Had an fun evening out the other week for the leaving do of my former colleague Carol Hayward at Bristol City Council. She’s off to New Zealand now, and despite working in the virtual world where location is more meaningless, will be missed.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be a Bristol City Council do without various suppliers being there alongside people from the council, and it was really interesting to chat to them about their perspective on e-participation and e-democracy.
Lots of ideas came out of it to be blogged over time, but one that’s really been nagging in my head all weekend was a reason given as to why council’s and public bodies shouldn’t use Youtube for engagement and consultation purposes.
Now, we’re all about things like Youtube here at Delib, why shouldn’t clients take advantage of something that’s not only free, but also has one of the largest user bases of any website going at the moment? It’s a no brainer.
The reason given for not using it was because public bodies don’t fit in in a place like that, that it risks going wrong and, in a rather amusing analogy, it’s ‘like your dad dancing at a disco’.
Now I really doubt this for a number of reasons. First of all, it implies Youtube is somehow a preserve of young people, with them being the primary content creators and viewers. However, like all huge websites, Youtube is more a snapshot of the world. You can find pretty much anything you want on there, created, uploaded and indeed watched by people of all ages.
Second, even if this were not the case, there’s not something in the very essence of being a father that makes you an embarrassing dancer at a disco, just as there isn’t something in the very essence of a local authority or public body that makes their presence on Youtube inherently and unavoidably embarrassing. I’m sure Ava and Fred Astaire Jr didn’t sit in the corner and cringe as their dad took to the floor at the end of a wedding.
Plain and simple, the reason why your dad dancing at a disco is embarrassing is because he doesn’t dance very often and isn’t very good at it. Likewise, the reason a local authority or public body on Youtube may be embarrassing (and there have undeniably been cases of this), is because they haven’t been on there much.
With any popular social networking or ’2.0′ website, you need to spend some time working it out and how best to use it. However, given that at the end of the day you’ve got a free service there to access, you are, in our opinion, far better off spending time and money working out how to make the most of the massive opportunity for engagement with a pre-existing user base it presents than you are spending the same time and money building your own closed system.
After all, it’s far less embarrassing to be a dad learning to dance at an already popular disco, than a dad trying to hold his own disco that no-one comes to.
NB: If you’re based in the East of this land and want to make sure you’re not dancing the funky chicken when everyone else is crunking, check out Dave Briggs’ forthcoming ‘ReadWriteGov’ event on the 29th October.
