Andy Carter’s Blog

This is a copy of my weekly blog which I write for work and is published on the council's intranet.  The views I express in this log are my own, professional, views as the Head of Communications but do not necessarily reflect those of the authority itself.

Lots of people tell me that it’s best to ‘plan for the worst and hope for the best’ and although I’m sure that’s not an approved or official way of doing things at Leeds City Council, they were sentiments I had last Friday night.

I assured myself – before going to bed – that we (both as a council and in partnership with West Yorkshire Police) had done just that for the EDL and UAF protests that were due to take place the next day.

Now, before I go further I need to make it clear that I feel I only had a very small role to play in preparing ourselves for an event which had the potential to cause lots of problems for and within the city.

Colleagues in West Yorkshire Police and our very own emergency planning team did the bulk of the work and I have a lot of respect for them.  Their attention to detail was amazing – crossing every ‘T’ and dotting every ‘I’ before the big day.  In fact, I was so impressed by their planning skills I’m going to get them involved in my next house move or family wedding.

Anyway, we (that's me, my boss James Rogers and Paul Buchanan from emergency planning) had a unique vantage point last Saturday – we were stationed at ‘gold command’ at police headquarters in Wakefield, where the officer in overall charge of the operation to keep the peace was controlling what was going on.

It was an interesting setting – a room packed full of telephones, computer screens, a board on the wall covered with pieces of card cut to shape to resemble a police van, loads of maps and a massive TV showing pictures being received from the various CCTV cameras around Leeds and a feed being beamed down from the West Yorkshire Police helicopter.

Assistant Chief Constable Mark Gilmore was in charge.  He was in a big chair in the middle, surrounded by his senior officers.

[Think Doctor Evil’s hidden bunker (but clearly without any evilness) … oh, and he wasn’t stroking a white cat either.]

There were briefings every 30 minutes covering things like what resources were in place, where the demonstrators were (in terms of how and when they would arrive and where) and intelligence about any particular nasty characters.

ACC Gilmore also wanted an hourly update on what the media were saying and, most interestingly for me, what information was available from social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. ‘It all adds to the mix’, the ACC told me later in the day.

We had already planned to use Twitter as a vehicle for getting our messages out there, so updates posted to the virtual newsroom generated a tweet and we also re-tweeted messages that West Yorkshire Police were sending.  But, it was all one-way; we weren’t planning to seek feedback from our followers.

But I thought that perhaps it might be a good idea to.

One colleague checked the EDL and UAF on-line forums, one of West Yorkshire Police’s press officers monitored Facebook and I set up a real-time search on Twitter so that every time the word ‘Leeds’ was mentioned, I got an alert.

It was very, very useful.

Putting aside all the talk about whether Leeds would trounce Yeovil that afternoon (and they did) and the resulting celebratory tweeting, there was some useful information coming through.

One guy on a train from London to Leeds tweeted about how it was full of demonstrators heading to Leeds causing a bad atmosphere - all was well though as officers had boarded the train.

Then there were the people commenting on what was going on in the city centre; many of them were asking ‘what’s happening?’  Others were asking whether it was safe to come into the city to do their shopping.

On this occasion I used the press office Twitter profile to respond offering an assurance that it was ‘business as usual’ despite the fact there were hundreds of police officers outside the train station.

For the first time, I was using Twitter to have a ‘conversation’ with people and in an official capacity.  It seems they appreciated it too, given the good feedback.  There wasn’t a reluctance to respond to an ‘official’ organisation and they were happy to pass on information.

Now I can see why lots of other companies and businesses have embraced social media and are using it to talk to their customers.  We’ve already got phones, faxes and email – Twitter is just another tool in the communications arsenal.

However, there’s a problem.  It’s resource intensive for a good start.  We’d need several people just to manage our social media channels full-time.  And would the powers that be sanction a team of people – locked in a room somewhere – chatting to residents all day long via the internet?  Probably not, well not just yet anyway.

And then there’s the expectation.  As a Twitter user, if I send a message or talk about a particular company and they respond, I expect something to happen; particularly if it’s a complaint.  If we were doing the same and tweets about broken pavements and unemptied bins were arriving, does the mechanism exist for us to be able to act?  Perhaps, but I’m sure it would need fine tuning.

So, I think that maybe we need to wait – let’s get ourselves geared up properly first.  If we run before we can walk there’s a danger we could damage our reputation and we all know who has to pick up those pieces ….

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