Looking Local has integrated with Twitter and Flickr

We hear about social media applications being used in all walks of life nowadays, they pervade our technology habits and have millions of people commenting, interacting, sharing and showing. Now partners using Looking Local technology can use outputs from two of the most popular social media sites to enhance their TV sites to inform and involve more people in the community dialogue.

Looking Local has integrated with Twitter and Flickr to pull in locally relevant stories, comments, images and notices. Combining these with polls, consultations as well as the latest information and services allows our partners to involve people without internet access - currently ten million adults nationwide - in the local debate and decision making process.

Trialling in North Lincolnshire as part of an I&DeA sponsored social media project, outputs of Twitter and Flickr are now available for the 120 Looking Local partners to use now. This allows partners to show up to date community created content about the most important local issues and debates, thus supporting the aims around the Big Society debate and policies for inclusion and access.

Image brought in from North Lincs Flickr site to their Looking Local service

With recent reports suggesting that local authorities and public sector partners should not shelve technology projects as they 'can play a critical role in delivering the efficiency savings required' (SOCITM report 'Tomorrow's public services: some stories from everyday life in 2012'), Looking Local's solution continues to bring organisations an amazing range of services and incredible value for money. Allowing organisations to engage with and deliver a huge range of services to high end technology users via mobile phones and the latest smartphones as well as DiTV viewers, at a low subscription rate.

Constantly integrating with popular consumer and government technologies that deliver popular services such as GP appointments and repeat prescriptions, choice based lettings and payment solutions, NHS Choices, Jobcentre Plus, the FID (Family Information Directory), credit union software and now Flickr and Twitter, Looking Local ensures public sector organisations can use all platforms and technologies available to give customers access, without the headache of maintaining a TV and mobile phone infrastructure.

DiTV is available to over 13 million homes already can for free and our research shows that over 40% of our users do not have access to the Internet and 45% of our usage is outside of office hours. With increasingly tight budgets, Looking Local is one way to make the most of technology for both non-Internet users and the high end technology users within our society, at an affordable price.