Agenda item

Report of the Assistant Chief Executive

The Cabinet Member considered the report of the Assistant Chief Executive on the New Media and Social Networking Update exploring the potential for the Council to develop a corporate approach to the use of recognised social media as a tool to provide information, communicate with residents and partners and engage with service users.

The report indicated that with the reduction in government grants, the current Transformation and prioritisation of Sefton Council services and the Government’s ‘Transparency’ Agenda, the expectations on Local Authorities to engage, be accountable for and work openly, were greater than ever. As such, the Corporate Communications Team was currently looking at effective and cost efficient ways of improving its new-media offer for residents and to help meet the significant changes in the way the authority delivered its services.

The report indicated that Social Media was becoming a foundation of communication in modern society and the Smarter Government and Digital Britain White Papers outlined the Government’s ambition to create digitally enabled public services used by a ‘digitally enhanced’ population; that Social networking was a relatively cost-effective way for engaging with services users and that in the UK 21.8 million people used social networks.

The Head of Communications presented the report, indicating that social media provided an excellent opportunity to address the Transformation agenda in an innovative way. He stated that many Local Authorities were now exploring social networking to a varying extent with most concentrating their activity around well-known sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which had a recognised legitimacy with the public and other large public organisations, such as the Police and Central Government. He continued that social media could be used for engaging with the public, providing media information/public messages, reporting problems, building communities and enhancing democracy and campaigning.

Arising from discussion, some of the challenges of using social media were raised, including:

• pressure on staff resources in maintaining the sites and responding to questions.

• a protocol would need to be considered around who would be responsible for updating social networking sites

• reputation management and the difficulties ensuring that all postings were appropriate

It was also suggested that the use of social networking could incorporate the use of emails, with members of the public being able to sign up for email alerts from the Council.

The report concluded by indicating the actions to be taken in order to move forward with the implementation of social networking. These included examining how a response system could be integrated into existing customer service arrangements to manage the issues and complaints; produce a draft protocol for social media activity to be managed centrally; liaising with other Council departments to see how they used social media sites to promote their services for incorporating into a Corporate Protocol; setting up Facebook and Twitter networking sites as a pilot to be linked to the Sefton website; and exploring the use of You Tube for targeted video content which could link through to the Council website.

RESOLVED: That