What I have learnt

For the last few days, I've been doing some research, watching some webinars, doing some tutorials and generally brushing up on my personal development that I'd let slip whilst working for Rotherham Council. So what have I learnt? Well, surprisingly, quite a lot.

I initially set out to simply understand the difference between Google Analytics and Google Analytics 360, which turned out to be quite easy, there is none! But this in turn lead me down a journey to understand more about what Google are doing as well as social media companies and generally a whole host of other stuff that Local Authorities are missing out on. Most, if not all Local Authorities are really missing a trick with plugging in to the social media revolution, I think mainly because they don't feel they have to. People, or customers as LA's like to call them, don't really have a choice who they do business with, they have to deal with the LA they live in, it's not like you can shop around for a better bin collection deal, is it? Well, that's not strictly true, commercial waste is a competitive market and LA's supply a whole range of services that can be shopped around for, from pest control to foster caring.

Google Adwords

The Fostering and Adoption Teams at Rotherham Council are the only services that do any kind of active online marketing. This is mainly through fear of missing out as these services are fiercely competitive in the private sector, which LA's end up competing with. Any Google search with the word 'fostering' in will return many hits, but crucially, it will always return adverts that have been procured through Google Adwords. These are pay per click ads that appear at the top of the search results and consequently push the real top hitters way down the page.

I'm personally not a fan of Google Adwords, tests have shown that internet users are tuned in to ignore the adverts, so in fact, in the majority of cases, the ads are scrolled passed. Also, Adwords works in such a way that you can quickly knock your competitor off the top slot by simply clicking on the ad a few times, if they've only paid for 10 clicks per day, less than a minutes work can put them out of the picture....until tomorrow.

Tomorrow

Talking of tomorrow, that's all for today, but I'll be pulling together a summary of all the skills I've been brushing up on, including AI, which I'd been previously researching for Rotherham Council over the last 12 months.

End.