We were pleased to present earlier this week at the New Ways of Seeing Social Media conference hosted by the London Fire Brigade. This attracted an audience from Emergency Services from the UK and abroad as well as UK Local Authorities.
The London Fire Brigade (LFB) is the busiest fire brigade in the country and one of the largest fire-fighting and rescue organisations in the world. We have previously worked with personnel from the LFB and are delighted to see that LFB is the most liked and followed social media offering of any regional or local public sector organisation in the UK.
The LFB opened the conference and highlighted some of their social media successes, such as over 4 million people seeing an image of a set of burnt hair straighteners that it posted on its Facebook page and the impact that social media is having on getting its fire-safety messages out to the public. Initiatives such as this have helped the LFB to target both hard-to-reach and broad audiences. In addition, the LFB has developed original digital ideas such as using Blippar (augmented reality) to promote the World Rescue Challenge and setting up the world’s first 999 emergency Twitter feed (though the LFB stress that people should always dial 999 in emergencies).
Before, we closed the event – there were other presentations given by Greater Manchester Police, Royal Mail, Tweetminster and former BBC news reporter, Sue Llewellyn. The event was excellently facilitated by Neil McNeil, another former news reporter.
The topic that we presented on with was titled: ‘Staff Relations: Raising Our Collective Understanding of Social Media’. The attendees were keen to understand how social media increasingly is focused on building relationships, engagement and ‘footprint’ in the public sector. We also highlighted how social media has become a norm and mass media; impacting individuals and organisations as communities engage both offline and online. In addition, we presented a simple model showing social media maturity in organisations from those that are ‘Traditionally Dispersed’ to those that are ‘Fully Integrated’ – and illustrated this with case studies to aid staff relations and employee engagement.
However, what was most pleasing for us to see was how proactive the public sector organisations are in their adoption of social media and the range of projects successfully implemented making a difference to the communities that they serve. A really good and insightful day – with many thanks to the LFB!
Written by Dowshan Humzah
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