is where RDFa (Resource Development Framework-in-attributes) comes in. RDFa is a recommendation for embedding rich metadata into web content. It does this by adding attribute level extensions to HTML (or more precisely XHTML).

To prevent web page authors adding their own ad hoc metadata elements to their web pages, RDFa metadata must use those elements as defined by the Dublin Core standard. The Dublin Core metadata elements are used widely within the fields of libraries, as well as computing. They provide a standard way of adding supplementary information to resources, including web pages.

Dublin Core
The Dublin Core is able to add the following metadata elements to content:
The Simple Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) consists of 15 metadata elements:

• Title
• Creator
• Subject
• Description
• Publisher
• Contributor
• Date
• Type
• Format
• Identifier
• Source
• Language
• Relation
• Coverage
• Rights

Example of adding information about a web page
In the following example the text on the web page is enhanced by representing the heading tags of <h2> and <h3> to indicate that they represent the author and title of the web page.

Here is the original XHTML
<h2>Dominic’s Little Blog</h2>
<h3>Dominic Burford</h3>

Here is the transformed XHTML containing RDFa elements.
<div dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<h2 property="dc:title"<Dominic’s Little Blog</h2>
<h3 property="dc:creator"<Dominic Burford>/h3>
...
</div>

The dc above stands for Dublin Core.

To explain what we have done here, we have introduced the Dublin Core namespace to the page by adding a reference to http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
<xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">

We then assign the <h2> tag to indicate that it represents the title of the document by assigning the property attribute (an attribute introduced specifically to support RDFa) to be the title.
<h2 property="dc:title">Dominic’s Little Blog</h2>

We then assign the <h3> tag to indicate that it represents the author of the document by assigning the property attribute to be the creator.
<h3 property="dc:creator">Dminic Burford<h3>

Example of adding contact information
Next, we can embed contact information (email, phone number etc) onto the page. This will allow users visiting the web site to easily add the contact details into their Contact Management System.

Here is the original XHTML
<div>
<p>
 Dominic Burford
</p>
<p>
 Email: <a href="mailto:dominic@blog.com">dominic@blog.com</a>
</p>
<p>
 Phone: <a href="tel:+999 999">+999 999</a>
</p>
</div>

Here is the transformed XHTML containing RDFa elements
<div typeof="foaf:Person" foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
<p property="foaf:name">
 Dominic Burford
</p>
<p>
 Email: <a rel="foaf:mbox" href="mailto:dominic@blog.com">dominic@blog.com</a>
</p>
<p>
 Phone: <a rel="foaf:phone" href="tel:+999 999"<+999 999</a>
</p>
</div>

Friend-of-a-Friend
To add contact information, you are obviously going to need to describe yourself (or whoever the author is). Unfortunately, the Dublin Core vocabulary does not contain property names for describing contact information, but the Friend-of-a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary does**. Using RDFa it is quite common to combine vocabularies (Dublin Core and Friend-of-a-Friend) on the same page.

** FOAF is the vocabulary used by social networks such as Facebook when finding friends you have in common with other friends. It does this using the attribute knows.

To explain what we have done, we have introduced the Friend-of-a-Friend namespace to the page by adding a reference to http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/.

This is similar to what we did in the earlier example.
<div typeof="foaf:Person" foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">

Next we introduce the contact information using elements from the FOAF vocabulary.

Contact Name
<p property="foaf:name">

Email
<a rel="foaf:mbox" href="mailto:dominic@blog.com">dominic@blog.com</a>

Telephone number
<a rel="foaf:phone" href="tel:+999 999">+999 999</a>

The FOAF type we have used is of type person which contains attributes for name, mbox (email) and phone.

Summary
Although these examples were fairly trivial, they should provide enough evidence for the usefulness of adding additional information to web pages. This is done in a consistent way using standard elements, attributes and vocabularies. Adding such information to web pages makes them much more useful, and brings the web ever nearer to becoming a semantic and social web.

The election May 2010 - go out and vote!

As I am sure everyone is by now aware, the UK election is tomorrow. From 7am 6th May (almost) every UK citizen will be able to cast their vote, and influence which of the major political parties gets into government.

On many issues they are very similar, and listening to them on the recent TV debates it was often difficult to tell them apart (except when they were arguing).

This is the closest election I can remember. In elections past, the result was almost a foregone conclusion. This time however, the opinion polls are very tight, and everything is still there for the taking.

This is the first election where your vote really does count! Nothing is certain, and everything is up for grabs.

Make sure you go and vote in tomorrow's election!

Baby P boss considers launching another appeal for unfair dismissal

You would think that in the wake of the Baby P tragedy that the failed head of social services at Haringey council would be keeping her head down. But no, Sharon Shoesmith, having been sacked for her failings, is now planning to launch an appeal for unfair dismissal.

Sharon Shoestring was removed from her post as head of Haringey social services back in December 2008 by Children's Secretary Ed Balls. She then launched an appeal stating that her removal was unfair, and she was the victim of a witch hunt. This appeal has thankfully been rejected by High Court judge Mr Justice Foskett.

Mr Justice Foskett has stated that it was "too simplistic" to suggest Mr Balls had been driven by "party politics" or had been improperly influenced by media pressure. He expressed concern that Mr Balls was "persuaded to offer his opinion" that Ms Shoesmith be dismissed, but could find no evidence of "improper interference in the Ofsted inspection".

Despite this, she and her legal team are considering launching yet another legal appeal. On what grounds I have no idea.

This woman was responsible for overseeing the social services department at Haringey council during the period when the Baby P tragedy was reported. It was under her watch that a seventeen month old baby was beaten and abused at the hands of his mother Tracey Connelly, her lover Steven Barker and their lodger Jason Owen.

This woman clearly has no shame whatsoever. Has she so quickly forgotten that her department missed repeated opportunities to remove Baby P from his abusers? Her failings led to the violent death of a baby. Despite the tragic consequences of her department, she seems far more concerned with pursuing her case for unfair dismissal, in which she will almost certainly receive a large settlement if successful. I am sure that the two are entirely related!

No doubt these legal challenges are costing the tax payer thousands of pounds. Money that could be better served if spent on social services, where it may prevent the repeat of another tragic case such as that of Baby P.

Are you stifling your staff's creativity?

While most sensible folks appreciate the need for an organisation to be safe and secure, this should not be at the expense of giving your staff access to information and technology. Frequently blocked sources of information includes the following:

• - Webmail
• - Blogs
• - Forums
• - Social media

I fail to understand why any organisation would block access to information. Blocking access to blogs and forums does not make any sense to me. I would even question the need to block access to social media and webmail. If people wish to check their webmail or update their Facebook page during their lunch time, then that is their business.

My main means of keeping my knowledge up to date in terms of technology is to use Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, forums and social media. For example, I follow many people on Twitter for their views and opinions on the latest technologies. Often, they may link to their latest blog, where they have written an article giving their thoughts on a specific technology. This is now how I keep up to date. I can access more information in a shorter time.

As a software developer, I need access to this sort of information. I also need access to the latest technologies as they come out, so that I can play with them, evaluate them, see what they can and cannot do. We have seen applications such as Google Wave and Google Buzz coming online, and the only way to see what they are about and what benefits they may offer an organisation is to start using them. You just never know, an innovative use for them may come about as a result.

This is where a different mind set comes into play. Some people demand to be shown a clear business case for granting access to particular technologies, tools and information, and some people do not. For these latter people, the benefits are obvious enough. Their staff have access to information. By being allowed to use the latest tools, they gain a competitive edge and increase their skills and knowledge.

If you give your staff access to information, tools and technology, then you are empowering them. As someone who works in the field of software, it's vitally important that I have access to this information and tools. Denying your staff the tools they need to do their jobs - not just today but tomorrow - is misguided. If you don't use these yourself, then that's not a valid reason for denying them to those that do. Find out what they are why they are important to your staff.

A sensible compromise needs to be found, where the enterprise is secure, but also where your staff have access to the information and tools they need. Otherwise, you may be stifling their creativity!

Implementing a local government web site

Following on from an earlier article relating to selecting a Content Management System, I would like to take the time to describe the steps involved in taking your Content Management System (CMS), and implementing a fully functioning web site that is capable of meeting the demands of local government. I would like to base this on my own experiences of implementing a new web site for East Northamptonshire Council. As the project spanned over twelve months from inception to going live, I won’t give a detailed blow by blow account, as this would be too much information, so I’ll stick to the key points.

Nailing the requirements
You need to have a very clear idea of your requirements. To give you an idea of the sorts of things you may want to consider, please read my article on selecting a Content Management System. This is not exhaustive, but hopefully will get you started considering what you need from your CMS. You may also want to consider whether you want an open source solution. There are many very good open source CMS suppliers offering a wide range of functionality. If you are considering this type of solution, then read my article which describes some of the areas you may need to consider with this type of solution.

It took several weeks before the requirements document was signed off with everyone’s approval. There were many areas that needed to be considered and included in the document, as different people would be involved with the CMS, and from different areas of the organisation.

· ICT would be tasked with administering the CMS (setting up users, tailoring the LGNL, creating appropriate landing pages, creating the necessary work flows, setting image sizes)
· Communications would be tasked with creating news stories and press releases, ensuring the web site followed the corporate style, that it represented the needs of the local citizens by including relevant content
· Content editors would be tasked with creating the content that would be put onto the web site. They come from all areas of the organisation, and are responsible for uploading content for the service area in which they work. For example, a content editor working in the Environmental Health service area, would upload content for that service area.

Everyone needs to be satisfied that their requirements have been fully considered during this process. You will need to get people round the table to discuss their requirements, so that others can give their opinion. We had several requirements that were initially deemed to be important, but during discussions were eventually discarded or amended in the light of input from others.

Never underestimate the value of opinion from a carefully selected group of interested people!

From our requirements, we could then proceed to the next stage of the project, and begin selecting suitable CMS suppliers.

Selecting the CMS supplier
There are many CMS suppliers out there in the market place, and the quality is very high. I used various comparative web sites at first to get a feel for what was on offer. We were looking for a non open source solution. Specifically, we were looking for a Microsoft based solution (SQL Server, Internet Information Services, .NET Framework), as these were the technologies we had in-house to provide local support, as well as to extend and develop the CMS further in line with fluctuating demands. As the primary development resource at the council, it was important that I could use the technologies provided by the CMS. This immediately narrowed the list of candidate CMS suppliers.

Looking through the list of those who were left, we looked to see which of the remaining suppliers had experience of developing web sites for local governments. The requirements of a local government web site are different in many ways to that of other web sites. Local government web sites need to implement a standard taxonomy, or list of services that they offer. What this means is that a service provided by one local authority should be located in the same area of the web site as another local authority. So bin collections will be located in the same area of all local authority web sites. They also need to comply more strictly with standards such as WAI conformance. This allows that web content is accessible to people with disabilities, such as visual impairments. This process also narrowed the list of potential CMS suppliers even further.

Eventually, we had a list of candidate CMS suppliers who offered systems that we could extend in terms of technology, and had experience of the local government sector. That list included:

· Immediacy
· Jadu
· Red Dot
· Goss Interactive
· Contentsis

We arranged demonstrations with each of these suppliers, with an invited audience of people from across the organization. This would give us a good cross section of opinions afterwards. We also had a marking scheme in operation, and marks were awarded by those who would be attending all of the demonstrations. This included myself, the web developer and other key personnel. This would ensure that we were awarding marks against each of the suppliers consistently, as they were being awarded by the same people using the same criteria.

Each of the suppliers were given the same set of scenarios to demonstrate with their products. They were free to deviate from the scenarios to demonstrate other areas of their product, but they each needed to all demonstrate as a bare minimum the set of scenarios that we had given them. This too would allow consistency, as each supplier would have to demonstrate the same elements within their product.

Having a standard set of scenarios, and a standard marking scheme, would bring fairness and consistency to the marking. It would also allow us to demonstrate how and why we had selected the successful candidate if this ever became necessary.

In the end, we selected Jadu as our CMS supplier. There were several reasons for that decision:

· They offered both an open source and a Microsoft based solution, allowing us to leverage the power of either development platform. Additionally, they offered a means of taking native PHP code, and compiling this into .NET Framework code using their own Phalanger compiler. This was a truly unique offering, giving us the best of both worlds.
· They had a deep understanding of the local government web site space, with many of their clients coming from local government, including the award winning Manchester City Council web site.
· From my own perspective, it was clear they understood technology. For any company involved in building systems, you need to have people who are passionate about technology. As a self confessed technologist, it quickly became obvious that the people at Jadu were passionate about technology. This was a crucial factor, as without the drive to move forward technologically, your investment would quickly become obsolete.
· Under the ICT Partnership, East Northamptonshire Council also provide ICT support to Borough Council of Wellingborough. The latter were already using Jadu, and so this would enable the two councils to share skills, and reduce the number of systems in use across both local authorities.

Migrating content
Once we had made our selection, we then met up with the team to go through the project – timescales, milestones, tasks etc. Jadu have a very well documented project management framework which is issued to all their clients to give them a detailed description of what will be involved. Luckily, they go through this with you at the start of the process, and indicate the key milestones along the way.

We now needed to migrate the content out of our current CMS and into the Jadu CMS. We initially investigated the possibility of automating an extraction, so that we could populate the Jadu CMS using content from our current CMS. As the two systems were radically different, it would have taken as long for Jadu to write the necessary scripts, than for us to plough ahead and migrate the content manually. However, as it turns out, the vast majority of clients prefer to migrate their content manually. This gives them the opportunity to clean up the content as part of the migration process – remove unwanted content and update existing content. What we didn’t really want was to blindly migrate our old content over to the new system, so the migration would help act as a housekeeping exercise.

The content editors were all briefed on what was expected of them, as they would be migrating the bulk of the content. It was a large task, as many had vast amounts of content on the web site which would take considerable time to migrate. So the next logical step was to arrange training for them on the new system. There are two levels of training – webmaster and content editor. Myself and several others had the full two day webmaster training. This covered all aspects of the system, including the administration and more technical areas. The content editors would receive the half day training which would cover the necessary steps involved in adding content (documents, downloads, news, events) to the system.

This process was initially estimated to take six weeks, but we soon realised we needed to change the timescales as the work was simply taking longer than estimated (that’s why they’re called estimates).

Testing
Despite several setbacks, problems and issues, we eventually managed to migrate our content over to the new CMS. We arranged internal testing, with staff from one service area testing the content of another service area. We used standard tasks extracted from SOCITM (the Society of Information Technology Management) who produce the excellent Better Connected report each year. This report ranks and assesses local government web sites, and gives advice on how they can improve. So using this as the basis for our testing made sense.

We tested each page also for:
· Spelling and grammar
· Writing for the web (short, punchy sentences and paragraphs, use of bullet points, breaking down a document into multiple pages)
· Broken links
· Use of images
· Use of page supplements
· Use of landing pages
· Layout and overall look / feel of the page

Communication is absolutely critical!
One of the key components along the way was a high level of communication. I arranged and chaired regular meetings with the content editors, to get their feedback on any issues and problems they were experiencing, as well to as to go through the latest project updates with them. With a project of such scope, that affects the entire organisation, and requiring input from all service areas across all levels of seniority, communication was far from easy. Keeping everyone up-to-date was very difficult. Different people wanted different levels of information. Some only required brief updates, some required detailed updates. It really pays dividends to have a formal process of communication in place:

· Who will send out the communications?
· Who will receive the communications?
· How often will they be sent?
· How will they be sent?

Having a process in place whereby these questions are satisfied will be of immense benefit.

Going live
On the day, the process we were to follow would be:

· Jadu perform pre go–live checks in the morning
· Once complete we then change the Domain Name System (DNS) record to point to the new web site and take the current web site offline (and place a suitable offline web page in its place)
· Jadu complete their pre go-live checks and give us access to the site for testing (the general public still see the offline web page)
· Once we have tested the web site to our satisfaction we give Jadu the go ahead to make the web site live to the general public

We had put together a test schedule for the period during which we had access to the web site. This was not to test the content (which we had already done), but to test areas of the site that may have been affected by making the web site live. This would allow us to perform targeted testing when we only had a brief window of time.

Conclusions
There are many areas of the project that I have omitted for brevity, including the integration with the back end office systems, coming up with the look of the new web site, as well as the many issues that were encountered along the way. That aside, the key points made here still apply.

Make sure you get your requirements signed off with the consensus of a group of interested people who are capable of arriving at the final document.

Spend as much time as you need (or as you can afford) researching the CMS market. Find out what is available, what the differences are between the many products. We sought the opinion of other local authorities to see what CMS they used, and what they thought of it. There is nothing quite like a recommendation!

Ensure you have clear channels of communication. This is vital to the success of the project. With so many different people involved from so many areas of the organisation, you will be quickly swamped without a proper process of communication in place.

Letting the adventurer out

I came across this quote recently when looking through Mark Beaumont's web site. If you have not heard of him, he set the world's fastest circumnavigation by bicycle last year, and appeared on certain mobile phone adverts thereafter.

"I believe there is some kind of adventurer in all of us. My dream is to share expeditions that push the boundaries of physical mental capability with the world. Questioning what is possible is the key to success in every walk of life" - Mark Beaumont - adventurer and cyclist.

I think this is a great quote, and epitomises the shared wanderlust that many of us have. I say many, as I have met many people who have no desire to step foot outside their own street, never mind another country.

On a much smaller level, one of the reasons I love long distance cycling is the sense of discovery, of poring over a map the day before, and looking for new places to visit on my bike. Cycling through a quaint little village in the middle of nowhere is the only reward I need.

The quote also emphasises the need to push yourself. I have made the point before about stepping outside your comfort zone, and indeed I think there is a strong analogy to be made between stepping out from your street and having an adventure, and stepping out from your comfort zone and pushing yourself. In both cases you are doing something new that may result in failure, but from which you will gain knowledge and experience.

How do you really know what you are capable of if you have never pushed yourself? You may just amaze yourself if you try!