Category Archives: Communications

Networked citizens

Demos, the UK think tank, this week published a pamphlet on the impact of social networks in the workplace. Called Network Citizens, the report is a qualitative study of six workplaces that documents their internal and external networks. Unsurprisingly, much of the focus is on the role of technology, and how it is changing the [...]

Election 2008

In case you had missed it, the Prime Minister announced yesterday that the country will go to the polls on November 8. That puts us, public servants, fairly and squarely in the pre-election period. What does that mean? For public sector communicators there are a couple of issues that we should consider.
SSC has guidance on [...]

Kiwis’ usage of the Internet

Last week, as part of the World Internet Project, Auckland University published The Internet in New Zealand 2007, a survey of 1430 New Zealanders’ use of and attitude towards the Internet. It has some interesting findings, particularly for public sector communicators.
The topline results of our usage habits are fairly unremarkable: 78% of Kiwis use the [...]

Citizens’ views on Govt 2.0

Colin McKay posted earlier this week about a fascinating piece of research published by the Canadian government. The paper, New Technologies and GC Communications [Word], is the first phase (the qualitative) of a survey into Canadians views on their government’s use of Web 2.0 technologies.
There are a couple of points that the survey throws up [...]

The future of communications

For the last couple of months I have been focusing on (what I hope has been) a less technical and more strategic approach to public sector communications; with a particular emphasis on using change management as the context for understanding what social media and govt 2.0 mean for our agencies.
This has been motivated partly by [...]

Rate your agency

As we approach the end of the financial year, public servants (with varying degrees of apprehension) start to turn their minds to their performance reviews. And while typically this is when you demonstrate your unswerving devotion to the cause and highlight the prodigious efforts you have been making throughout the year, it is also an [...]

Mobility and agility

This post began as a review of how well government websites are doing making their content available to mobile devices. I had looked at this in February last year, and had hoped that over those 12 months we might have seen an improvement. These hopes proved, as you might guess, somewhat optimistic. This exercise did, [...]

Trust, the Media & the public sector

Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, last week on the BBC blog posted a speech he gave called The Trouble with Trust. At over 6,000 words it is a long post, but if you are a public sector communicator, it is well worth the read – for some very different reasons.
Thompson wants to [...]

Online reputation management

Andy Oram wrote a post on Friday that triggered some thoughts of my own about reputation management, and how public sector communicators can approach this issue. Oram attended a Yale symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace and has since been providing thorough coverage and analysis.
What I found interesting about his first post (he has posted [...]

Censoring social media

Some of you may have seen the post a couple of weeks ago on TechCrunch that caused a fair amount of comment and controversy in the blogosphere. The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos was a spectacularly ill-advised and unintentionally revealing account of one marketer’s techniques for placing client videos in prominent spots on the [...]