See on www.middleagebulge.com

To some extent I believe accountability at the municipal level is handled nicely by those things we call ‘elections’ in a democracy – you get a chance once every three or four years to do that thing called voting. If you’ve voted you’ve exercised your democratic right and, for better or worse, you have to trust the process. Criticizing every single council vote by someone you helped to elect is your democratic right – but politics is an even bigger game of give and take than business and life itself. So while I earnestly and steadfastly believe everyone should always ‘vote their conscience’ I’m not naive enough to think one can always do so and govern effectively (sometimes that’s where the abstention option comes in handy).

But I also believe, as a communicator with expertise in issues management, that it is better to communicate proactively, to attempt to anticipate response and to deflect potential criticism. No one will ever have a 100% approval rating, and you really can’t please all of the people any of the time. But isn’t it better to discuss an upcoming issue (many of which relate to perceived non-essential spending) and engage in (hopefully) respectful dialogue about it than to wait till the popcorn starts to hit the fan and you find yourself suddenly playing defence?

I’ve seen many reports to councils from those who’ve attended the Federation of Canadian Municipalities annual trade show and conference over the last two years. The information presented during council meetings tends to be perfunctory. And while those who’ve attended sometimes create more comprehensive reports, these tend to be filed as information rather than formally presented and discussed at council meetings. This one from Kelowna Councillor Arjun Singh just blows me away in terms of its transparency, accountability, and eagerness to engage. (He’s on Twitter too.) I think it also makes the best possible case for attendance at events like this being not just essential but crucial budget expense line items for any elected municipal official.

And I can’t resist – regardless of the fact that pollsters got the last Alberta and British Columbia elections wrong – extracting the stats from Angus Reid’s keynote at the FCM Vancouver 2013 meeting. They’re well worth pondering – and debating.

‘Keynote by Angus Reid, Pollster 

talked about three main challenges in polling in this era: hard to reach youth, hard to engage multicultural communities, and there is significant volatility in opinions.

Broke down Canadian public like this: 

• 16% of Canadians are angry activists.  Receive 70% of publicity
• 23% young and ambivalent
• 35% retiring skeptics
• 26% happy campers’

The implications of these stats – if anywhere near true – are phenomenal. The question remains, how to find out what the 84% of those who aren’t ‘angry activists’ think. Suggestions welcome.

After coming across this list of Toronto City Council members (last updated in July 2011), I thought, hmmm – time to get geeky here. First, I found more members of Toronto City Council who had opened Twitter accounts since the list was last updated. Then I counted who still wasn’t using Twitter. Turns out 11/44 members of Toronto’s City Council don’t use Twitter (yet – will they ever?). Then I compared to my local situation, where 5/9 members of Lethbridge City Council actually have Twitter accounts (as does one of the two declared mayoralty candidates for 2013).* Quite a striking difference in the numbers: 75% of Toronto City Council is on Twitter, while only 56% of Lethbridge City Council has a presence. I have yet to track usage and number of followers of the members of Toronto City Council (although I have added them all to a list which will make this possible in the future). I do know that only two members of Lethbridge City Council tweet on a regular basis and have continued to use Twitter between the last election campaign in 2010 and now (Councillors Coffman and Mearns). Several of the Toronto City Councillors who still aren’t on Twitter do have Facebook pages though.

Twitter can be a far more opaque medium than Facebook. But with Facebook only now beginning to introduce hashtags in mid-2013, how many opportunities to engage and connect and to monitor the conversation have the municipal politicians who’ve chosen not to pay attention to Twitter missed? And will there be any correlation between Twitter usage and re-election of incumbents? Time will tell – watch for another post on the subject in October (Lethbridge) and early 2013 (Toronto).

* Let me clarify here. Both the currently declared mayoralty candidates have Twitter accounts. One is currently a member of Council, the other is not. The one who is a member of Council currently has a Twitter account but rarely/barely uses it, and certainly hasn’t used it much in the three years since the last campaign.

Some digital pioneers think that the online sharing of books via social media — social reading — may become the dominant way of both consuming and producing stories.

See on www.cbc.ca

TW Column by David Biddle
It’s way too easy for us indie authors to devalue what we’re selling.”

See on talkingwriting.com

If you care about democracy, if you’re currently a politician, and perhaps if you’re one of those people who don’t vote because you’ve been around long enough to see that those one helps elect don’t always fulfill their campaign promises  – hell – I don’t care who you are really – I think you need to watch this video. In other words, only the world’s would-be megalomaniacs should NOT watch it (and hopefully I’m flying under their radar anyway). For those who, like me, have an easier time taking in information via words on a page or a screen, there’s a very brief summary below.

Sharky’s initial question is, ‘What happens when a new medium puts a lot of new ideas into circulation?’ and he briefly looks at the three tees (telegraph, telephone, and television), all disruptive technologies for which their societies had high hopes: once we can actually get information, talk to each other easily, surely world peace will result. Erm, didn’t happen. He then goes back to the printing press, perhaps the single most disruptive technology we as a species will ever experience. Thought of initially as ‘a tool that would enforce Catholic hegemony,’ says Shirky – but instead we got Martin Luther, the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War.

His explanation for why this is the human response to disruptive technology: when a lot of new ideas suddenly begin to circulate society is changed because it allows new mediums through which more people can weigh in with their points of view. This tends not to lead initially to world peace, but rather to more arguing:  ‘more media ALWAYS means more arguing.’

He then talks about the Invisible College (mid 17th C, about 150 years after the printing press was first invented) and the fact that it takes us a while to find our feet with new technologies – their initial uses may seem frivolous (think LOL cats).  ‘The scientific revolution wasn’t created by the printing press, it was created by scientists’ who needed openness and speed for peer review – while the printing press was the right medium, books were the wrong tool, and the scientific journal and the concept of transparency and peer review were created to solve the long time to press disadvantage of books.

Open source developers, says Shirky, are “our invisible college … not for more arguments but for better arguments.” Proprietary software represents feudalism, says Shirky, open source software represents democracy, ‘because when you adopt a tool, you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool’ (get your own, take it or leave it, this is how it is versus collaborate, use and share freely). And when you have ‘co-operation without co-ordination [that is, a collective and collaborative approach rather than a hierarchical one] you start to see communities form that are enormously large and complex.’ And he illustrates this compellingly with two graphics: one illustrating proprietary software, which looks like an IBM org chart from the 1960s, the other detailing the interactions between people working on an open source project, which looks chaotic. The open source technique used for Ruby Rails, says Shirky, can be applied to democracies – and to the development of law, as it was during the 21st C copyright reform debate in the US, where people used open source software to experiment with the political ramifications of the proposed legislation (just after 13′ in the video).

The collaborative method is cheap, large-scale and can be messy, but the bigger problem is power – and by this he means, I think, the reluctance of those who have power to share it, even for a few moments. I think he’s bang on here – whenever we talk about referendums in the political sense you have a group of people demanding that their voices be heard, that the issue be settled democratically. This is immediately followed by the institutional response of Old Skool politicians, who talk about how much it’s going to cost to have a referendum, etc., and fall back on, ‘you elected us to represent you, you get to vote every two [three, four, five] years, get out of our way and let us do the job you elected us to do and we’ll let you have your say again at election time.’ If the Occupy and Idle No More movements have taught us anything, I’m hoping it’s that once every election is no longer often enough, but we’ll see how that goes, won’t we?

Transparency in government is now the norm, says Shirky (as a result of the disruptive technologies we’ve had at our disposal for decades now, which led to a radically changed society). But, says Shirky, ‘transparency is openness in only direction.’ And he’s absolutely right: transparency, like mainstream media of the 20th C, is basically 1:many communication: I make the information available to you in various media; you choose to avail yourself of it if you like but that’s where it ends. But collaboration is a radical new form of two way transparency where everyone knows – and can see – what everyone else is thinking and doing.

We have collaboration tools – can we use them? asks Shirky. I think the more important question is, Will we use them to create a better, fairer world for ourselves?

Or will our elected representatives continue to cling to an outmoded form of or pretence at democracy that ultimately leads to revolution (bloody or merely electoral)?

In order to ‘lay track’ as Ignatieff calls it, you really have to take control of the conversation. Bridging techniques don’t have to be subtle – they can be as blatant as saying, ‘Interesting question. But what I really need to talk to you and your viewers about is free trade/national security/our failing civic infrastructure.’ And then you just start talking about free trade/national security/our failing civic infrastructure. And hopefully some of what you say will be interesting enough to prompt a follow-up question. At which point you’ll be in charge of the interview you’re giving.

Here are the details – you can follow Susan Toy of Alberta Books Canada on Twitter, but she’s hosting, so check out the hashtag instead. And if you’re in Calgary, get yourself on the mailing for the next one – Susan’s going to see if she can’t make the next salon in December (surprise December guest is an Alberta author who won the Bantam/Seal First Novel award who teaches in the MFA creative writing program at University of Calgary – my that’s a broad hint).

Alberta Books Canada is pleased to announce
a new reading series
The Johnson House Literary Salons
in Marda Loop, Calgary
Please join us for the first of these events
Tuesday, November 29th
7 – 9 p.m.
Featuring readings by Calgary authors
Betty Jane Hegerat
Lori Hahnel
Rosemary Griebel
Bob Stallworthy
Followed by a discussion with the authors
Books published by these authors will be available to purchase
thanks to Sue Hill of Monkeyshines Children’s Books
Admission fee – $10 per person
(In keeping with our belief that authors should be compensated for their participation,
ALL monies collected will be paid directly to the authors)
Coffee and tea will be served – please bring your own cup
If you are interested in attending please send an email to susanmtoy@gmail.com with the subject line: Johnson House Salon
You will receive confirmation and the exact address in a return email. Only a limited number of tickets will be available, so please send your request soon.
We look forward to welcoming you to our first Johnson House Salon!

A local radio station reported on a city council meeting in which there’d been significant discussion about the role of council vs administration in determining property tax increases. Since many current members of council campaigned on no-property-tax-increase platforms, it’s an important issue, and the fact that council seemed unsure of whether it could actually push back (administration was requesting a property tax increase higher than the inflation rate) and say, no increases or lower increases adds yet another wrinkle to the discussion.

A former mayoral candidate – someone who almost won the election – tweeted a comment, which was incorporated in the story posted on the radio station’s blog by the reporter attending the city council meeting. The station – or the reporter, it isn’t clear who manages the radio station’s feed, which is an issue I’ll discuss later – then tweeted the article using two local hashtags, one for the city itself (although not the shorter, more recently adopted airport code for the city locals have adopted), the other hashtag commonly used to report on council meetings, activities, and issues. The article was retweeted several times using all three hashtags commonly in use for the city and for council meetings. Unfortunately, the article referred to the mayoral candidate as a former aldermanic candidate.

I immediately posted – or rather submitted – a comment correcting the misinformation, saying that in fact the candidate had run for mayor and came a very close second in the race, not for alderman. I was required to provide my email address when leaving the comment (although I was assured it wouldn’t be published).

I checked the article the next day, and was surprised to discover that not only was my comment not posted on the article, but it had silently been corrected with the information I’d provided and using exactly my wording.

So I tracked down the reporter and fired off a somewhat – but not too – intemperate email about the issue. I suggested that if the reporter was not aware of what was happening to comments on the radio station’s web site, she needed to take it up with the powers that be.

The next day I got an email from the station’s news director, informing me of how well qualified the journalist was (Master’s degree, not a mere Bachelor of Journalism), of how hard she works and how tight her deadlines are, and informing me that the reporter had realized her own mistake prior to seeing my comment, had in fact covered the municipal election and had interviewed the candidate, had corrected her article, and that the correct information had been used when the story aired on the 4PM news.

My comment hadn’t been posted because it would have embarrassed me and confused other readers, since the story had been silently corrected. I was also informed that comments on the blog were supposed to further a discussion, not to correct facts or misinformation.

So let’s talk about the many many different ways in which this may not be the way to go with social media as a broadcast outlet and/or member of mainstream media.

1. You’re using Twitter and you’re hiding behind a corporate presence without indicating who’s doing the tweeting. @cbcbooks does a great job of not doing this by naming the four people who tweet from their account in their bio and ending the tweets with the initials of the person who’s written them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s nice to know who you’re talking to.Your reporters are using Twitter and consider tweets fair game as ‘quotable quotes’ when writing stories (the comment was not made in person to the reporter or during the course of a telephone interview – see points 6 and 9).
2. You have what you refer to as a blog on your radio station’s web site. But you don’t follow general social media and blog convention rules, which are that when a correction is made, strikeover mode is used.’You are about to write a Comment on this blog entry’ is the wording on the site when one attempts to comment on a story.
3. Your comment ‘policy’ consists of a single line: ‘Your Comment (No HTML or coarse/ hateful language).’ My comment didn’t contain either but it didn’t survive to posting stage. You allow reporters to post directly to your blog without anyone referring the content prior to posting. As a former proofreader, copy editor, and fact checker, this strikes me as a very dangerous precedent.
4. Your reporter him/herself reviews comments and decides whether to post them or not. And your reporter does this silently, rather than emailing the commenter to say, ‘hey, thanks for your comment – I realized my error and had already corrected the story before I read your comment – glad to see someone’s on the ball – there I go, writing too fast again! Is it ok if I don’t post your comment?’ To which I of course would have graciously replied, ‘Absolutely – no point in posting it.’ Instead I’m shaking my head and wondering what the heck they’re teaching in Masters of Journalism programs these days.
5. You tweet stories that have not been proofread, fact checked or copy edited (I suspect using some form of auto tweet system that auto posts when the blog is updated).
6. You have no social media policy posted on your web site for your reporters or the general public, nor is it possible to track one down when searching for your radio station or the parent company of your station.
7. You have a different comment policy from the one that is posted on your site. If you don’t permit people to correct errors of fact and only want comments that expand the discussion, say so.
8. You’ve made it look as if errors you make on your blog don’t matter; only what’s said on air matters.
9. You don’t seem to understand that Twitter and the internet count too. What you – as a blogger or as a reporter or as a news outlet – post and tweet is you reporting the news – it’s not all about the 4PM radio broadcast when you make information public prior to air time. I didn’t bother to take a screen shot of the story with the misinformation – but now I wish I had.
10. So – anything I’ve missed here? Think I’m being over-sensitive?

Oddly, a Twitter account for the program was created – and as of today, has tweeted exactly once, on August 18. The general Banff Centre Twitter account has provided some information, but has failed to recognize the #banffscience hashtag.

I don’t want to be all judge-y and prescriptive here. But people have been live tweeting conferences and events for years now, and this is the second major failure to take advantage of an opportunity for some almost-free public relations I’ve seen this week.

The Banff Centre programs aren’t cheap (in excess of C$5k)  and there aren’t a lot of scholarships available for them. Everyone I know who’s attended any kind of course or workshop put on by the Banff Centre has raved about the experience, and the instructors in this program are top notch. The programs have grown, morphed, and expanded over the course of the last twenty years, getting bigger and better and more varied. In this particular program, the enthusiasm of both the participants and the instructors is palpable (see this tweet from John Rennie, one of the instructors, and this post from one of the scholarship winner attendees).

So far I haven’t seen any mainstream media coverage of this particular program. Instead, there was a Globe and Mail article this week about the Banff Centre, in which the claim that it makes Alberta Canada’s new arts hub is made. There’s no mention of the Science Communications program at all.

So here are some suggestions (and a prescription or two):

• If you’re marketing something (and the Banff Centre most definitely is marketing its programs, courses and workshops), make a commitment to do so and follow through on it.
• If you’ve established a social media presence, don’t neglect it. Use the power of crowd sourcing in particular and social media in general to tap into prospective volunteers. Inviting bloggers and live tweeters to attend and participate and comping them in to events is probably the cheapest marketing and public relations in which you’ll ever invest.
• Seize the day by getting out in front of the hashtag. #banffscience is a great hashtag. It’s a shame the Banff Centre doesn’t seem to have to twigged to the fact that it’s being used. But if a co-ordinated social media strategy was in place, the Centre itself would have created – and used – the hashtag.

Good corporate public relations drives employee retention and attraction. It also drives program participation. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the Science Communications participants returned to the Banff Centre to take the adventure photography course? Or if some of the folks from the creative non-fiction course took the science communications course? Unique programming only goes so far. Right now, according to the Banff Centre’s stats, 75% of program participants are Canadian. But given the strength of the Canadian dollar and the meltdown in the US economy, plus the fact that many of the program’s instructors are Americans, wouldn’t it be nice to ensure there isn’t a 25% drop off in attendance?

I don’t mean to single out the Banff Centre or its Science Communications course. An international literary festival this week also demonstrated that it doesn’t quite get the value or scope of social media either – despite a Twitter feed and two mainstream journalists in attendance, with only three events running simultaneously they were unable to provide coverage of all three events on Twitter. That’s a shame, as well as a huge opportunity missed. It’s really not all that different from the case study/customer success story tactic, in which the client pays to have a case study developed and the client’s customer reaps the benefits of participating in the case study by getting public relations it hasn’t paid for.

Live tweeting and live blogging events may not drive attendance for your current programming. But it has the potential to drive future attendance in 2012, 2013,  2014, and beyond, at a time when your local, homegrown audience may well be vanishing. Don’t discount the ‘been there, done that’ factor or the fact that the ‘staycation’ may not be here to stay. You may well find volunteers among your existing staff who are willing to live blog or live tweet events. You’re paying them anyway. Their enthusiasm for promoting, organizing, and administering the events you put on will only increase if you allow them to participate by turning them into brand ambassadors and allowing them to showcase some of the skills you may not currently be paying them to use. It could be the cheapest professional development you ever offer them. And if you cast your net more widely for volunteer live tweeters, you’ll be amazed at the coverage you get and the goodwill you create. People will be banging down your doors for the opportunity to participate, not just spectate. Increasingly bloggers are transitioning to paid online and mainstream news organizations. You could be making a media friend for life. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?