There's one simple first step councils can take to help the residents who follow them on twitter – follow them back.
A survey of 77 local authority chief executives found that although they all had an official Twitter account and 300,000 followers between them, they were only following back 43,000 of their followers collectively.
"These are the people interested in what councils are doing and signalling to the council they are keen to engage with what the council has to say," said Nigel Bates, development director at Serco, the international services company that conducted the survey.
"Following back is critical as chances are that at some point these people will be interested in the wealth of services councils and their partners provide.
Social media monitoring – by setting up keywords which are relevant to local authority priorities – can help councils engage proactively with residents.
For instance, by keeping an eye out for mentions of "coming home from hospital" on Twitter or Facebook, a council could pick up on a tweet or post from someone concerned about a relative leaving NHS care – possibly after an operation. They could then respond to that person with relevant information, such as social care or Telecare packages they could be eligible for, or products they could buy to assist their relative in the home.
Proactive digital engagement with citizens can produce strong results with limited resources, said Bates. People feel cared about while councils can save money because more informed citizens are better able to help themselves and less likely to rely on council services. Plus, giving out advice on social media has the added bonus of accumulation – tweets and retweets and Facebook posts can reach a lot of people – many more than through traditional voice-oriented call centre interactions.
It's a concept that UK local government is already trialling, albeit on a small scale. As winter sets in, local flooding or gritting is a great example. Some residents have used Twitter to alert friends to perilous roads or ask for their own grit bins – saving local authorities a job – while social media also helps authorities identify the areas worst hit by ice or floods. Some 90% of councils now use now use live Twitter updates on road gritting, according to Laurence Meehan, head of campaigns and external communications at the Local Government Association.
The biggest social media listening project across UK local government is soon to come to fruition. In partnership with Serco, one council in the north east has recently built a digital contact centre for exactly this kind of proactive digital engagement. This project will be formally announced sometime this year.
Local government can learn a lot from the commercial sector, which has been reaping the benefits of social media monitoring for a while. Private companies, not so hampered by the budget cuts and statutory duties of local government, have had room to experiment and gain credibility online. One particularly humorous Twitter conversation which started with a customer with a service query to @tescomobile, and ended up with input from @YorkshireTea @RealJaffaCakes and @CadburyUK, also produced a lot of happy consumers.
Digital engagement is about providing communities with the resources they need to help themselves – and building up a trusted brand. This can have untold benefits. Part of the success of Apple's website, for example, is that it attracts hoards of enthusiasts happy to answer questions on Apple's behalf.
But there are also some great examples to draw on from elsewhere in the public sector. The London Fire Brigade's award-winning Twitter feed puts out some amusing yet informative messages which target the right people; for example, "Getting curry down your #Christmasjumper is bad but better than having a kitchen fire due to cooking while sloshed #nodrunkcooking".
Councils need to think about a switch in tactics: from reacting and broadcasting to monitoring, influencing and engaging, said Bates. Historically, customer service performance in the public sector has been measured in terms of average handling times or time to answer calls.
"It may be the wrong measure in having a one second time to answer and an average call handling time of 20 seconds, if the customer, at the end of the interaction, has not had a satisfactory resolution to their enquiry. Or even worse, has to go through a further lengthy process at the end of which they still do not feel they have received any helpful service at all," said Bates.
"If, right at the beginning of that process, the options were explained in a caring and considerate way and customers were given the right information, they might go away very happy.
Of course, digital engagement can't solve everything. In a recent roundtable hosted by the Local Government Chronicle and Serco, Valerie Pearce, head of city services at Brighton & Hove city council, made the point that local authorities are not resourced to deal with a big engagement channel that gets lots of responses. "You'd get overwhelmed with it so you must decide the level of engagement you want," she said.
But Bates wants to dispel one stubborn myth about online engagement. "When people say you can't use social media for the sort of demographic we need to engage in, actually it's becoming a bit of a non-truth," he said. The fastest growing group of Facebook users is women over the age of 55 and the percentage of people accessing the internet over 65 is rising more rapidly than any other age group.
It is those in their 50s and 60s – the people with aging parents – who are most likely to require council services.
Digital engagement is "fundamental to the transformation of service delivery", said Bates. "The customer has to be at the centre of everything you do. It's about engaging the customer to help them get what they want at the first point of contact – and giving them sufficient information so they can solve their own problems."
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