Top of the Social Media league…for now

Hi there

Owing to the one or two issues we’ve experienced with the website this last week, some other updates have been delayed. We hope this week to have some more new features up. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, we’re pleased to report that we currently appear to be a leading light among our Local Authority colleagues in taking up Web 2.0 to improve communication with our customers. Looking at the brilliant Talkwiki website and specifically the The TALK Social Media Map, shows that St.Helens Council currently has the most social media links and web 2.0 applications of any local authority anywhere in the country!

The following are listed as examples of our use of web 2.0
- Our facebook page
- Our Twitter feed
- Our Web Team’s Twitter feed
- Our Where I Live page
- Our Streetworks page
- Councillors’ blogs
- This blog!
- Our Flickr page

and our two most recent additions:

- Our Identica feed
- Our friendfeed

As more and more authorities embrace web 2.0, we can’t imagine we’ll keep this position for long, but it’s good to see that our work in this area is being recognised.

What other social media / web 2.0 apps should we be using? What do you think of the way we’re using web 2.0? What other examples of good web 2.0 use should we be looking at?

As always, please do follow us or add us on any of the above to keep up to date with the work we do as a Council.

Thanks for your continued contributions and visits to the Web Development blog. The response and visit rates have so far well exceded our expectations. So keep visiting and keep commenting!

Thanks

Councillors’ Blogs and Flickr

Hi there again

First of all, thanks a lot to everyone who has commented on the blog this last week. I think we’ve all started to have a very useful discussion. So keep visiting and keep commenting!

Thanks especially for your practical comments on the page header we put up this week. They’ve all been taken into account for the overall redesign and they’ve been really useful in ironing out a few issues we’ve had with it this week.

As way of an update this week:

- Councillors’ blogs. These aren’t actually within the site as such at the moment. However a microsite called Councillors online has been up now for some time. Currently we have 2 Councillors blogging and we received our first comment back this week. Please pay them a visit and leave a comment. What do you think of the site? Do you have any experience with producing Councillors’ blogs on your own sites?

- Our Flickr account is now up and running and features loads of really great shots of our Borough taken by various photographers. It will be continually updated. If you want to see what photos have been taken in your area, check out the map on which we’ve geotagged photos.

For your immediate perusal, here is an embedded slildeshow of our photostream:

Have you taken any shots of St.Helens? Feel free to add them to our photostream or add us as a contact on Flickr.

As usual, feel free to leave us any comments on this blog.

Thanks and have a great weekend.