A brief presentation on how I use social media to support my work as an Improvement Strategist at the Improvement and Development Agency (for Local Government).

1. Everything’s a campaign: using social media for local government improvement Ingrid Koehler Improvement Strategist, IDeA

3. Identifying and sharing best practice Part of my work is drawing on current best practice and emerging tools and techniques to develop tools and guidance. I use social media to get evidence and promote the message.

4. Horizon scanning… from policy to practice Peeps and whale, survive by Phil Romans on Flickr How blue can it get, by Rietje Swart on Flickr A key part of our work is making sure we know what’s going on…whether that be changes in policy or strategy or identifying new practice or challenges to the sector.

5. But it’s really all about networks These are just a few of my Twitter “friends and followers”. Most of them are dedicated to public sector improvement, too - many in local government. We help each other and strengthen our network. All of the work that we do is about networks of practitioners and policy makers. People drive improvement. Social media helps me to support my relationships with those people.

6. Connecting communities This is one of my most important social media tools. The IDeA Communities of Practice platform www.communities.idea.gov.uk This is the community I facilitate - with over 2300 members. Almost everything I do is shared through a relevant CoP.

7. Continuing the conversation We run lots of face to face events, too - and we’ll never stop doing that as they’re so important to our work. But social media can help there, too. This website: www.ideaperformance.com was the platform for social reporting we did at two performance management events. This helped us capture the conversation before, during and after the event. We uploaded (almost) live content, talks, notes, Twitter, pictures and video. It helped bring people in who couldn’t be there in person.

8. Monitoring the scene We need to know what’s happening. Monitoring RSS feeds through Google Reader or Google alerts helps us to keep track of what’s being said.

9. Active listening Twitter is a way of listening and responding. You demonstrate your value by helping. In return, people help you. You can promote messages through Twitter, but it has little use without the social.

10. And promoting the message I’ve used Facebook to promote an event and I use my blog to communicate messages, discuss ideas and promote discussion quickly and relatively informally.

11. My tool box All free… all make it easy to share These are some of the social media tools I use on a regular basis to support our work. All of them make it easy for other people to pick up and share what I’m saying elsewhere. (This is mostly good, but can have downsides) All of them have a free version.