Change management is often most closely associated in the public sector with machinery of government changes or internal departmental restructuring. However, it can just as easily be required as a result of changes in the external environment. It could be new legislation, a crisis of some sort, or it may be – as is the case with social media – a social and cultural change.

The transformation of New Zealand’s public management system is, for example, essentially a change management programme for the State Services:

Organizational Change Management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. Organizational Change Management is characterized by a shift in behaviors and attitudes in people to adopt and embrace the future state.
Wikipedia

Public sector agencies coming to terms with the impact of social media on their staff, their policies and their external and internal engagement programmes can similarly be thought of in these terms; shifting behaviours and attitudes to this future state.

The change

According to the Wikipedia article, going by the comments on this blog and the discussions I have with most of you, it would not be unfair to characterize most of the public sector in the ‘unfreezing’ state:

It involve(s) overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing “mindset”. Defense mechanisms have to be bypassed.

One expression of this change is the various guerilla activities that are happening in the social media space. These vary from Ministry Facebook groups through to full-blown (and successful) implementations.

Another indicator that I have discussed before is the changing nature of the media landscape, and in particular the emergence of Google as the largest, most profitable and practically omnipresent player in this space.

The plan

How do we manage the change? Simple. It is about moving from the current state to a future state, in a structured, organized way.

Naturally, you will need a strategy. Essentially, this will be a plan that assists your organization take the manageable, moderated steps necessary to evolve over a period of years into a model Govt 2.0 agency.

Begin with an audit. Develop as comprehensive a picture as possible of all of the social media touchpoints in your agency. Does your agency have a Wikipedia page? A del.icio.us account? YouTube channel? Who in your agency is already blogging? Are there people already commenting and engaging in fora (even if not necessarily relevant to your business)?

Find a champion. Every change management programme needs a senior manager as a sponsor. Try and avoid the CIO for this role as it may reinforce the misconception that this is just about technology — its not, it’s about behavioural change.

Agree on the future state. Make sure that everyone from the sponsor down has a clear conception of where you are going, and the steps that you will take to get there. The reality for most public sector agencies is that this will be a modest vision…

Measure your inputs, outputs and outcomes. This will enable you to accurately report progress towards the future state and to tweak your plan accordingly.

Seize opportunities to bind the change into other organizational initiatives. Use an internal blog in concert with your employee engagement programme; launch a wiki as a knowledge base for staff inductions; podcast your staff talks. By including social media in your people and organizational development activities, you are effectively building capability for the future state.

Conclusion

Pitching the integration of social media into your agency’s internal and external engagement and communications programmes as a change management strategy won’t guarantee you traction with senior management (see the quote above about inertia and defense mechanisms). It doesn’t hurt, however, to have these conversations in a language that managers are comfortable with and connects more purposefully with the organizational goals – rather than focusing on the technology or the tools.

Photo: David Reece

Some background. PageRank is the patented algorithm that Google uses to determine where your page sits on the return page of a search query. This means that a high page rank is, potentially, a very lucrative commodity:

It can be an effective and viable marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of quality and relevant sites to drive traffic and increase a webmaster’s link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned webmasters that if they are or were discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring PageRank and reputation, their links will be devalued (ignored in the calculation of other pages’ PageRanks).
Wikipedia.

As Darren and many others found out this week, Google’s warning went from a bark to a bite. It seems there was a PageRank update and Google decided to penalize those who were selling links.

Fair enough, you say. In the same week that saw research released showing 7 out of 10 American’s experience search engine fatigue, who doesn’t want to see link farms torched?

Incidentally, the reality of search engine fatigue for the average user is not to be underestimated:

More than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking – either “always,” “usually” or “sometimes.”
search engine land.

However, as Mashable pointed out with their wonderfully titled post, Three Clicks to Spam: Google’s Hypocritical Link Selling Policy, it is a little rich for Google to take the high road when they are turning record profits doing exactly this. AdWords anyone?

Now, in terms of reputation management, antagonizing high profile bloggers by threatening their income is probably not the smartest move for any organization — unless you are Google. Third quarter earnings of $4.23billion and a virtual monopoly on search apparently mean you can pretty much ignore the whole thing.

That’s right. Despite the fact they run dozens of corporate blogs, Google just toughed this one out. Not a peep. Both the Official Google Blog and the Webmaster Central Blog studiously ignored the issue. There may have been official comment through another channel, but I couldn’t find it (search engine fatigue, alas).

Darren finished the week with nice post capturing the lessons that he learned, but despite him getting his page rank back, for me the story was a more cautionary tale.

Google is the 800lb gorilla and, despite their vaunted motto, the extent to which we rely on search – and on linking strategies, means that you would hope for a slightly more transparent and engaged approach from them in these circumstances.

Perhaps more terrifying though, is the other finding from the fatigue research; 78 percent of all survey-takers wished Google could read their minds. Apparently the respondents are unaware that they can already do this…

So I have developed a couple of arguments that I wheel out — to wildly varying effect. The first I ran through recently, and it is one that appeals to those managers that like to deal in statistics. Painting them a picture of the numbers of people using social media generally helps them to visualize the enormity of the change and, with any luck, will help you to focus their attention on the need to adapt to these changes.

There are two others that I also fall back on. The first is inspired by Charles Darwin and the second by very large primates.

Darwinism

Today, New Zealanders – both here and offshore – can choose to receive all of their mass media content via the Internet. They can listen to Radio New Zealand streamed live to anywhere in the world, access newspapers via their websites or, even better, via RSS feeds to their desktops or personalised home pages, watch TV shows (including downloading torrents of programmes that are not scheduled to appear on NZ TV for months, if at all).

Not only is it possible to access all of this content via the Internet, but in almost every case, you can access it when you want to. In other words, you don’t have to listen to Mediawatch on Sunday morning, you can download the podcast and listen to it on the train home on Monday evening. You don’t need to wait for the DomPost to land on your driveway to read the latest breaking news and you certainly don’t have to wait for distributors to determine when you can watch the latest Batman film.

Now, faced with these realities, how long do you think it will be before everybody (or at least those people with access to broadband) just give up on the old model entirely? It is already extinct, it is just that the body still seems warm to the touch…

That is natural selection at work.

The 800lb Gorilla

Ask most comms people who they think is the largest media player in New Zealand and you will get a variety of answers. Fairfax. Independent News & Media. News Corporation. CanWest. Yet, apart from Murdoch’s News Corp, none of these companies is in the same financial league as Google: and Google is currently significantly more profitable than News Corp.

And it is not just the financial weight of Google (although you would be naive to ignore it), when you also consider that all of the content that the other media players produce can be served up through Google search – complete with their advertising, you begin to see how important understanding Google is. Understanding how it works, in terms of SEO and more importantly, in terms of reputation management.

Conclusion

These aren’t intended as knockout arguments, rather they are designed to start people thinking about the changes to the media landscape and how that will affect their business. As communications professionals, it is up to us to ensure that senior managers are briefed on what this will mean for our organisations and how we can take advantage of these changes or mitigate against some of the risks.

Whatever course of action we decide on, one thing is clear: complacency is not an option.

How did they fare? Poorly.

When I opened MSN the first thing I saw was a warning:

Additional plugins are required to display all media on this page. Install missing plugins now…

That is a great start: do I want to install something else onto my machine just to view your content? I don’t think so. As a consequence, a significant part of my screen was blank, so I can’t really give you an accurate assessment of the content that they are providing for their visitors — at least those that have the requisite plugins installed.

Both MSN and Yahoo!Xtra weigh in at a hefty page size: 364KB and 354KB, respectively. That means that for Kiwis accessing these pages using dialup, they are in for a wait of around 90 seconds for the pages to load. A minute and a half to load: make it my homepage? Sure, what else am I going to do with my time?

This is particularly ironic given Yahoo is partnering Telecom on this venture. As we have recently seen, New Zealander’s access to broadband is not a given.

Following my look at mobile access to government sites, I decided to put these portals to the same test. Surely the big corporates are far more aware of this stuff than the public sector and will be much better positioned to deliver content over the phone (especially when you consider how much Telecom have to gain)? In a word, no.

Neither had skip links, and both served up big irrelevant images. Yahoo! acknowledged this was a problem by including a message that told me:

Please upgrade to a more recent browser: Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 or Safari 1.2

My message back to them: Please upgrade to a more user-centric approach to web development.

I will, however, acknowledge that at least Yahoo! offers RSS feeds from their portal, which increases the utility of the site, sort of.

Conclusions

Looking at both sites really made me ask myself one question: why would you bother? If you want a portal, customise your Google homepage and build your own (you can even set it up to work on your phone).

These two offerings are for people who don’t understand the web, have incredibly low expectations about what sites should be delivering and have no physical or technological handicaps. Anyone else taken either for a spin and come up as disappointed?

In previous posts about reputation management, I have written about how once something is published to the web, it is there for good. Google never forgets. Consequently, your strategy for dealing with an issue in the social media space needs to reflect this reality. It needs to inform the way you respond, and the channels you use.

The first lesson that we can take from this is that agencies need to be engaged in this space. Your publics are already there: join them. Don’t be left out of the conversation. If you are present and contributing, then you are a) building up a relationship and enhancing your reputation and credibility, and b) able to respond quickly and appropriately, because you will understand both the medium and the community.

The news that CYF have approached Google about taking down the blog is – from my perspective – an odd tactic. Even if Google were to comply (which seems highly unlikely) it doesn’t remove the content from the web. Secondly, it is likely to engender more negative feeling, not less. And, if anything, it is likely to reinforce the appearance for some that the accusations may have some merit.

The other important point that I think we should consider is that, in the work that public servants do, we will make mistakes. While we all work to ensure that these are minimised, there will be times (especially when you consider the powers invested in some agencies) when those mistakes will have a significant, and potentially traumatic, impact upon the lives of New Zealanders. We need to do as much as possible to ensure that we retain the trust of the public to exercise these powers fairly, and we need to effectively communicate with them about the ways in which we are upholding that trust.

The blog critical of CYF is a good example of a situation that has obviously spiralled way out of control. Opening up new lines of communication, engaging with public across a variety of media particularly those that support transparent dialogue means that some of these situations can be averted before they reach a crisis point. And those that do escalate to a crisis can be more effectively managed.

The people we serve are choosing, in increasing numbers, to use social media. We need to be engaging them on their terms.

What really got me, however, was a quote in the front of the paper that, given my recent comments about reputation management [here and here], really resonated.

Your brand is no stronger than your reputation – and will increasingly depend on what comes up when you are Googled.
Allan Jenkins

This really impressed me. Given that once an issue becomes part of the conversation in the blogosphere, there is no way that you can roll it back. And Technorati are now putting the number of blogs at more that 57 million, which is a tremendous amount of potential Google juice.

So in order to effectively manage your reputation in this environment, you have to:

1. be aware of what is happening – at a minimum monitor the conversations,
2. be engaged in the conversation: have a presence and be credible, and
3. proactively manage your reputation by representing the values your agency espouses.

This means that, if your agency does drop the ball, you have some credibility in this space, which translates as reputation ‘credits,’ you are engaged so you can respond early (and disclose everything), and – in the very distant future – it is less likely that when someone googles your agency, the first couple of returns won’t be a painful reminder of how ineptly you managed a particular issue…

…act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender’s modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

My first reaction on reading this was w00t! I’m in the clear you are kidding, right?. Then, upon more considered reflection, I decided they were not and, while RD are unlikely to crack the sort of Web 2.0 jackpot that YouTube managed, they will probably do very nicely preying on that wonderful mix of human frailty that is a combination of gullibility and youthful indiscretion.

We all have had those moments that we would like to forget or, more importantly, have forgotten. Unfortunately, now many of those moments are published on the web, generally courtesy of people we loosely refer to as “friends”. Now, thanks to the good people at RD, you can rest easy, knowing that those pictures of you and your colleague doing the “lambada” at the christmas party will no longer appear when you egosurf.

Apparently, the business case for the firm rests on the interesting statistic that

26 percent of hiring managers say they have used search engines to research potential employees, and one in 10 has looked on a social networking website.

26 percent? I would have thought that would be a conservative estimate. If I was in HR, I would pretty much restrict my quality control to googling – why deal with the mundane (ie, actually reading the rank fiction that is passed off as a resumé or the fulsome praise of an employer who is only too keen to offload a freeloader) when you can cut straight to the tawdry and the scandalous?

Will this service really help anyone? Who knows. Why should we care? It is about reputation management -albeit an odd sort of retroactive variant- and it is a reminder of the changing environment in which we work.

Oh, and for the record, as I have noted before, in the age of Google, once it is posted, it is there for good. So before you hit Enter, make sure that you are happy for whatever it is to stay there for a long, long time…

If you are still feeling your way around the new media, trying to determine how much is hype and how much will have a significant impact on the way you do your job, then I would recommend that you listen to this podcast. Cameron Reilly, the founder of The Podcast Network, interviews Paull Young, an Aussie blogger, podcaster and PR professional.

During the course of a long (and OK, at times, rambling) conversation, both Paull and Cameron make a number of very astute observations about the impact of podcasting and blogging on public affairs. What they have to say about the changing nature of corporate communications, and the different approaches required to adapt to these changes, is just as applicable to the public sector as it is to the private.

In fact, given the incredible proliferation of these media, and the increasing amount of traffic in the channels, I think that you can only ignore (at the least) monitoring them at your peril. The immediacy and rapidity with which an issue can arise and achieve a critical mass of comment and profile within the blogosphere – and as Paull points out, once it is out there it is with your Google rank forever – means that if you adopt a traditional approach and wait for it to hit the MSM, then it is too late: the damage has been done and, at least in terms of Google, it is pretty much irrevocable.

So, for those of us toiling away in the public sector, it is not so much a case of rush out and start a blog, or convince your chief executive that she needs a podcast, rather I think that it is critical that we first a) understand these media, and b) monitor them and -where necessary- participate in the conversation. Once you have cleared it with Legal, of course…

Podcasting?

For information on podcasting, start with Podcast Expert. If you just want to figure out how to play the link to the podcast above, the info halfway down this page should see you right.