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Thanks a lot. You’d be pleased to know, I didn’t go to a public school and my name is not Charles. So social media isn’t all public school. You know, where’s the Charles’s in the world? Also can I ask is PR Uptley still here? Is he still here? Raise your hand? Oh, cuz I was gonna give him the award for Most Retweeted phrase to play. You definitely guess that one you know, old media: stick a celeb, on an ad. New media: Stick a celeb on the web. And was it social media? Stick a celeb on Tweeter. So, I thought was, I thought that deserved an award. I was gonna say “If you here, you know, round of applause for that” probably last which is, and I also realize I can’t compete with Robyn White cuz I watching the back channel, everyone is been talking about Robyn White’s clothes and as you can tell, there’s no point in me even trying to compete with that.

What I am going to do is talk about Social Media in Government. Quick straw poll: Who works in the public sector? Or has anything to do with the public sector? Ah okay, a few, so, this may come as a surprise to the rest of you, which is, that actually, possibly the UK government get social media. And that’s what we’ve heard so far, just from the ah CRY talking. And also, you know, the UK government in some ways as shocking as it may, may sound have been early adopters of social media. The reference point being Tweeter, Number Ten was on there way before most of us were, if we were honest and they now got a million and a half followers, their number Forty Nine in the global list of the top ranked Tweeter sites. That is higher than any other political site other than, other than one individual, which is Barack Obama.

Um, so they’ve done incredibly well. They’ve got you know, very, very good stats. If you look at their stats in terms of usage and they were really early adopters. So, political government do actually get social media. This is probably one of my favorites, I should say I have nothing to do with this, um, but I really like the way NHS direct Tweeter. Um, they do really timely kind of tweets. And they, and You know so this one, we’re here all night, sleep well, would come probably about twelve o’ clock at night or one o’ clock in the morning, cuz if you’re sad enough like me just don’t be online. They send you a little tweet, things like “what’s keeping you up at night?” Again that’s one that comes late at night, because they recognize the people are there.

They respond to individuals and one at the bottom there for the morning after the night before we’re here. That came on a Saturday, ah no a Sunday morning I think it was, after the Saturday night. So, what they know is people might have been out, had a bit too much to drink and they blurrily checking out you know, their, their tweeter feeds and NHS Director just basically saying “We’re here.” I think it’s just a very nice use. Anyway, you heard a lot today about the use of social media to communicate. What I wanna to do very briefly is talk about whether or not you can deliver services using social media. And here’s an example, of delivering services to parents, which is something that my company did. The public has been helping the Department of Children’s School and Families to do now for a couple of years.

So, this was before Two Thousand and Seven, I think, I, I don’t wanna characterize it too much but certainly the department, the bigger the department we were working with, which is the families bit in the department was, if you needed some help as a parent, and anyone who is a parent, would know at times, we all need help. Um, but if you needed help, the way that they would fund that was to get people to pickup the phone. Um, and you know, sort of, you know, they would fund thirtex organizations and they would say okay, you know, “you can telephone help lines, just pickup the phone.” However, one of the things that they realized is that the world has changed. It’s one of those ubiquitous kind of shots you see about social media. But the social media landscape has changed. And the other thing they realized is that actually, some groups of people don’t like picking up the phone and asking for help.

And again, I don’t wanna make a sexist statement, but men generally are harder or find it slightly more difficult to ask for help then perhaps women do. If you disagree with me, I would like for you to consider the last time you went driving with a man in a car and got lost. Because women, and I, I would say you could call me sexist, but in my experience a woman has, finds it slightly more easy to roll down the window and ask somebody, “Excuse me, where are we?” But a man who will insist that they know how to read a map and I don’t know all the sense are gone wrong or whatever else it is. And what they found is, that overwhelmingly, of about ten million parents who we got in this country, about ninety thousand people were using the telephone help lines. So, that’s not a lot. And most of those people were mothers, not dads.

Partly because, it’s harder for a dad to admit that you need help, which is why we worked through the department this sort of thing.  Well, actually, how can we develop new social media services, which would allow dads to access them in a way that’s just slightly more anonymous. So, we launched the Innovation Fund. One of the things we didn’t do was say to the department, “You know what? Social media is really cool, why don’t use setup a website, DCSF, help parents, and kind of do this kind of stuff and really engage with them, cuz what we realize, is that actually, not a lot of parents actually want the government to tell them how to parent.

They might want help and advice but they don’t necessarily want it directly from the government. So, we did it, we said, “Why don’t use launch an Innovation Fund? Why don’t you talk to the people, you actually already have contacts with parents.” And we launched the Innovation Fund, and we said to the third sector, and we said to the private sector, “come together, you third sector people that all know how to engage parents. You private sector people are doing social media, “ come together,” here’s the segments that we’re interested in. We’re interested in particular groups like BME, families, or it might’ve been you know, uh, parents of teenagers, and all this kind of stuff we said, “ this is what we think we know about the way they use media, go experiment.” So, we launched the Innovation Fund.

And we worked with some familiar names; many of you would have heard of uh, Mitt Mums. And Mitt Mums is you know, a forum that was setup by mothers themselves. It wasn’t funded by the government, and it was setup as a peer support network. How many people actually use or are members of Mitt Mums? Oh, not many, okay. Well, I am, even though cuz dads can sign up too. And what they found was actually parents would support each other, “I have a problem with my kid, I don’t know what to do?”Dadadadada. But every now and then you get a mum coming up to the phone and going, “ I wanna kill myself, or I wanna kill my kid.” And they’re not donkeys, they’re not like, “I really wanna kill myself.” As in “I really do wanna kill myself, I really don’t know how to cope.” And other mums would just kind of go, oh, ah, “you really need to talk to somebody.” Because they’re little bit out of depth for a normal forum. So, one of the things that they do, is we funded them to do this, lent mums parent supporters, which basically, put, health professionals online so that when those kind of really serious issues came up in a forum there was someone who is professionally trained who could respond to that issue. And this was an idea that we didn’t, you know, great to say, you know, “we are the clever guys who came up with it.” We didn’t. Net mums came up with the idea. Based you wanna work your partnership and, and deliver this thing and we thought “fantastic idea” and we funded it.

We also went with organizations like uh, Paramount Plus who setup a new site, this was a new site called Got A Teenager, in which they started from scratch. And within a year, they beat the targets that were set in terms of how many people to contact it, by three hundred and fifty one percent. So, they showed that there was a demand for these kinds of services. I might’ve worked with some people that you might not have heard of, but this is an organization, again a thirdex organization called SPAN (The Single Parent Action Network.) They setup a social media site and they got a hell of lot of people using it. So, did it work? Yes it did.

Ninety thousand parents are accessing support services before. Within a year, two point four million parents have been reached. And of that lot, seventy four percent have never accessed parenting support before. This is what they told us. So, we carried out evaluations. And seventy two percent of the dads were new users. So, the demand was there, it actually worked. But not everything worked. We setup a couple of pilots using SMS. We thought that might work, text message support, actually we found it didn’t. A whole of reasons why it didn’t work, I haven’t got the time to explain. But we tried it and it was an Innovation Fund.

And when you try some things, some things work, some things don’t. And we’re still learning, we’re launching new [inaudible] channels, we’re using old media, we do booklets, and we do new media, we produce DVD’s, and we syndicate content to the places where parents go. So, we’ve launched thirty-six films and syndicated out GMT Online Presence on all kinds of places, targeted to where parents go. Um.

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