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

The sense of dissatisfaction I felt with my inability to quantify the benefits of a semantic media release and a series of discussions that I have had with colleagues over the last couple of weeks about reporting and metrics triggered some initial thoughts on this issue. There is also a heightened interest in measuring social media around the blogosphere, John Johansen’s post on social media metrics metaphors over the weekend is a good example.

The framework

In arriving at a workable solution for social media metrics the first point that occurred to me is that we shouldn’t overlook the fact that these metrics are only a small part of the picture. Ideally, what you measure and report against is your total strategy, not just the social media element(s).

The strategy would be assessed against achievement of the outputs in your Statement of Intent. The SOI provides the basic framework for the reporting, this can be further broken down into inputs, outputs and outcomes – and metrics established for each of these categories.

The mechanics of this process are self-evident. Social media inputs, for example, are relatively straightforward: time spent writing content, moderating and interacting with commenters and others, numbers of posts, pages created, or podcast episodes.

Outputs can be similarly reported as comments, subscribers, saves to del.icio.us or diggs, pingbacks, the degree to which your content goes viral (remember, we are talking about government here, so let’s not get too excited…).

Obviously, these metrics will also depend upon where you are in your social media maturity cycle. To borrow the MAIL acronym from David Jones, your inputs and outputs will vary according to whether you are monitoring, interacting or leading. You should always be analyzing…

Outcomes

Proving a causal link between a policy input and an outcome is not something that can be taken for granted. Extending that causal chain to the communications contribution to a business strategy is frequently an even more difficult and tenuous exercise.

How, then, do we approach the more demanding task of determining what outcomes can be reasonably attributed to a subset of that communications strategy, social media activities? One solution is to ensure that you build in solid evaluative criteria from the outset, and link these to the outputs in the SOI.

Measuring the impact of social media initiatives on your organization’s ability to successfully engage with its publics is unlikely to be restricted to a single input or output – it will be multi-dimensional. Ensure that you have a matrix of criteria; aggregation will present a more compelling case.

Photo: PPDIGITAL

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.