Big thanks to all those who attended and helped make happen our Data is Power event this week. The breakfast seminar at the RSA was designed to get the grey matter going on the subject of data visualisation, with the help of our fabulous speakers: Simon Rogers of The Guardian and Vicky Ames of Alzheimer’s Society.
Elsewhere on the web there have been some great write-ups from others: Steph Grey, who was our social reporter for the day, has summed up one of the key themes with his post Telling Stories with Data; and Simon Francis has picked up on the Risks and Rewards of Data Power.
To see photos form the event jump over to our Data is Power set on Flickr.
Here’s Ben talking about Data is Power and our Pollen service for digital PR of events just like this one.
Here’s me on why we think data visualisation is important right now.
And here’s Vicky Ames describing the dementia map case study she presented.
One of the things exciting us at Claremont right now is data visualisation (so much so that we’re hosting a seminar on it this week, more to follow). Here’s 5 data visualisation that show off what’s possible.
MySociety travel-time maps
A real trailblazer this one. Nowadays open data is at the heart of government but back in 2006 mySociety were breaking new ground in their travel-time maps collaboration with the Department of Transport. These interactive maps showed you the possible places you could live in London on a certain budget and with a certain commute time.
Billion Dollar Gram
David McCandless popularised data visualisation in the UK with his blog and book Information is Beautiful, and the first time he really caught my eye was with The Billion Dollar Gram. Produced in the aftermath of the 2007-8 credit crunch it provided great perspective at a time when talk of billions and trillions filled every news report.
Hans Rosling’s Gapminder
Quite possibly the first data visualisation rock star, global health expert Hans Rosling uses his Gapminder visualisation tool to reveal the truth behind development issues with all the urgency of a sports commentator. Here he is making the best use of the Dragon’s Den studio since Levi Roots pitched Reggae Reggae Sauce.
New York Times’ Osama bin Laden sentiment analysis
The New York Times Data Visualisation Lab is innovating in the use of data for journalism, and in particular visualising the response from readers. A recent piece that caught our eye was this one capturing people’s reactions to the news of Osama bin Laden’s death; a great example of how visualisation can provide a snapshot overview and still drill down to an individual data point.
Sound Mapping in New York
Finally, something a bit different. Put together by architect Mark Edward Campos, this is a visualisation of 24 hours of sound in an area of New York, so turn on your speakers.
It’s exciting times for digital in government. The Matt Tee review of COI pushed digital as a default option for communications; the Alpha.gov.uk project is re-designing government online from scratch (to mixed reviews); and today it’s been confirmed that digital director of The Guardian Mike Bracken will take up the new post of Executive Director Digital.
I think this is a really important sign that the approach to digital in government is maturing. Over the years I’ve seen many a large organisation try to mangle digital through its tried and tested ways of working only to be surprised when the results weren’t all they hoped. The iterative, non-linear, permanently-in-beta world of digital can have analogue broadcasters and politicians in a cold sweat.
Yet at The Guardian Mike Bracken made digital practices work in an “old media” organisation (albeit one that was already tacking in the right direction). Agile development, user experience, and product managers replaced waterfall projects, “big design” up-front, and project managers. He realised the promise in Simon Willison’s geek aphorism that “you can now build working software in less time than it takes to have the meeting to describe it”.
It won’t be easy. Whitehall’s attitude to failure is, understandably, radically different to a rapidly iterating commercial enterprise; there a huge legacy issues; and the relationship with big IT suppliers will need sorting out. But if he can bring about the same change in Whitehall, and inspire the rest of the public sector with it, we could see a revolution in public sector digital comms.
(For more see Simon Dickson and Steph Gray for their usual excellent context on government digital matters.)
If a jar of Marmite can have a Facebook Page so can you! Photo by mrbill on Flickr
A recurring theme in the social media training we provide is that most participants are on Facebook personally but are unsure how to use it for work. Here’s our top tips for getting started:
- Creating a Facebook Page for your brand or organisation is a good way to start engaging fans on Facebook. A Page has many of the features you’ll be familiar with from personal profiles but is about a brand or company instead of a person.
- Make sure to add as an administrator anyone else who will run the Page with you.
- You can keep your personal profile separate from your Page activities. If you administer a Page you’ll see a link on its right-hand side that lets you switch to using Facebook as the Page rather than as you.
- The single most important element of your Page is its Like button. By clicking on it fans will opt-in to your updates and you can start engaging. Why would someone Like your Page? Is it the remarkable content? The chance to win a prize? Whatever it is, make sure there’s a compelling reason to Like your Page.
- Drive traffic to your Page through other channels. You can advertise within Facebook but make full use of your existing owned channels first. Add a Like Box to your website for one-click Liking of your Page!
- When people first arrive at your Page show a separate welcome page that tells them what the Page offers and why they should click on that all important Like button. Also, set the community expectations around acceptable behaviour and how the Page is administered – remember to keep it friendly though!
- Just getting Liked isn’t enough though – we’re up against the competition. Facebook uses a system called EdgeRank to determine what content rises to the top when people visit Facebook (and so gets seen). Poor content sinks like a stone.
- EdgeRank is Facebook’s secret sauce so we can only guess at the exact ingredients. We do know that it looks at three factors: affinity (how strong are the social ties between a person and a Page), weight (how many Likes and comments has a Page or piece of content attracted) and time (how recent is the content).
- Use the EdgeRank formulation to help plan the content you’ll put on your Page, then use Facebook’s Insights service to see how people are reacting to your content. The sweet spot is timely content delivered to an engaged community that elicits a response.
- Remember above all though that your Page will be a community of real people. Brands as diverse as Marmite and Duct Tape have built up six-figure followings by listening to, understanding and rewarding their fans.
If you need more inspiration take a look at the examples in the new Facebook Studio (thanks to @almoncaspersz for this tip).
Our dementia map work for Alzheimer’s Society was featured in PR Week. Click the image below to have a read.
We all know blogging is a must for any organisation that is not still stuck in the 20th century.
But when it comes to it, thinking of interesting content to write about on a regular basis can be a challenge.
Here are 5 ideas to help get the creative juices flowing:
1. Your opinion
Use your blog to share your thoughts about recent news in your industry. This helps to show you’re up-to-speed on what’s going on and that you are genuinely interested in the industry you work in. Being a bit outspoken (if justified!) can pay off as it may well spark some interesting debate in response.
2. Top-tips
Give your top five or ten tips on something you’re a bit of an expert on. These may seem obvious to you, but these gems of wisdom can be invaluable to those in a different line of work.
3. How to….
Talk you’re readers through a process that is a regular part of your work. This helps to showcase the sort of things you do and also gives your readers some practical advice to follow.
4. News
Your blog is an ideal place to update the world on anything new happening in your organisation. This could include launches, events, interesting meetings or even news about what other people have been saying about you. Once in a while, news that’s bit more quirky can help liven up a blog.
5. Websites we like
If there are a number of websites that you think are priceless for other people in your industry, share the knowledge. Signpost your readers to useful sites and hopefully in time someone will return the favour!
We’ve been reading Cabinet Office’s ‘Review of government direct communication and the role of COI’ with great interest.
It’s major. Indeed, it’s a fascinating, fresh look at government communications that draws some radical conclusions, not least that the COI will soon cease to exist.
Here are three points that particularly caught my eye:
(1) “My conclusion is that government should make greater use of digital channels in direct communication and that digital considerations should be built into all communication activity from the start.”
This one’s fairly predictable, I suppose. Digital communications has matured now. It’s no longer an optional plug-in – a view shared by many industry big-wigs like Stuart Bruce at Wolfstar.
(2) “[On payment by results] the industry also indicated that there had to be upside opportunities if results were beyond expectation, as well as downsides if they were not.”
Music to our ears! When we as an agency hit a home run we want it reflected in our pay packet. Obviously, if we muck it up we can also expect to take a serious hit in the financial ghoulies as well. Putting concerns about measurement aside, payment by results – with ‘upside opportunities’ – is wonderfully meritocratic stuff.
(3) “For any proposed activity outside the [small number of cross-government strategic] themes, the default position should be to use low-cost channels such as digital and PR.”
Well-well-well… sing hallelujah! Let’s repeat that just for the record:
“…the default position should be to use low-cost channels such as digital and PR.”
The default.
This is music to our ears. We passionately believe in digital and PR in government communications. With budgets tighter than ever and the explosive growth of social media, digital and PR combined can deliver powerful communications that engage citizens and turn them into advocates.
I never thought I’d say it… but man, it feels good to be the default.
See previous ‘Mapping the Alzheimer’s Gap‘ blog post for background to this campaign. Just click on the image below to take a closer look.
I spent the last half an hour trying out Google’s new Ngram doo-da.
Ngram enables you to search the last couple of century’s books and see how many times a particular word or phrase is cited. One click and it creates a graph.
It’s a wonderful distraction and has great potential for when you need to write a speech or make a presentation.
I started out with a few work-related searches like advertising - interesting to see the surge in the run up to WW2 and the steady climb in the eighties.
Then I went through heroes like Ghandi and Mandela. All very interesting.
But most telling of all the graphs was the one I’ve copied below, showing the steady increase in the amount that we are have all been talking bullshit.
Truly disturbing.
The map helped drive the story to the top of the BBC News health section.
Today the Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Scotland launch their “Mapping the Dementia Gap” study, and new partnership with Tesco, with a bit of help from the team at Claremont. Combining traditional health PR with digital, we’re showing the data behind the half a million people who will have undiagnosed dementia in 2021.
We’re big fans of data journalism and love to combine PR’s sense for the story with digital’s ability to engage. The push for open data and transparency is making these skills vital, but having the data is one thing – how do you put it towards achieving your comms objectives? How do you make it accessible and relevant to your audience? How do put your data to work beyond your own website?
Here’s a few tips if you want to use data to tell your story:
- Break the silos – get your number crunchers talking to your press officers, your policy people talking to your comms agency. This will be a collaborative effort
- Clean your data – rarely will your data be shipshape and ready to go. Start looking for the gaps that will need filling; try to standardise how it’s organised; and be prepared to source the extra data you’ll need
- Think visual – find the right designer to bring the data to life through visualisation and interaction
- Test early and often – get a prototype running as soon as you can and iterate rapidly to get the data looking just right
- Keep it simple stupid – most people aren’t used to navigating data so focus on the key message with the option to drill deeper
The map itself is shown below. It organises the data into UK health authorities, with England automagically flipping from Strategic Health Authorities to the smaller Primary Care Trusts as you zoom in. A simple red-to-green overlay vividly shows the varying diagnosis rates. You can search to find more detail for your own area, and then get a link for sharing or embedding the map. This is key for local media who will be able to show the map focused on their city or region.
The map was put together in double-quick time to coincide with the Tesco announcement and we had to leave some ideas on the cutting room floor, so look out for new versions in future.
UPDATE: The study got some great coverage on BBC News (where it was the top health story), Daily Mail, Telegraph, The Scotsman, Daily Express and Mirror.
