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.

Of course, this is not limited to the public sector but, given our obligation to make information available and to keep it available as outlined in the Policy for Government Held Information, we are in a particularly invidious position.

One of the obvious ways to address this content crush is tagging. However, I can’t help feel that this is only part of the answer to the problem or, less optimistically, at best a short term solution.

With only 600 odd items in my delicious account, I already feel a sense of dread at the cognitive overload when I look through my list of tags trying to locate a page saved a couple of months ago. Looking at Hamish’s bookmarks renders me dumb with equal parts awe and despair.

The Answer

As I suggested in 5 Principles for Govt 2.0, the answer is Search. Or, in Jon Udell’s far more elegant phrase,

we’re in the midst of a long transition from container-based to query-based storage and retrieval
Tagging and Foldering.

An important point to qualify here is that the term long transition shouldn’t be taken to imply a process that is either leisurely or painless; in government, we can rest assured it will be neither.

I should also point out that, for the government namespace, the demand side search issue has already been solved. The new search on newzealand.govt.nz is frighteningly good (if you are a content owner in this namespace, just search your domain and you will see why it is frightening — everything you have posted in now surfacable).

As an example, when I wanted to pull up the Government Held Information Policy, I searched the SSC site using the, what I thought, obvious terms: “government held information” “policy framework” and finally (I am a lazy typist) I went for the whole phrase. Result? Nothing on the first page of the three searches. An advanced search on newzealand.govt.nz, using the phrase “government held information” restricted to “ssc.govt.nz” and, bingo! straight there.

Supply Side Search

The real issue for government is not the search tool. It is preparing the content for search — making it discoverable. This is where we will have to reinvent business processes and essentially apply a new model to the creation and publication of government held information.

However, until we have XML editors installed across government, and we continue to rely on the thoroughly broken model of trying to convert Word documents to valid HTML, then we will need to pay far more attention to these supply side techniques.

So, in the meantime, we need to focus on:

• semantic markup
• seo
• folksonomies, and last but most importantly
• validate your pages.

All these techniques will address the symptoms, but to get to the heart of the issue will require a more fundamental and profound change.

Conclusion

The exponential growth in the amount of content on government websites should be viewed as an opportunity to transform the namespace by creating social and economic value. There isn’t much point talking about the long tail if it is squashed under a fat rump of poorly marked up, irrelevant and dated or superseded content…

Photo: singleframe.

If you haven’t used del.icio.us before, this video will provide you with a pretty good introduction to what should be a standard tool for a public sector communicator.

Other uses for del.icio.us

Aside from sharing bookmarks with your colleagues, there are a couple of other ways to use this service that might be of some benefit.

Media clippings

Still photocopying or clipping media articles and storing them in a filing cabinet somewhere? Why? Save them all to a social bookmarking site and, apart from saving yourself hours of drudgery, you will have an online database of clippings that can not only be tagged, making it a far more efficient system that you are likely to have in place now, but can be syndicated via RSS or exported to HTML and backed up.

Another advantage of these services is that, now the mainstream media is all online, you can bookmark video. But I would recommend that if you want to start saving video from the local news sites, you upload your own copies to YouTube; the concept of persistent URLs seems to be anathema to the local broadcasters.

Links for media releases

Part of the social media release template is a specific del.icio.us page featuring links to related material. This is particularly useful in the public sector where we have to be careful about linking to commercial web pages. Rather than host a list of links on your agency site, you can store these links in del.icio.us and point people to that page. As an example, you can see the e-government links for Google.

Reference database

I found this ingenious use of del.icio.us via delineator, a tranche of Parliamentary Questions relating to specific topics saved by kiwimp.

Unfortunately, this highlights one of the problems with this method. All of the bookmarks in kiwimp’s account point to the old Clerk of the House site and there doesn’t appear to be a sufficient level of detail in the redirect table to the new Parliament site, so every link painstakingly saved, tagged and annotated by kiwimp is broken.

Still, a brilliant idea. You could easily save, for example, all the legislation relevant to your agency and use tags to categorize it to increase it’s discoverability and usability. Or all your PQs, Minister’s media releases and speeches, videos, whatever.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are an invaluable tool for public relations professionals, whether working in the public or private sectors. The ability to save and tag countless web pages and share them with others that follow the same interests cannot be underestimated.

Similarly, seeing what other people are saving under tags you are interested in supports your ability to track issues and follow conversations that you might otherwise miss.

More experienced users of del.icio.us may want to have watch this Jon Udell screencast for a more detailed look at the power of social bookmarking.