The Cost of Social Media - Richard Overy

It has been a while since my last blog but here goes…..on 10^th September I was lucky enough to attend Digital Futures, a free event hosted by Shropshire Council at Theatre Severn; the event celebrated the work of digital champions across the country and even featured a live Skpe link to No 10 (which worked by the way!).

Vicky Sargent of Boilerhouse Media explained the financial cost of transactions and the benefits of channel shift to cash strapped local councils. Below is a quick infographic I produced using the Socitm data Vicky quoted and noun symbols (open source symbols from http://thenounproject.com/  which you can download using google chrome). The infographic shows a comparison of the average cost of tranactions for the web, phone and face to face.

Average cost per transaction

Of course channel shift is only one element of providing a service to customers and several speakers mentioned the issue of digital exclusion, Alison Smith from Pesky People www.peskypeople.co.uk was one such speaker. Alison explained the issues surrounding digital exclusion for customers who have a disability, for example 1 in 3 disabled users have never used the internet compared with 1 in 10 of the able-bodied population.

Just two quick snippets from Digital Futures, further information can be found on twitter using the following hashtag #digifutures12 and a link to an article from the Shropshire Star featuring Dan Slee is shown below.

 http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2012/09/11/delegates-set-trend-at-digital-futures-conference

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