LONDON, March 5, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GovDelivery, a leader in cloud-based communication solutions for government, congratulates its customer, Met Office, for continuing to receive recognition as a leading innovator in digital communications. The organisation was recently recognised as a finalist in the Search Engine Optimization category of the 2012 Econsultancy Innovation Awards, the only public sector finalist across all categories.
The Met Office was recognised for a program addressing the organisation's key objective to disseminate outputs as widely as possible to ensure that the public can take action for impactful weather and climate outcomes. Leveraging the GovDelivery platform, Met Office created and launched an Event Calendar in 2010 as a creative approach to delivering tailored weather content around specific UK events (e.g. Glastonbury Festival, 6 Nations rugby). This has allowed the organisation to target seasonal traffic trends and engage with new audiences by driving online search requests to the Event Calendar.
Since its launch, the increase in web traffic to the Met Office's Events Calendar has resulted in securing incremental revenue for the Met Office through sponsorships. There has been a significant increase in number of links back to the Met Office by working collaboratively with industry leading websites associated with key events. From initial keyword research, the Met Office has successfully optimised key event-based content for high volume search terms associated with the event, thus increasing visibility and incremental visits.
"The Innovations Awards shine a light on the best creative thinking across the digital industry and Met Office's finalist status proves that government communications can be innovative, creative and achieve recognition. The Met Office wholly deserves this level of recognition for its continued focus on efficiently communicating with citizens across all available digital channels," said Dave Worsell, Director of Government Solutions, GovDelivery.
This acknowledgment follows the Met Office's November win of the Best Use of Social Media award in the public sector from Computer Weekly's Social Media Awards 2011, sponsored by IBM. The Met Office competed against other excellent public sector organisations, including South Yorkshire Police, the Government Digital Service from the Cabinet Office, and Idea Street from the Department for Work and Pensions.
The award recognised the Met Office's outstanding work in using social media to increase awareness of severe weather and climate information throughout the United Kingdom, reaching more than 75,000 UK people every month. The Met Office regularly pushes out weather information on Facebook, YouTube, their blog and Twitter. @metoffice has more than 60,000 followers, with Met Office staff available to respond to weather queries 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The Met Office uses GovDelivery Digital Communication Management (DCM) to help manage and push out their social media communications. GovDelivery DCM allows Met Office to integrate their email notifications with social media, automating the process so that any new content added to the Met Office website triggers the system to create an email and social media post, and disseminate both to subscribers at the same time.
About The Met Office
The Met Office is the UK's National Weather Service, employing more than 1,800 people worldwide. The Met Office provides a wide range of services, from providing weather information to the public, working with organisations around the world to advance global understanding around climate, and providing impartial information to governments in the UK and Europe.
About GovDelivery
GovDelivery, the leading provider of government-to-citizen communication solutions, helps government maximise direct connections with the public while reducing communications cost. More than 500 government organisations 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.
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