In contrast the UK government has made just 11 such requests, but Twitter has complied in just 18% of cases (that’s about twice). Japan has made the second highest number of requests with 98, but Twitter has only complied with 20%.

Rather alarmingly Twitter has complied with 0% of requests from many democratic countries including Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.

Personally I find it rather alarming that Twitter appears to respect requests from the US government, but treat other governments with contempt. In countries where Twitter doesn’t have a local office I can understand (although not agree with) why Twitter doesn’t comply with requests from that country’s government. However, in the UK Twitter does have an office and therefore I’d very much like to know the reason for the discrepancy in how helpful it is to the US government compared to the UK government.

It’s rather bizarre that the blog post simply publishes the figures, but with no attempt to explain them.

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Lots of buzz about #neverseconds and almost universal ridicule of Argyll and Bute Council’s statement (see Update Three below as the council has now unethically tried to hide its incompetence) in response. The story is that nine-year old Martha Payne has been blogging photographs of her school meals and writing about what is wrong with the meals. The blog has had more than two million hits and raised nearly £2,000 for charity. But after some negative newspaper headlines the heavy-handed council stepped into ban her from taking photos in the school canteen.

I’m seeing tweets from lots of people describing this move as ‘bad PR’ by the council. And it certainly is, however I strongly suspect it’s not a public relations person behind it. My experience of working with local authorities and councillors tells me that it is likely that the photo ban idea was taken by a senior councillor or council officer. The PR person’s failing is probably just that they weren’t strong enough or respected enough internally to be able to explain to the numpty in charge that they were wrong.

The council’s reputation is taking a hit which is almost entirely self-inflicted and could have been avoided had a corporate communicator had a seat at the top table.

UPDATE: And the ban was so counter-productive the council has had to back down!

Hurrah the guy from Argyll and Bute council has just announced the pics will be allowed on the school meals blog, live on Radio4

— Paul Richards (@Labourpaul) June 15, 2012

UPDATE TWO:

LISTEN: Argyll & Bute council reverse #neverseconds camera ban live on The World at One BBC Radio 4 #wato via @Audioboo bit.ly/L9RzvI

— Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) June 15, 2012

Leader Roddie McCuish (SNP) backs down, but it’s still not clear who made the decision. About one minute 30 seconds in he appears to admit responsibility saying “I’ve changed my mind”, but later when pressed as to what happened he claims not to know yet.

UPDATE THREE

I’m afraid that I don’t think the PR team can escape the blame for the latest staggering incompetence from Argyll and Bute Council. What on earth were they thinking to remove the original statement and replace it with the u-turn statement. They make it worse with the arrogant statement that “This statement supersedes all other council statements on the matter already issued.”

A basic tenant of good public relations is to remember that “Google never forgets” so here is the original Statement on school meals from Argyll and Bute Council before they tried to rewrite history:

Argyll and Bute Council wholly refutes the unwarranted attacks on its schools catering service which culminated in national press headlines which have led catering staff to fear for their jobs. The council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils however this escalation means we had to act to protect staff from the distress and harm it was causing. In particular, the photographic images uploaded appear to only represent a fraction of the choices available to pupils, so a decision has been made by the council to stop photos being taken in the school canteen.

There have been discussions between senior council staff and Martha’s father however, despite an acknowledgement that the media coverage has produced these unwarranted attacks, he intimated that he would continue with the blog.

The council has had no complaints for the last two years about the quality of school meals other than one from the Payne family received on 6 June and there have been no changes to the service on offer since the introduction of the blog.

Pupils have a daily choice of two meals from a menu which is designed with pupils, parents and teachers. Our summer menu is about to be launched and includes main course choices like meat or vegetarian lasagne served with carrots and garlic bread or chicken pie with puff pastry, mashed potato and mixed vegetables.

Pupils can choose from at least two meals every day. They pay £2 for two courses and this could be a starter and a main or a main and a desert. Each meal comes with milk or water. Pupils can have as much salad and bread as they want. Salad, vegetables, fruit, yoghurt and cheese options are available every day. These are standing options and are not a result of any changes in response to the blog site.

As part of the curriculum for excellence, pupils in all our schools are regularly taught about healthy eating and at lunch breaks staff encourage pupils to make good choices from what is on offer. We use a system called ‘Nutmeg’ to make sure everything is nutritionally balanced. Our staff also get nutrition awareness training so they know how to provide a good healthy meal. There is portion sized guidance which we adhere to and it is matched to the age of the child so they get the right amount of food. Second portions would mean too many calories for pupils.

In Lochgilphead Primary School we are piloting a new pre-ordering scheme which is designed to encourage class discussion around meal choices and also improves the accuracy of meal choices. The pupils use a touch screen to select their lunch option and the data is downloaded in the kitchen so they know how many portions of each meal are required. As they place their order, the pupils are given a coloured band which relates to their meal choice that day. They wear it during the morning, and at lunchtime they hand it to the catering assistant, who will give them the corresponding meal.

The council’s focus is now on supporting the school in the education of young people in Argyll and Bute.

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BDO has published an interesting report into the current use of social media within local government in the UK. BDO worked with Municipal Journal (MJ) to conduct a survey to find out how 67 local authorities are currently using social media to support a range of services.

The report Updating your status: From housing and litter to Facebook and Twitter (PDF) contains the result of the study. It also ‘explores how social media can work within a local authority context, identifies its specific benefits and offers our recommendations to enable councils to overcome common barriers and have the confidence to ‘own’ the channel.’

BDO has also produced this video which aims to make it easier for those in local authorities to share the report with their colleagues:

I particularly like the pie chart to illustrate that people spend more time on social media and social networking sites than they do on council websites. Quelle surpise. Although I think they should have has a big pie for social sites!

Some of the key findings of the report are (the remarks in italics are my thoughts):

• 24% of councils have reduced face to face visitors by using social media – In the current financial climate this is good because face to face contact is the most expensive form of customer contact for a local authority – £7.40 for face to face, £2.90 telephone and 32p for online.
• 60% of councils block social media on internal PCs – Local authorities are frequently conservative (with a small c) and change is difficult, but if the right social media policy is in place then councils can make massive gains by removing this absolute ban (controls are guidance are still fine and can actually be empowering.
• 82% think council staff are confused about how to use social media – That’s because they are! And its not just how to use social media professionally. Although most people use social media personally many don’t know how to use it well or safely. That’s another reason why councils need social media policies and training in place. Even if they aren’t proactively using it to improve services and reduce costs they need that policy as an ‘insurance policy’ in case things go wrong because most of their staff and residents are already using it.
• 79% of local authorities said that the comms team was ‘currently responsible for social media’ with only 15% saying it is dispersed, 3% customer services and 3% services – This is potentially quite alarming as it implies that most local authorities still haven’t grasped the broader strategic implications of what the social web means to providing services to residents.

It’s an interesting report, but my main criticism is that the case studies are quite weak focusing more on the outputs achieved rather than outcomes which is rather surprising given that the report is produced by a firm of accountants (and yes I know that they now prefer to be business advisers and consultants!)

Many of the case studies featured won’t be new to anyone whose familiar with how the public sector uses social media (many of the examples are actually from police, rather than local authorities) and there are some notable examples missing – none of the award winning social media work from Monmouthshire.

BDO is trying to get an online conversation going using the hashtag #litter2twitter.

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On Thursday I was a guest of Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko at the Russian Embassy in London. The embassy was hosting an invite only reception for ‘top British bloggers‘. The event kicked off with two lively and informative panel discussions. Both discussions were chaired by Mark Flanagan, the former Head of Strategic and Digital Communications in the Prime Minister’s Office at 10 Downing Street and now a partner at Portland Communications.

The first panel looked at the role of social media in modern politics in the UK and elsewhere. The first panel included Paul Staines ‘Guido Fawkes’ of Order-Order.com and Sunny Hundal editor of Pickled Politics and Liberal Conspiracy. The second panel looked at e-government and diplomacy and consisted of Jimmy Leach who is the Head of Digital Diplomacy at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Elizabeth Stewart who is Editorial Director of Embassy magazine and Alex Butler who was previously Transformational Strategy Director at the Central Office of Information (COI).

One of the most fascinating things was finding out how the Russian Embassy is using social media to put its case directly to the public and bypass traditional mass media.

The reception was well attended and familiar faces included Mike Butcher (European Editor of TechCrunch), Heather Taylor (Acting Editor of About the BBC, the BBC’s corporate blog), Mat Morrison (Social Media lead at Starcom MediaVest Group), Jag Singh, James Whatley, Neville Hobson and many others.

To give you a flavour of the event I’ve included a round-up of some of my tweets from the event and some of the other more interesting ones using the hashtag #digitalbbq:

PR winners and losers is a couple of days late this week, not good for its second outing, but my take this week is:

PR Winner

Greater Manchester Police is this week’s PR winner for its excellent use of social media that demonstrate how social media and social networks can be a greater force for good in quelling the riots, than it can for some of the negatives that some elements of the media are reporting.

Greater Manchester Police been using @gmpolice on Twitter to report on successful convictions of rioters and looters. Despite a slight hiccup yesterday it’s done a brilliant job and GMP’s web manager Kevin Hoy deserves a round of applause for the sterling job by him and the rest of the force.

GMP has also been using Flickr to publish pictures of suspects and the ensuing arrests. It’s also been using YouTube so bypass the media and talk directly to the public.

PR Loser

The PR Loser this week is the prime minister David Cameron, whose response was simply too little and too late. He just beats London mayor Boris Johnson, who was also inexcusably late in responding, but at least when he did he was more credible than Cameron, not least in his call to halt the police cuts.

Greater Manchester Police is one of the public sector organisations that is leading the way in its use of social media. But, if you’re at the forefront of new innovations it’s inevitable that you’ll make the occasional mistake. And that is what happened to Greater Manchester Police this morning.

For the last few day it has been tweeting out the convictions and sentences for those involved in rioting and looting. On the whole this has been positively received by most people, with some questioning why it was revealing addresses and dates of birth. But the @gmpolice Twitter account was very quick to explain why – it is to prevent people being mixed up with those of the same name.

This morning however, the @gmpolice crossed the line from reporting what it is doing to commenting on sentencing policy. This is most definitely beyond the remit of public sector officers who are there to advise on and implement policy, not create it and set it.

The @GMpolice account was quick to react and almost immediately issued a public apology, which was exactly the right thing to do. However, I do believe strongly it made a mistake by deleting the offending tweet. By doing so it didn’t prevent it being seen as many people, including journalists (including Jane Merrick, political editor of the Independent on Sunday), had already retweeted it – some simply to put it on record and show what @GMpolice had done.

One of those jumping quickly into question @gmpolice was Bristol MP Kerry McCarthy.

It will be interesting to see if this breaks out of being a little Twitter skirmish and online reputation issue into being a mainstream media story and wider reputation management and public relations issue.

Let’s hope this doesn’t deter @gmpolice from continuing to find new ways to use social media to serve the public.

If I hadn’t started that blog I might never have started Wolfstar. It would be great to be able to say that I started the blog because of my amazing intuition and foresight. But unfortunately it wouldn’t be true.

In truth it was probably laziness that made me start the blog. From 1998 to 2005 I was a elected local councillor on Leeds City Council. When I was first elected as a councillor I did something that was extremely unusual at the time and started a councillor website. As I’m not a professional designer or coder this was actually quite hard work and if I’m honest wasn’t particularly brilliant.

That’s why when I first came across ‘blogging’ I was intrigued as I thought, that sounds a lot easier than running my website. And so my first blog was born. It was the first councillor blog in the UK and the third political blog – former Lib Dem MP Richard Allan (now European Head of Public Policy for Facebook) and Labour MP Tom Watson were first and second respectively.

It didn’t take long for The Guardian to find my blog and in July 2003 it ran a profile about the UK’s first blogging councillor. As The Guardian article indicates my councillor blog deliberately wasn’t like many of today’s political blogs. It was determinedly focused on local issues that mattered to people in Leeds and more specifically my ward of Middleton (later Middleton Park) in south Leeds.

But my blog wasn’t just about the minutia of being a local councillor. That sort of the thing is for officers. You can’t run a good councillor blog without being political. It was when I was being highly political about local issues that my blog always received the most attention and engagement. Despite popular belief local politics is party political. That’s one of the problems with many of the official efforts to get councillors blogging. Because they are official they have to be a politics free zone (otherwise the local authority would be accused of funding party political campaigning). But you can’t take the politics out of it. Even seemingly mundane decisions such as when the road sweepers visit can actually be highly political (the Tories want the leafy suburbs to be pristine and don’t care about the council estates).

The other important thing I learnt from my councillor blog was the massive impact what you do online can have on what happens offline. The intention of my councillor blog was never to get all 16,000 of the local electors to read it. What I did want (and succeeded in) was to get local ‘influencers’ to read it. If they knew properly about what I was doing then they could talk face to face to other people in the community. That’s why I was pleased that people like the chairs and secretaries of residents associations read it, the local vicar read it, the local neighbourhood policing team read it (and even asked me to write about them!) All these people then went out and spread the word for me.

The success of my councillor blog meant that it didn’t take long before it dawned on me that blogs weren’t just about making my life easier, but also had enormous potential for my day job as a public relations consultant… but that’s a story for another blog post.

Cross-posted to Stuart Bruce on the World, my political blog.

It’s worth reading Tom’s speech in full as it has quite a lot of interesting stuff for anyone involved in public relations, communications and marketing for government and other public sector organisations.

Of course it isn’t actually Gordon Brown sitting at the keyboard or tapping away on his mobile (in fact I seem to remember that when Gordon became PM he had to give up his personal mobile as all the PM’s calls need to be logged).

But that’s not what this should be about. The social media and social network purists will possibly criticise the move because the PM isn’t properly taking part in the community. But come on, get real people. He’s got a big enough job running the country.

If it is being done by someone close enough to Gordon in his office then that is good enough for me. However, at the moment you don’t get that impression. The eight posts to date are incredibly dull and uninformative – even for a political junkie like me.

If this is to work then it needs to give an insight into Gordon’s personality and what makes him tick. “The Prime Minister is greeting President Nicolas Sarkozy at the front door of 10 Downing Street” tells me absolutely nothing of interest.

What was Gordon thinking? What was he doing? That would make the Twitter channel work.

If it is to be a news channel then that’s fine as well. But at the moment it doesn’t do either very well. “No10 news: France and Britain pledge school places: The Prime Minister and French Preside… http://tinyurl.com/27sjzl” tells me nothing much.

That’s probably because it is created using Twitterfeed from the PM’s existing RSS feeds.

So far there are only 23 followers (it was single figures when I joined) and it is following nobody. It will be interesting to see if it does do any following. If it is a success and enough people start following then it would be unrealistic to expect real interaction and community. But, what you could do is monitor and mine the followers to glean insight into what they are talking about and therefore what matters to them. That would provide useful information as to what to Twitter about and also provides the potential for a quick, dirty and easy online focus group.

Edelman’s Marshall Manson also has a post, as does Simon Dickson who alerted me to the story with his Tweet (incidentally it’s hard to credit a Tweet and comment in 140 characters).

UPDATE: To be crystal clear, even though I’ve already said it above. I (245 followers) was NOT the first to Tweet or blog this story. That honour goes to Simon Dickson (39 followers) at 12:04 yesterday, mine was second at 13:18. It was just that mine got picked up by Marshall Manson (followers 150), which in turn was picked up by Steve Rubel (4627 followers). I think it’s down to the number of followers.

First of all the ever wise Tom Murphy brings a dose of reality and common sense by saying “Now that’s a very big tea cup…“. And Shel Holtz points out that “Stowe notes he’s been invited to speak on the impact of social media on PR. I’ve been invited to speak on the impact of social media on healthcare, but it doesn’t make me a healthcare expert.”

Quite. In the last year I’ve spoken or provided training on social media and PR to a wide range of sectors – none of which I’m an expert in. I talk about communications and PR in relation to social media. That’s what I know. I’m not an expert in defence, the arts, computing, universities, financial services, politics, healthcare, government or the motor industry – to name just some of the sectors I’ve spoken to or trained.

I also say I’m not an expert in social media, despite having spoken at conferences and trained senior managers in all those sectors. In fact I have a pretty low opinion of those who claim to be social media experts. It’s all too new and changing too quickly.

I do think I know more than most PR people (especially in the UK), but that still doesn’t make me an expert. I’m always learning.