Here at Qube we (obviously) believe in Social Media as a platform for change. Social media and the Internet are such important parts of our daily lives it makes sense for public officials to start using it as a way of making a positive difference to our country. With that in mind we thought we would start highlighting some of the best and worst uses of social media and the Internet in official communication on a weekly basis. With the election looming it seems now more than ever social media will be important for the political parties.

More of This

This week saw political figures respond to questions asked by social network users. Barak Obama spent half an hour answering a variety of questions from Youtube users. While he was only able to answer a few of the 11,696 questions asked it was great to see the president of the United States taking the time to respond directly to his citizens. The video has received almost half a million views and has over 9,000 comments. That shows a great level of discussion and influence with a smart piece of crowd sourcing.

Over in the UK Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was taking part in a similar endeavor. Reddit users had been asked to submit questions for Nick and then vote up their most popular questions. Mr Clegg then answered these questions in a refreshingly under produced Youtube video. It was great to see a party leader taking the time to go into other communities and get involved in discussions.

David Cameron has also taken some time to answer user submitted questions. Although the Liberal Democrats approach of going into existing communities may be preferential to some, it is great to see the Tories taking this action (they also have a nice and slick system for submitting and voting for comments).

Why is this worthwhile? A couple of Youtube comments from Nick Cleggs Reddit video make it perfectly clear why.

The next step is for the parties to get involved in these comments on their own videos

Less of This

Labour have a bunch of “tools for your website” on their official site. Rather than focus on their own policies they seem to have taken the school boy approach of throwing insults. There are a series of “satirical” widgets that you can install on your site to show txt speak conversations from the Conservatives. Hardly the most thought provoking or conversation starting stuff. Instead of creating fake conversations for your site perhaps they should help voters engage in real conversations with the party?

Have a look at the offending item below and let us know what you think. How do you think the political parties should be using social media?

5 of the best Social Media stories of the week as chosen by the Qubites. Also 5 of the rest aka “Things MC Hammer says you can touch”.

5 of the best

Google’s Privacy Principles

There are times when I worry about how much Google knows about me. They know all of my web history, my conversations, my personal blogging…the list goes on. On the one hand I can see how it creates better results for me (in both the paid and natural results) as well as providing me with plenty of highly useful services for free. How much should our privacy cost though and how much are you willing to give up? This video calms me a little that Google is thinking about these things and says they will let me remove private information when I choose, but is this enough?

UK Internet Map (as featured on the BBC’s Virtual Revolution)

The BBC’s new show on the virtual revolution had an amazing 3D diagram of how Internet traffic flows in the UK. Here you can see it in all its 2D glory and realise that maybe cyberspace isn’t as big as we think, or at least for all its size we visit a few websites very often and the many websites much less.

The State of the Internet

We love pretty graphs. Here is a collection of useful and interesting top level views of how people are using the Internet.

Five lessons from MyDavidCameron

My David Cameron is both a stab at political satire and interesting social experiment. I would recommend that everyone running social media campaigns reads the findings and see how they reflect their own experiences. I particularly like the “Crowd Sourcing is Good” and “Crowd Sourcing is Bad” section.

Government 2.0: Communication and Engagement Are On a Collision Course

Couldn’t agree more with the differences between communication and engagement strategies. There is a huge difference between using Twitter as an alternative to the phone or website and actually going out and engaging in conversations where members of the public are. Food for thought for any government officials.

5 of the rest

70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Any Star Wars fan (and Phantom Menace hater) should find 70 minutes to enjoy this beautiful, witty and spot on analysis of the Phantom Menace that shows how off-base Lucas really was.

Internet archaeologists find ruins of “Friendster” civilisation

Very funny and makes you wonder how long it is until something similar to this becomes reality. Maybe I should start trawling through the way back machine for similar findings, I wonder how Friends Reunited is getting on. Also this Onion video has me chuckling .

Ashen’s Tech Dump – Retro Games

The BBC are doing some great web comedy content. Short in length but not low in quality. This is a funny look into the “past”, They don’t make them like they used to!

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” quotation marks

This is a very “Funny” series of photos

Our 5 favourite Social Media stories from the past week and  5 other random things that may or may not be interesting.

5 of the best

Don’t blame social media for bad behaviour

I think too many times blame is shifted from people to something else be it films, games and now Social Media. It is clear that these things have changed society but that does not mean they are making us bad people. While people are quick to point out bad behaviour on Social Media sometimes not enough mention is made of good behaviours, helping someone with a question on Twitter or catching up with old friends on Facebook.

A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions

Here is a nice long list of tools you can use to monitor Social Media activity. Brandwatch and Google are my personal favourites.

Calling Open Data Developers: We need your help

Last week I mentioned that the American government was moving forward with its transition online and that we needed to catch up. Only a few hours later this blog post popped up from the cabinet office. Would it be sycophantic to say maybe someone was reading my blog? Probably! Still good on them, lets hope it leads to the UK having a government 2.0.

87 Cool Things

Google have put together a list of cool things from the internet. It is great to see how the social web allows us to mashup our content to create something new. One of my favourite discoveries from this list will be appearing shortly in 5 of the rest .

WikiLeaks

I came across this after the story that a government document about stopping leaks onto the internet, was leaked onto the internet! You can’t make this stuff up. This is a fascinating repository of information and who knows what could turn up in it next.

5 of the rest

What is Google Wave?

There has been a lot of fuss made about this Google Wave thing, but what is it? This slightly tongue in cheek video might help you understand it a little more.

Daytum

I hinted at this earlier from Googles “87 Cool things”. It fascinates me. I have always wondered about my life statistics, how many chips I have eaten, how many times I have been to the doctor. This is obviously a very manual way of doing it but a nice looking tool. I intend to start using it and I think you should too Lets see what we can track over the coming months and what we find. Check out one of the creators reports for insperation.

Letters of Note

Weird and wonderful letters from all sorts of people. Such as Lindsay Lohan getting a telling off!

Kashiwa Mystery Cafe

The Cafe where you get what the person before you wanted.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc.

A slightly creepy but very entertaining video

Our 5 favourite social media stories from the past week and  5 other random things that may or may not be interesting. Also if you like it, Retweet now there’s a good boy/girl (delete as applicable).

5 of the best

Let’s Kill The CPM

A really great article that you should go and read now!

Done that? Good. my only slight problem is Shelby doesn’t offer enough solutions, but I will! Obviously I am talking about social media, passive advertising might generate big numbers but is it really creating advocates and giving you value for money? As people become more immune to the banners are your impression numbers even reflective of how many people are paying attention?

Gov 2.0 in action

I think government at large has been slow to keep up with the internet age. We need more information now with better levels of access. Movements like rewired state are giving us some really interesting projects, but we need more involvement from the top. Britain will get there, we just might need to follow America’s lead.

Fifa 10 and the smart media partnership

Games are starting to converge more with our social media and Fifa is using the game itself as way of building awareness and engagement. Users are sharing their experiences away from the game in social spaces, the videos just help to facilitate and create the conversations. On that note, what do you think about my sweet goal with Frank Lampard?

Sport England teams with Facebook to get people playing sport

I think this could be a great way to reach people and get involved with them about sport. Sport is such an important part of our society and it is nice that the powers that be realise that just because we like to spend time on the computer does not mean we don’t want to go out and play!

AskPeopleYouKnow.com

An interesting idea currently in its beta phase. I think it is worth keeping an eye on but for now I get my knowledge and recommendations from asking my connections on Twitter or Facebook.

5 of the rest

Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe

Whether you are an avid gamer or not I think you will find some entertainment value in Charlie Brooker’s latest installment of his Wipe format. More of you than not should be interested as a recent survey says that 73% of the country are gamers!

Today Now! / Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Fantastic satire from the Onion with a creepy underlying truth.

MacLane’s photostream

A really cool collection of geeky Lego models! I heart Wall-E and Optimus Prime. Also who doesn’t love Boba Fett?

A periodic table of visualization methods

If you ever need something visual to help you explain a concept or make some data more interesting check out this table! It is a little dry at face value but full of really great ideas.

People of Walmart

Oh internet you do seem to revel in finding the quirkiest and weirdest people in life. Check out this collection of Walmart shoppers and be glad you are not one of them (hopefully)

With the remit to deliver 3% net cash efficiency gains per annum, local councils certainly have their work cut out. On the face of it this must seem like an almost impossible task, I mean where do you start?

The good news is that not only does the efficiency agenda mean cost savings, but according to a recent Audit Commission report, efficiency is one of the most important drivers of innovation as councils will need to break with established practices and try alternatives.

Image c/o Steffe's Photostream on Flickr

So what kind of Innovation is happening?

I came across this article published about the efficiency agenda in the States. “Social Networking Tools Stimulate Government Operational Efficiency and Transparency, Government Insights Research” which is about…well I think the clues in the title.

In a nutshell the big idea comes down to this. Using technology that already exists and is proven to work (i.e. social networks), connecting in and building relationships with communities that already exist and are reachable (using social media) has the potential to produce huge efficiency gains.

I have worked on a couple of projects that have used the idea of social media as a path to efficiency gains. I’ll be having a think about how they fit with the efficiency agenda over the next few weeks and sharing that thinking here. Stay tuned…