As a local government officer with over 25 years of experience I have had to communicate many messages to residents; What to recycle, what roadworks are taking place in your town, the team’s success in Britain in Bloom or simply a… ‘please take your dog poo bag home with you after your dog walk’. This includes a whole host of communication aimed at improving or assisting in the various areas I have worked in, from small towns to the Big City.
Sadly over the last couple of months my Twitter account has also had to spread the message of Stay Home, Stay Safe and Save lives and how the services that residents pay their council tax for are changing over the coming months in order to deal with the crisis. It’s been heartbreaking to retweet the Nursing Times posts of front line health and care staff who have passed away alongside my usual tweets on operational services from bin collections, school dinner arrangements and leisure facility availability.
I have noticed that as local government officers on social media in the main we stay calm, professional and apolitical in order to not upset too many apple carts. We all have that sentence at the top of our bio that says ‘views are my own’ but then have our job title - which of course adds a seriousness to the type of tweet you may tweet!
In my own experience of exploring Twitter I have found local government communications to be clear and informative, they try to encapsulate and translate the sometimes confusing national messages for our region and of course some people will always need further clarification. We are all wired to receive messages differently and so it’s always important to sometimes talk back, respond, explain a little bit further on occasion.
But what happens when you put out a relatively benign message about your service or that nice walk you took through town that morning and someone responds with ‘you damn lazy council worker, why are you out walking instead of fixing my potholes’? Or much worse, I had a lovely one this morning from someone who decided in capitals to shout at me ‘you’re a f****ing disgrace’. I have to say I’m not quite sure why?
There is of course a block button for those that are so incandescent with rage that they feel the need to rip the skin off your council working back but I prefer not to if possible. I prefer to ask ‘whats up’, ‘what the issue’ and ‘why do you hold that view’, especially if it’s not fully cognisant of the facts.
However, as working in isolation has become increasingly difficult I’ve had to take the decision to block immediately anyone swearing, abusing, ranting and so untrustworthy of the information that I am freely sharing that they decide I’m nothing more than an idiotic stupid woman for daring to share it.
Twitter can be an immense force for good. It promotes our services, it provides great local information and it can give us real time responses when our communities are impacted by emergencies, accidents, and incidents. It can also be a source of great harm, damaging good intentions, undermining confidence in perfectly good decision making and worst of all be a public flogging and shaming platform for what in the most part are officers genuinely trying to inform or lift spirits.
So every now and then I think, I’ll come off Twitter, it gets too nasty but something in the back of my mind always says.. keep going girl, you’re in contact with great people, great residents and you need to sort the wheat from the chaff and stay focused on delivering what you set out to do which is provide help, support, information and light-hearted human interactive humour with those who follow you.
Donna Ball is executive director of operations at Bury MBC