Like Dave, what I found most interesting (and that was a tough call given the amount of dubious and unethical practice this guy was self-servingly touting) was his –and by extension– his firms’ attitude toward moderating comments. The heading gives you a pretty good idea of their contorted approach to the concept of integrity:

Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.
Dan Ackerman Greenberg

You have to respect their self-styled lack of fear in deleting criticism, don’t you? I certainly admire his courage for sharing his venal, duplicitous professional practices with us.

Of course, this is not an isolated instance. It seems the growth in influence of social media is accompanied by an increasing willingness to try and control the message using a lamentably old media mindset, albeit assisted by some very clever technology.

Another blogger details how the San Francisco Chronicle uses software to continue to display deleted comments to the people who posted them, leaving them completely unaware that their views have been hidden from everyone else that visits the site. Subsequent commenters to the post then reveal that other sites are using similar techniques.

All of this has led to the obvious Web 2.0-type social media solution: a forum for people to post their comments that have been censored by moderators on other sites. don’tcensorme.com claims that

Your right to free speech online is at the mercy of website moderators. There are no checks in place for moderators online. This site aims to change that and put the balance of power back in your hands.

I don’t think freedom of speech is really at risk here; it seems more a case of an inept attempt at reputation management by suppressing critical comment. The important lesson to takeaway is that, no matter how devious or cunning you are, your perfidy will be exposed and your reputation will be forever linked (and cached) to the evidence.

For public sector communicators there is more at stake. Agencies cannot afford to risk their reputations like this; we should openly suffer the slings and arrows and attempt to build our reputation by engaging with substantive criticism, rather than deleting dissent:

Fairness: social media is about reciprocity, if you are going to engage and invite comment then accept the good with the bad. Post a very clear comments policy and stick to it. Don’t delete comments because they are critical of your agency or policies.
Principles of public sector social media.

Ultimately, private sector organizations that are exposed behaving unethically will answer to their customers or the market. Government agencies endure; our job is to build trust, not to gamble with it.

Photo: spacesuitcatalyst.

Disregarding the wisdom of issuing categorical imperatives for the moment, time and a little more analysis have led me to reassess my stance on the sovereignty of public sector social media initiatives. In my haste to arrive at a series of principles that would serve as a discussion guide for public sector communicators, I overlooked those instances where government agencies would be well advised to use hosted services.

The most glaringly obvious example is video sharing. It would be a waste of taxpayers’ money to try and replicate a service like YouTube in the government namespace.

The important point to note here is that the content you post to these types of sites is not beyond the control of the Crown. You are only uploading a copy that can be accessed and shared by others. In each case the content that you are ’socializing’ could, and should, remain part of the public record.

Much the same argument could be made for social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or, somewhat less strongly, photo sharing sites like Flickr.

This isn’t intended as (additional) encouragement to start creating agency YouTube channels and Flickr streams. There are still some considerations before you go into an uploading frenzy…

As an example, let’s look at a case where your agency has produced a video. You would like a wider audience than public servants, so you just create a YouTube account and away you go? Alas, no. The Government Web Standards still apply. So, once you have posted the video to YouTube, you link to a full transcript on your agency site.

In terms of sovereignty, government agency channels on hosted sites could be thought of as a little like diplomatic posts; they may be ‘offshore,’ but the same standards still apply.

As I suggested some time ago, in a post on blogging as a public servant:

If people within your organization are blogging (and you really should know who they are), talk to them about their blogs, the scope of their involvement in other social media and try to get a feeling for how they see the boundaries to their self-expression.

The other critical point that I should have added, is that if they do touch –even only occasionally– on work-related issues, then subscribe to their feed and read their blogs. For god’s sake, make sure you are aware of what they are posting…

Mind you, this is not an invitation to crack down on what public servants are doing in their own time (and with their own bandwidth). A good counter example is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which has recently issued a blogging policy that is, frankly, a little draconian. The key point to note:

Any CBC employee who wants to start a personal blog which “clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada” now requires their supervisor’s permission.
Inside CBC: the official blog

Should we expect that public servants should get their managers permission before they start blogging if they intend identifying themselves as an employee of a government department? In a word, no. From a blogger’s perspective, I would always disclose to my manager that I blog, and that from time to time I blog about my agency’s business. That is just common courtesy.

Would I expect that someone that reports to me would seek my permission before launching a personal blog that overlaps with their professional interest? Again, no. I would expect that they would discuss the matter with me and, if at any time they felt that they were ‘close to the line’ with a particular post, seek advice about the wisdom of posting it. That is both courteous and smart.

The Code

The principles that guide the behaviour of public servants are laid out in the Code of Conduct. The relevant principle is trustworthiness, specifically:

avoid any activities, work or non-work, that may harm the reputation of our organization or of the State Services.

[...] We must use judgement when exercising our personal democratic rights or voicing professional concerns. We must be careful that we act lawfully, and that we do not misuse official or personal information we have acquired through our work. We must always be careful that our actions do not compromise our organization or our Minister.

It’s the bit about using our judgement that is of particular relevance when you consider the intersection of blogging and your corporate media policy. Public servants are paid to exercise their judgement. To suggest that we are incapable of doing it when we are blogging is as ludicrous as suggesting that we should not be allowed to give presentations in public.

Spokesperson vs Blogger

For those of you that are blogging about work, this does not put you in the position of being an official spokesperson. Yes, it is conceivable that a journalist could cut and paste part of one of your posts into an article — just as they could misquote you when you front your powerpoint deck at a conference. But they won’t be able to introduce your view with the words ‘a spokesperson for the agency said…’

Does that matter? Yes and no. Blogging about something that your agency is involved in is fraught anyway. You had better assume that, at some point, you will be misinterpreted and quoted out of context, because to blithely ignore that possibility is poor judgement.

One point worth noting: publishing a disclaimer on your about page should be seen more as a convention than any sort of iron clad protection against dropping yourself and your agency into the proverbial.

Conclusion

Social media are part of the reality of our professional lives. The best way to ‘manage’ it in your organization is to understand it. Read your colleagues’ blogs, join their networks and start to participate in their conversations. Above all, encourage them to exercise their judgement and help build a culture of engagement rather than one of fear and distrust.

It is only a matter of time before a couple of paragraphs on blogging start to make their way into agency policies (media or some other). It would be a good idea if that policy was written from a position of understanding, rather than a scrambled rush to deal with some new perceived threat to the integrity of your external relations.

As a guide, you can always refer to some private sector corporate blogging guidelines, IBM’s are good; but the bottom line for New Zealand public servants should always be the Code of Conduct.

Photo: nib.ipernity.com

Anyway, there has been quite a lot of comment, but I think Allan Jenkin’s summed it up best, in his rather colourfully titled post, Tim O’Reilly can eat my ethical shorts:

I make ethical judgements about what I write, and about what I allow others to write on my blog, every damned day. I think I do pretty good. My “badge,” in other words, is Desirable Roasted Coffee. Read it… if you think I am ethical, keep reading. If you think I am unethical, don’t read it.. and let me know. I don’t need a badge to proclaim my honesty. If I did, you’d have every right to be skeptical.

As public sector communicators, we already have a code: it governs not just the way we blog, but every facet of the way that we work (and to a limited extent, the way we conduct ourselves out of the office as well). But in this age of the increasing proliferation of social media, it is not a bad idea to think about some of the issues raised by O’Reilly’s proposal.

When I posted the principles for public sector social media, I touched on the notion of acceptable comment, but I wasn’t nearly as prescriptive as O’Reilly. The reason for this is that, much like Allan Jenkins, I believe that public sector communicators are acutely aware of their ethical responsibilities and this sort of thing does not need to be spelled out. [Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a good piece on why this sort of prescriptivism will not succeed in the private sector either. Robert Scoble also has some pretty good points from a bloggers perspective.]

What does it mean for us in the public sector? Certainly, we are not immune to ugly blogging, and indeed given our profile are probably more at risk to elements of this.

It means being particularly vigilant when we do launch social media: 9-5 just won’t make the cut, you need to moderate after hours and on weekends to maintain (or develop) your credibility and to ensure that the space is one that is ethically pristine.

It means that we link out cautiously and develop relationships that reflect the integrity of our endeavour – and we do this by engaging before we launch and remaining sedulously active thereafter.

And finally it means that by modelling the behaviour that we would like to see in the social media we participate in, we contribute to making our online society a more inclusive, welcoming and enjoyable space for everyone. Just like the rest our job, really.

I can see why Tim O’Reilly wants a code of conduct for bloggers. I just don’t agree that we need one, and I certainly don’t think that an attempt to regulate people’s behaviour on the Internet is either feasible or necessarily desirable.