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The Peerless Prognosticator is ON THE AIR!!!
Well, Caps fans, we are in the midst of having won one in a row. And what a one it was. A 7-1 win in Toronto against the Maple Leafs is always a treat, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The Caps are still only 5-6-0, but that is better than the stumbling 4-6-1 start that tonight's opponent – the New York Rangers – have compiled.
A trip to Manhattan always brings with it the thrill of the sights and sounds of the big city. And the visitor might be advised to partake of some of the delectable delights of the Big Apple when taking in the city. Perhaps no place says, "New York" more than The Stage Deli in Manhattan, where their famous sandwiches bear the names of those who created them. From the "Marv Albert" (corned beef and swiss cheese) to the "Alex Rodriguez" (turkey, chopped liver, lettuce, tomato, and onion), you'll find something famous when you're famished.
But what about the Rangers? The Peerless perused the menu and didn't see anything dedicated to the Blueshirts. Well, if there were any Rangers on the menu, perhaps Caps fans might be able to order such as…
The Jaromir Jagr…over-boiled chicken, limburger, and chopped liver…it has no heart, and stinks, too! Call your friends to order one…on your cell phone!
The Scott Gomez…sliced Alaska salmon, caviar, waygu beef, moose milk cheese (really!), and a nice slice of heirloom tomato…oh, so nice, and overpriced at half the price!
The Brendan Shanahan…blue cheese (extra mold), aged corn-fed beef, and hard-boiled egg…we'll even throw in a bottle of Ensure!
The Sean Avery…sliced tongue, hot peppers, extra sharp cheddar cheese, and bologna…it puts the "smack" in "lip-smackin' good"
The Larry Brooks…bologna…lots and lots of bologna…we don't even bother with the bread!
The Chris Drury…ground buffalo, boneless chicken wings, and white American cheese…you'll wish you were in Buffalo…he does.
The Fedor Tyutin…pastrami, sauerkraut, chopped liver, and onions…you'll be "tyutin" all night long!
The Stephen Valiquette…two slices of white bread…hey, when he plays a game, we'll fill it in!
The Marc Staal…chicken, turkey, duck, and goose…hey, they're all brothers under their poultry skin…
Now that you've had you fill, what can we expect tonight? Well, we can expect the fans at Madison Square Garden to have a low "boo" threshold. A club featuring a payroll that includes the likes of Jaromir Jagr ($8.36 million), Scott Gomez ($10.0 million paid to him this year), Chris Drury ($7.1 million), and Henrik Lundqvist ($4.1 million) sitting dead last in the NHL in scoring (1.73 goals/game) and 12th in the Eastern Conference in points will have that effect.
Only Lundqvist can be said to have earned his money so far. His 1.82 goals-against average (5th in the league) and .930 save percentage (6th) have kept the Rangers in every game, despite the goal scoring drought. King Henrik is only 4-3-1 when giving up two goals or fewer – a sign of the consistent goal scoring trouble the Rangers have had. The Rangers are third best in the league in goals-allowed-per-game.
Offensively, it's hard to know where to start. The Rangers are second in the league in shots per game (33.8). They're certainly not shy about launching the puck. But here is a glimpse at the trouble…Brendan Shanahan takes almost six of those shots a game, and he has two goals to show for it. His 3.2 percent shooting percentage is worse than Fedor Tyutin, Petr Prucha, Ryan Callahan, and Dan Girardi, who – combined – earn less than three-quarters what Shanahan is earning.
Shanahan is hardly the only problem. Someone forgot to tell Scott Gomez that the season started. Being 2-1-3, -2, through 11 games is not what the Rangers had in mind when bringing him across the river. But, three points ties him for fifth in team scoring.
See the problem?
However, in the end, all roads (and pucks) go through Jaromir Jagr. That he would be leading the team in scoring is not a surprise. That he would be doing it with 11 points is. If he was to continue that pace over the entire season, it would be only time he would have failed to average more than a point a game (save for his split season with the Caps and Rangers in 2003-2004), since 1991-1992. This is an important consideration for Jagr, given the nature of the criteria to trigger an option for next year on his contract (and the Caps' obligation therein). At the moment, at the pace he is on, he would meet none of the criteria, not even the trophies (unless you think an 82-point season will win the Ross or be deserving of the Hart, and the Rangers are not now in the top-eight, so there goes the Smythe).
For the Caps, their seven-goal effort against Toronto catapulted them to 15th in the league in scoring at 2.82 goals-per-game. They're actually better on the other side, giving up 2.73 goals-per-game, good for 13th in the league. Again, it's not five-on-five play that is hurting the club – they are ninth overall in five-on-five efficiency. Their special teams remain mired in the bottom half of the rankings – 20th on the power play (16.1 percent) and 19th on the penalty kill (80.7 percent). Their "special teams index" (power play ranking-plus-penalty killing ranking) ranks 22nd in the league. The Rangers, by way of comparison, are 13th.
If there is anything in the numbers that suggests a strategy for the Caps it is this…"shoot early, and shoot often."
The Rangers are winless when trailing first (0-5-1), and they are winless when trailing after one period (0-3-0). Conversely, they unbeaten when leading after one period (4-0-0). You can pretty much plan your evening on the basis of the first 20 minutes…unless they're tied.
This is a really good sign for the Caps (it's what we do here). The Caps are tied for fourth in first period goals scored (13) and have outscored their opposition 13-6 in the first frame. The Rangers, on the other hand, are six for and six against in the first period this year.
The Caps will get that first goal tonight, and it will be a lead they will not relinquish…
Caps 2 – Rangers 1.
Edit...we almost forgot, there is a post-game treat for fans after the Flyers game on Friday...the Chuggers of the NVAHL (Northern VA Adult Hockey League) will be playing the Justice from the HNA (Hockey North America) after the Caps game. If you choose to hang around after the Caps victory, you can all move down to the players bench area and watch some spirited hockey, amateur style. As English put it over on The Official, "the Washington Post...says, 'A must see game'". He wrote it on his copy of the Post with a Sharpie, but no doubt the WaPo was thinking it. Give it a look...The Peerless prognosticates a hard-fought affair won by the sons of the Old Dominion.


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subset: commoncrawl


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LOCAL GOV: So, we've got Twitter Gritter sorted, what's next?Posted: January 18, 2013 | Author: Dan Slee | Filed under: local government, social media, twitter | Tags: communications, local government, localgov digital, localgovdigital, snow, social media, twitter gritter |8 Comments
You know you are in trouble when Kenny Dalglish tells you on Twitter your gritting efforts are rubbish.
A couple of years ago that's what the former Liverpool manager told Liverpool City Council in 140 characters.
Chances are they'd already been out treating the roads but without regular updates nobody would have know.
Looking out of the window in January 2013 as snow falls after 24-hours of snowmaggedon warnings it's s different story. There's real time updates on Twitter, Facebook and in some cases rolling blogs too like at Walsall Council and Norfolk Council. That's great to see.
It was a different case back in 2009 for local government when some leftfield councils – including Derbyshire, Walsall, Kirklees and others – boldly decided to use Twitter to tell people they were going out. I wrote about it here in early 2010.
Things stepped up a gear in 2011 when the excellent Geoff Coleman came up with the idea of getting councils across the West Midlands to tweet grit alerts using the #wmgrit hashtag so people could see the state of things across the region.
Taking a look at the stream in full effect this morning there's messages of support being tweeted and a tweetreach stat that paints an impressive picture.
Thanks for your nice comments about the gritting team. I will make sure they see them. Don't envy them. #truegrit #wmgrit #uksnow— Stoke-on-Trent CC (@SoTCityCouncil) January 18, 2013
It's c-c-cold. We gritted last night but grit its not a magic substance so please take extra care. #wmgrit #localgov— Birmingham Newsroom (@BCCNewsRoom) January 13, 2013
Stourbridge Town center has been gritted by @dudleymbc with men n shuvel! well done! town centre snow free to walk around #stourbridgesnow— Dave Baker (@The_Grim_Weeder) January 18, 2013Of course, audience stats aren't the be all and end all as we know but 134,000 people potentially seeing what is happening on the roads is quite powerful.
114 #wmgrit tweets generated 267,972 impressions, reaching an audience of 134,086 followers within the past 24 hours— wmgrit (@wmgrit) January 17, 2013
Seeing a tweet or update land in your inbox or sail by helps. It saves people ringing up an engineer and asking for information and can even in passing can see that local government is doing stuff for them.
That doesn't mean sweetless and light has broken out. People still complain they didn't get their street treated. Or have a pop because they didn't see a gritter go by. But that's just it. They're not shouting into the void anymore and the council can hear and respond.
But as much as I love the grit and winter disruption alerts I don't think this is the last word. This should be a first word. But we should now be looking to see how else these real time alerts could work.
The digital landscape has evolved since 2009. Much has changed. This stuff is no longer revolutionary. It's mainstream and being taken seriously. The LGA and DCLG have this month signed off the localgov digital group to try and innovate and share best practice. That's rather good.
So after grit, what's next?
As dull as unexciting as it may sound, something around bin reminders delivered in the evening by email or Twitter or by another means would be a rather handy piece of communications.
Any other ideas?
8 Comments on "LOCAL GOV: So, we've got Twitter Gritter sorted, what's next?"
Ross says:
Well said dan. Loads of potential in the public sector for new things. I don't think we've scratched the surface of the subject yet. Really excited about Pinterest & future of content marketing.
Dave Harte says:
Be nice if those in public sector comms better valued the efforts that citizens make to keep each other informed at times like this. This morning Birmingham City Council's disruption website fell over. Their twitter feed was useful but it paled in comparison to the work done by Sas and Marty Taylor at the B31 Voices Hyperlocal website. In between getting their own kids ready for school they were running a full-on information service reporting on school closures for most of south Birmingham and have spent much of the day reporting on transport issues. I did a little over at Bournville News but it was largely their stuff I retweeted.
But it's more than just hyperlocals who do this. I (the Bournville site that is) was getting updates from parents as they heard from their school. They were no doubt using social media to keep each other informed as well. Local gov twitter accounts play a part in keeping us updated but it's as nothing compared to how citizens use their networks as a knowledge resource. And as my earlier example points out, some particularly active citizens, Hyperlocals, often do this stuff better than council comms teams do.
It would be nice therefore to read a blog post saying 'didn't they, our community, do well' rather than 'didn't we do well'.
Dan Slee says:
Hi Dave.
Thanks for stopping by. I fondly remember that innacurate post you wrote about Facebook stats where you assumed I'd said something and still didn't buy it when I and then a member of the audience gently broke it to you you'd got totally the wrong end of the stick.
Any road up. To press onto your latest post here 'Hyperlocals 1 Local Councils 0' in which you say'I wish local government communications people would stop self-aggrandising and give credit to their citizens instead' which links to a blogpost about the good work done by Twitter Gritter.
To state the blooming obvious a blog about local government comms is going to focus squarely on local government comms. It's not self-aggrandising to point at something on a blog and say it works well. The Twitter Gritter initiatives do a really good job put together as they are often out-of-hours by staff who really believe in the job they are doing. Someone asked me on Twitter if there was a role for this 'extravagant' PR activity. The answer is that it's extravagantly affordable saving as it does scores of telephone calls from irate residents on the return of updates to the website and social media. I didn't know it had been referenced by West Midlands Innovation. Thanks for flagging it. But that wasn't the aim.
The success of any communication depends on it being read, shared, talked about and discussed. My focus as a local government press officer is how councils can get the information out in a timely and effective way so that they can be read, shared, talked about and discussed by a whole range of people. Hyperlocal blog sites included. But without the information first coming out from local government in the first place – either from a school or centrally – there wouldn't be much to talk about. Or rather there would. It would be people asking what the heck was going on and why the heck weren't they being told about it by the school website, council website, Twitter stream or Facebook stream. When we don't tell people what's going online believe me, that's what happens.
On a wider point, I've really noticed this year that in my own corner of the universe in Walsall a hyperlocal blogger Brownhills Bob doing a rather fine job in rumour-busting with people who think that the roads should behave just as they should on a summers day in snow and if they don't it's the council's fault. The fact that he's often a critic of what the council does should be noted. Other Walsall bloggers and residents retweeted or shared @walsallcouncil updates or shared their own pictures or updates. That's all part of the mix.
By the looks of things B31 Voices did a great job of their own in sharing the messages that were coming out from schools and the rest of the community. That's just it. It's getting quick messages out and sharing them. But to turn this into 'Hyperlocals 1 Local Councils 0' makes you look just a bit petty, to be honest, Dave.
[…] a recent write-up asking 'what's next' for snow-related local government comms seems to sum up a particular problem within local […]
MarCommsKenny says:
I wonder if my local authority would take a lead from this, I might suggest it… love it. Thanks for sharing.
kate Goodall says:
Hi Dan.
Twitter gritter is sorted? Twitter gritter might be but Twitter ain't all that. And telling people that gritters have been out ain't all that either tbh. The majority of a council's populace aren't Twitter users (I'm guessing, but think I'm right) and the majority of a council's populace (I'm very sure of this) think grit (salt) is magic and so don't believe gritters have been out if their road isn't miraculously clear within minutes of snow falling. We can tell them until we're blue in the face that the gritters have been out and they won't buy it.
#Lesson – Payment of council tax gives open membership to the armchair experts club.
Those of us who work in local gov largely do it because we're caring sorts. As a colleague said to me recently "if I haven't been called a wanker by 11am it's a slow day". In our own little corners of local gov, we do our good things and feel like we've done a good job. Who believes us? We're told we should show and tell. And so we tell via Twitter Gritter and other initiatives.
#Lesson – residents think we the workers, the politicians and the Council en masse are crap and they don't believe the stuff we spout out.
I don't mean this to be in any way unsupportive of Twitter Gritter, indeed I've loved seeing how #wmgrit has been used by councils that aren't even in the West Midlands! I just think there should be a moment to stock-take on how useful it is and to see how it can move forward. I do think our residents could really come on-board here.
#Lesson – the bloke in the pub I met tonight 'knows' what he's talking about.
Council workers don't have credibility. It doesn't matter a toss that I have two relevant university qualifications. That gobby guy down the pub knows it all apparently. There's really no use in wringing our hands over why people don't trust in council workers or have belief in them. If what they believe in is the gobby bloke down the local boozer, then maybe we should look to make sure Mr Gobby is better informed and let him do the job for us.
#Lesson – embrace the local bloggers
Dan and Dave both mentioned citizen engagement. In Walsall, I think the Council, via Dan and others, can be very proud. Dan mentioned Brownhills Bob, who promotes council activities and slates the council when he feels its fouled up. There's also the Bloxwich Telegraph and Common People. These are just a few examples of hyperlocal bloggers who are on the Council's press release list and proactively work with the council, police and other public agencies when the need is there. There are actually dozens more in Walsall and they're all part of the overall picture.
And yes Dave, these local sites have all been as busy as hell pushing local info out over the last few days. It's great to see tbh. Oh and if you keep an eye on the Walsall Council twitter feed, you'll see that the RTs between those mentioned, and others, is reciprocal.
Oh sorry, I went right off tangent. What I meant to say is 'how are we going to communicate with those not on Twitter'? A second question could be 'how do we communicate with those not on-line?'.
Dan Slee says:
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the comment.
You're absolutely right that Twitter isn't the last word and that telling people we've gritted isn't either. It's one channel of many. But don't tell people you've gritted and you get a stream of phone calls. Besides, it's just a worthwhile thing to do to remind people what their council tax gets spent on.
Dan Carins – on Twitter – made a fascinating comment. He used to live in a city in Japan that was under snow rather a lot of the time. In fact, there was so much snow 40 per cent of the council budget was spent on clearing the stuff. It was common in the thaw to find benches that had buckled under the weight of it. That's a bit wow.
You are quite right to talk about the messages being shared from the council, bloggers and residents in Walsall. On Dave's needlessly point scoring blog I've highlighted Brownhills Bob for taking to task those who think that perhaps grit is fairy dust that should allow you to drive with the same handling as a summer's day as you have here.
You ask two brilliant questions in how to communicate with those not on Twitter… and offline.
Part of the bringing things off Twitter is to have a CoveritLive pulling things off Twitter and onto a webpage. Helen from the webteam's winter blog also does that and 5,000 users in a day – I think I'm right, Helen? – shows the real worth of this.
The question of communicating with those offline is harder.
Perhaps there's mileage in looking for inspiration elsewhere.
Sandwell Council's snow champions is brilliant. It sees volunteers given grit and spread it on problem hills outside their houses or outside the homes of vulnerable people. I don't know if they do it but it would seem like common sense to sign up those champions to e-mail alerts – and open these alerts to the wider residents – to give some relevant information out. Something in other words that copies a neighbourhood watch info dissemination thing.
It would be great to plug into the networks that are already there whether they be residents groups, neighbours, school communities or the like.
That's one idea to cross the digital divide but I get the feeling there are plenty more to be had and plenty better ones to.
[…] LOCAL GOV: So, we've got Twitter Gritter sorted, what's next? (danslee.wordpress.com) […]


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