Suffolk County Council Trading Standards Wins Prestigious Award for Social Media Campaign

Published on Thursday, 02 February 2012 05:09 Written by TradersHuddle Staff

LONDON, Feb. 2, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GovDelivery, a leader in cloud-based communication solutions for government, congratulates its customer, Suffolk County Council Trading Standards (SCCTS), for winning Best Use of Social Media at the 2011 UK Public Sector Digital Awards.

The award demonstrated how critical social media is to digital communications within the public sector. The Best Use of Social Media category examined public sector organisations that used social media to improve government-to-citizen interaction and increase government transparency. SCCTS competed against many other UK public sector organisations, including Northern Ireland Executive Information Service, Durham County Council and the City of Edinburgh Council Libraries and Information Services.

SCCTS won the award by using a comprehensive digital communications strategy, with a foundation in social media, to fight rogue trading and promote consumer protection and empowerment. In this campaign, SCCTS used Facebook, Twitter, blogs and GovDelivery email alerts to recruit and equip consumers with the resources and tools to protect themselves. Since the start of their campaign, SCCTS has achieved amazing success, with:

• More than 8,800 Facebook views
• Over 900 Twitter followers
• More than 8,000 blog views
• Nearly 5,000 email subscribers

SCCTS uses GovDelivery Digital Communication Management (DCM) to manage email alerts and push out social media communications. The platform allows SCCTS to integrate their email notifications to simultaneously post to the most popular social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter. GovDelivery DCM also offers message automation capabilities that monitors SCCTS's website. When new content is added to the website, GovDelivery DCM can create an email alert and social media posts and push all types of communications to subscribers at the same time.

Councillor Colin Spence, Suffolk County Council's Portfolio Holder for Public Protection, said, "It is staggering just how many people regularly use social media, and I'm delighted that we have been recognised for our innovative approach. I am very proud of the team's efforts to harness this new technology to effectively communicate with people and businesses in Suffolk."

Sarah Nagra, Community Engagement Officer, is at the leading edge of the team's approach to using social media. She said, "We are thrilled that our efforts to protect Suffolk communities were recognised last night. Twitter, Facebook and the like offer a brilliant platform for people to tell us when they think an advert, salesperson or scheme might be untrustworthy, and helps us share this information with others."

"The work that Suffolk County Council Trading Standards has done to communicate directly with citizens around rogue trading has provided enormous mission value for the County Council, the public and the business community. It's clear that they understand how critical social media is to a comprehensive government-to-citizen communications strategy, and it's only fitting that they were recognised by the UK Public Sector Digital Awards," said Dave Worsell, Director of Government Solutions, GovDelivery.

About Suffolk County Council Trading Standards

Suffolk County Council Trading Standards is working to achieve a fair and safe trading environment and informed confident consumers. They hope to achieve this by educating consumers and making them more resilient to rogue traders.

About GovDelivery

GovDelivery, the leading provider of government-to-citizen communication solutions, helps government maximize direct connections with the public while reducing communications cost. More than 450 government organizations worldwide, including more than half of major U.S. federal agencies, as well as state, county, and city governments in the U.S., and local authorities and central government agencies in the United Kingdom, use GovDelivery to optimize their effectiveness, efficiency, and engagement in communications with the public. GovDelivery is a partner company of ICG (Nasdaq:ICGE). For more information, visit http://www.govdelivery.com.

The GovDelivery logo is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=8030

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