This week saw another incremental shift as I published the first of these social media releases (SMR) with commenting enabled. Most of you will no doubt be wondering why I have buried the lead (SSC has a blog?), but I figure that there are plenty of other capable people to spread the word.

In any event, IABC has now taken up the leadership of the Social Media Release and, as I will continue to contribute a public sector perspective to the process, I thought that it might be helpful to share some observations about the the impact for SSC of issuing semantic media releases over the past 12 months.

How effective is it?

Naturally, it depends upon where you draw the bottom line: media pick-up, comments, saves to social sites, there are any number of valid approaches to the issue. In most of these cases, however, these releases would have to be judged abject failures.

Another way of making the same point: at the launch I was chatting with a journalist, and I asked him if there was any value in the SMR for him. He stared blankly back. Figuring that I was talking passed him, I tried a more practical tack. Was he finding the del.icio.us links helpful? The reply? What’s delicious?.

Now that doesn’t mean that the del.icio.us links are a waste of time. There are currently six people who have at least a passing interest in what is being bookmarked, it just so happens that none of them work in the local media…

On the other hand, a couple of hours after the portal launch SMR went out, I issued this traditional release about changes to the ICT branch. The result? See for yourself.

Is it worth the candle?

Marking up your releases semantically does impose an overhead. Is that a justified use of resource? I would argue yes. Journalists here may be slow to pick up on the new format, but with every release, you are making an investment in the future capability of the namespace.

If all government news releases were marked up using this format, the newzealand.govt.nz search tool could return search results for all news items restricted to a certain geographic area, or about specific topics, within timeframes etc. These results could in turn be parsed into news feeds for local or topic specific sites (including those outside the .govt.nz domain), thus creating far more public value than an individual agency release buried on its site.

Another point that I have made in the past is that public sector communicators can’t afford to think of metrics solely in terms of media. They are a primary audience, but we have a responsibility to ensure that these news releases are discoverable and accessible by the widest possible constituency.

Conclusion

Whether or not hRelease makes it to a draft microformat stage is really an academic issue for me. I will continue to mark up the releases as semantically as possible and to argue for others to do the same. Yes, you should cover the basics and write sharp, factual and informative news releases. The question you should also be asking yourself is, why don’t I spend at least as much time ensuring that the release is as well crafted semantically as it is grammatically. That just is the reality of communicating in the age of the Internet.

Bob Conrad at The Good, the Bad, the Spin has a great post about why PR people should be using blogs, and it triggered a few thoughts about how we could be using them.

Yes, you can use them as a standard corporate communications tool, either internal or external, in the way that most often springs to mind when people start talking about blogging in the public sector. You can also use this incredible technology in some other more innovative ways.

Internal applications

In addition to the obvious applications like the corporate newsletter or management team meeting digest, there are a couple of other creative uses of a blog for your internal communications.

Issues register

Allow people in your communications or senior management team to post emerging issues. The comms team can also add comments detailing mitigations and tactics and include links to media coverage. Anyone else in your organization (with access) can then add material via the comment function. The blog becomes a chronological record of issues and how they were managed. Once an issue is dead, close the comments and update the post with a summary for the record.

Link blog

Set up a del.icio.us bookmarking account and, using the RSS feeds, syndicate the links (and the notes to each link) to an internal blog. Staff can then subscribe to the blog by RSS or, for those that don’t have this functionality in their agency, via email to receive a list of links relevant to their business.

If you are not using del.icio.us (or a similar tool like Ma.gnolia), I strongly urge you to experiment with it. To get a feel for it, have a look at the State Services Commission’s e-government bookmarks.

External applications

I believe that public sector communicators should trial blogs internally before they make the move to the world wide web, but once you have got your feet wet, you may want to consider some other ways to use this tool.

Crisis management

As Bob notes in his post:

Blogs publish information in real time. It’s obvious to say, but the need to release and respond to information in a timely manner is ever more critical. Organizations that fail to respond quickly to allegations and attacks will in effect be giving tacit approval to their critics’ complaints. Blogs offer a mechanism to respond quickly and affirmatively.
The Good, the Bad, the Spin.

This is never more important than when you are faced with a crisis. Your publics will expect an immediate (online) response and a blog will be far more responsive and versatile in a crisis that a traditional, over-engineered corporate website.

Keep the blog dark while you pre-populate all the pages that you will need: contact details, organizational information, pre-formatted media release templates etc. Then, once the crisis arrives, you flip the switch and you are ready to respond.

Another advantage of a blog in this situation is that you can have multiple authors, updating the blog from anywhere there is Internet or cell phone coverage.

Social media newsroom

Todd Defren, who cooked up the social media release template, has also developed a social media newsroom template and, while it is an excellent template, it may be a little sophisticated for most (New Zealand) government agencies. However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be thinking about ways to maximize the effectiveness of your media releases. Using a blog as your publishing platform will immediately deliver a host of benefits.

It will mean that your media releases are native to the blogosphere, therefore the nature and extent of their take up will be more visible through trackbacks and specialist search engines. The commenting function will lead to much better engagement (if properly managed) and, best of all, you will be more easily able to use the hRelease microformat to mark them up.

Conclusion

Blogging in the public sector is a relatively new discipline, and I am sure there are other obvious applications for the technology that haven’t occurred to me. If you have any suggestions, please drop them in the comments.

The first thing that occurred to me as I began writing the post was that there isn’t much point trying to optimize your pages for search engine spiders unless they are also optimized for all the other User agents, ie., web browsers, handheld devices, screen readers, content aggregators and syndicators etc. In short, SEO is a subset of a wider field of optimization, and an understanding of web standards, particularly HTML, should precede that conversation.

This got me thinking about the level of understanding of HTML among public relations/affairs professionals. After all, it is our job to advise our employers or clients on how to best communicate using the various channels that use the Internet, so surely we should have at least a basic understanding of these media?

Maybe not. Two things happened this week that left me thinking that perhaps this is a naive or overly simplistic view…

First, I was in an agency presentation where a web development company were pitching to redevelop one of our websites. At one point, they showed us a slide where all the acronyms on the page were highlighted (this being a government site, they reasoned, you would want people to be able to understand the acronyms: fair point). However, when I asked how they intended to do this, they said with some javascript. I asked why they wouldn’t just use the acronym element? And, honestly, they just stared blankly at me. They had no idea what I was talking about.

Here is a hint. If you are presenting yourself as a subject matter expert, at least cover the basics.

Then a couple of days later, I saw that another social media release had been put out, and judging by the case study, it was a success. Which is great. However, if you view the source of the release, you will see that the quality of the HTML is, well, quite poor. Invalid, no doctype, full of deprecated markup and meaningless classes.

Why does this matter? The release looks fine in most browsers and none of the other bloggers of media seem to be complaining about the quality (or lack thereof) of the HTML.

It matters because if you are a practitioner of public affairs/relations and you are working in the online space, how can you claim to be a professional if you don’t understand the basic language of the medium? Would you employ a builder that couldn’t read the architect’s drawings?

It matters because valid, semantic markup is accessible to both people and machines. It is optimised for search engines, for browsers and for people, irrespective of how they choose to access or repurpose that information. That is presumably what the author of the case study was aiming for when he said:

So we opted to make the announcement as an SMR, optimizing it’s format for maximum success.
Geoff Livingstone

I don’t want to be overly critical, because I think that it is terrific that people are experimenting with the social media release. Indeed, compared to some of the earlier SMRs that I have looked at, this one is a marked improvement. What I do find amazing is that so much of what communicators are trying to achieve on the Internet is done without consideration of the standards that support this medium.

So, if we are going to have a microformatted social media release, hRelease, then we can start by issuing releases that are valid (x)HTML. Validation is not an end in itself, but it is a pretty good indicator of a disciplined approach, and if we want to be considered professionals, isn’t that something we should all aim for?

Conclusion

If you are going to specialize in online communications or public relations (in the public or private sectors), then you owe it to yourself, you agency and your clients to – as a minimum – be familiar with the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 specifications. The HTML 4.01 spec was published eight years ago: have you read it? Do you think you should?

Rather than just comment from the sidelines, I thought I would prepare and publish a media release as a hRelease, the proposed microformat for the social media release. I hesitate to call this a social media release because –being a government release– it doesn’t look like the templates that have been proposed. However, under the hood, it is very much an attempt (albeit preemptive — hRelease has not yet made it to ‘draft’ status yet) to publish a semantically enhanced media release.

So here it is: just off the shelf, the first New Zealand government hRelease: SSC signs all-of-govt deal for Google boxes.

The real departure from the examples that are already in the wild (one, two and three) is the detail in the markup. If you view the source of these pages, you will see that the content is just jammed into (for the most part) a ratmangle of nested tables, font tags and other cruft that severely undermines the principles of microformatting content in the first place.

Yes, the content should be usable by humans first. For public sector communicators, that means everyone. People using text readers because of vision impairments or people on 28k dialup in Taihape. The content should also be usable by machines, hence the microformatting. Publish it once at the authoritative source (your agency) and ensure that it can be syndicated and reused by whoever chooses to do so with minimum effort.

The Markup

I have tried to use existing microfomat properties and work from the elements for hRelease as outlined by Chris Heuer. It was also a given that the page would validate. The best way to see this is to look at the code:

1. <div class="hrelease">
2. <h2 class="headline"> SSC signs all...
3. <abbr class="dtreleased" title="20070227">February 27, 2007</abbr></span
4. <p>The <span class="fn org">State Services Commission</span> today...

You can see how the content is marked up so as to make it semantically rich. The heading is given the class headline, the agency is marked as "fn org", full name organisation etc, all of which makes the whole document much more usable — for people and for machines. This is critical for search. You could, for example only spider for hrelease results, or for contact details vcard. So within the hRelease, I have added my contact details as an hCard:

1. <p><div class="vcard">Contact:
2. <span class="fn">Jason Ryan</span><br / >
3. <span class="tel">
4. <span class="type">DDI</span>:
5. <span class="value">04 495 2850</span>...

Not only is this format more accessible to people and machines, it is actually usable. There is a Firefox extension that allows you to click on microformatted information in web pages and it will initiate application sequences. So, in the case of hCard, clicking on the microformat will open your address book (in Thunderbird or Outlook, say) and you can save all the information then and there. Geo formatted information will open Google Maps and show you exactly where the place or event is, hCalendar will open your calendar application and allow you to save the event. Pure genius. This functionality will be fully integrated into Firefox 3.

From here on in it gets a bit more opaque, so I should note that the rest of the markup is provisional only, until hRelease makes it to draft and some of the properties are specified.

I wanted to add resources, in this case an image, del.icio.us links and Technorati tags. I dropped the first two into a <div class="links">. A property for the image had already been described in the hCard spec, so that saved some improvisation.

The tags were another matter. I created a <div class="tags"> (I know, crazy eh?) on a best-guess basis, but I am happy to consider alternatives.

That is about the extent of it. Have a look at the release and, bearing in mind that it is a work in progress, let me know where I went wrong. Or just tell me if you think all the extra markup is a complete waste of time…

Updated 22/7/07

After reading this post from the Web Standards Group on the accessibility issues around abbreviations in microformats, I have reworked the code for the most recent e-government hRelease (on new search for newzealand.govt.nz). The dateline now looks like this:

1. <h3 class="dateline"><span class="dtreleased" title="20070717">July 17, 2007</span></h3>

While, not an ideal solution, it does make it more accessible for people using assistive technologies.

Social media release?

This is a media release that is tailored for a world where the environment in which media operate has changed significantly over the last couple of years. Tools like search engines, RSS and social media have together created an online space where news is syndicated and aggregated in ways that make it almost ambient.

The Social Media Release is intended to make it easier on people to identify and share the most important pieces of information with others around the globe while adding their own valuable perspective and/or editorial. It also takes full advantage of HTML, multimedia and the network effects enabled by the Internet by using structured data via the Microformat, which ultimately increases its findability by interested parties – which is ultimately the driving purpose of public relations and the press release specifically.
Chris Heuer

Microformats?

Microformats are simple, standard formats for semantically marking up information, making that information easier to discover and share. Perhaps the best known microformat is hCard, the format for contact information. Using an open data format for this information means that it is discoverable by people and by machines. hCard information can be downloaded and easily saved into your existing contact book, like Outlook or Thunderbird and – more importantly – it can be searched, indexed and syndicated by machines (browsers, web crawlers or custom scripts).

You can see microformatted information in action on Upcoming.org, a social events calendar that spiders and presents hCalendar information, or on Flickr, where all the personal profiles are stored in hCard.

The social media release group are proposing a microformat for media releases, hRelease.

So what?

For public sector communicators there are probably at least two salient points. One, the development of the template and the microformat are a good indication that we should be paying attention to the elements of the format, if not putting out releases this way ourselves: can you really see Ministry X putting out a release with a digg this! link at the bottom?

Two, microformats have tremendous potential. With the launch of the new search technology in 2007, we will have the power not just to index HTML pages, but elements of those pages. So, for example, we could index all the published hCard information in the .govt namespace and then republish/syndicate it any number of ways. Same with hCalendar, or hResume for www.jobs.govt.nz.

By using open data formats, we transform the way government information is published, discovered and shared. It is published once, from an authoritative source, and then can be syndicated and repackaged inside and outside government. It means we stop thinking of government websites as a single repository for agency specific information, and start seeing those sites as part of the publishing vehicle for all-of-government information. Another piece in the mosaic…

That is starting to sound like transformed government to me. Your thoughts?