Category Archives: Communications

The limits of sovereignty

When I first posted about the principles for public sector social media, sovereignty was the first of the ten principles I discussed because, once you have decided that you need to incorporate social media into your communications plan, the next most important decision is where you host the project. The answer at the time was, [...]

Agile government

Demos and the Victorian State Services Authority have embarked on a project to explore the concept of agile government. The first product of this collaboration was what they described as a provocation paper, released in September, and called – as you might expect – agile government PDF [238 KB].
The focus of the project is to [...]

The (real) cost of social media

I have posted previously about arguments for social media and a business case for a blog. And while there is plenty of discussion about the ROI of blogging in particular and social media in general, for public sector communicators it is important that we understand what we are committing our organizations to when we launch [...]

Social media and government consultation

For those of us who are watching how governments begin to engage with social media, it has been a particularly active week. Colin McKay at the Canadian Office of the Privacy Commissioner has launched an official blog and there has been a bit of activity here in the antipodes as well.
Police wiki
First, as part of [...]

Media monitoring and blogs

It was with some delight, tempered by wry amusement, that I opened the PDF forwarded on by a colleague this week that announced a new service launched by Chong Newztel, the media monitoring firm. From the end of this month they are going to be monitoring the blogosphere as well as traditional media.
Why delight? Announcements [...]

Dominion Post goes digital

The Dominion Post, the Wellington morning newspaper, has launched a digital edition, currently available to paper subscribers for a 3 month trial or to the merely curious for a 7 day preview. This offering comes less than a year after Fairfax (the parent company) redeveloped the Stuff website, a redevelopment I was less than enthused [...]

BBC goes social: some lessons for govt

The BBC introduced social bookmarking options for all of its news website pages last month. Not a startling move in itself; as one of the editors noted in his blog, they are following the lead of some fairly large media organisations, notably the New York Times and the Washington Post. Oddly, despite me blogging about [...]

Social media and degrees of control

On a recent edition of their excellent podcast, Inside PR, Terry Fallis and David Jones suggested five questions that you would want to ask your PR agency before you signed them to help you out with a social media campaign or project. I would recommend that you listen to the whole show, but to cut [...]

Blogging and your media policy

It is almost inevitable that, right now, there are at least a couple of people in your agency running their own blogs. It is also a pretty safe bet to assume that if you open up your agency’s media policy, you won’t find anything in there about blogging. The policy will be very specific about [...]

Alternate uses for public sector blogs

I posted a couple of arguments for getting a blog up as an internal communications tool some weeks ago, Business case for a blog. However, as a blog is a content management system, there are any number of other ways to turn this tool to your communications needs.
Bob Conrad at The Good, the Bad, the [...]