Launching a blog or wiki is easy – it is literally a matter of minutes, not hours. The real cost, or rather the investment, is in ensuring the regular flow of quality content and in moderating and participating in the resulting conversations.

In this post I won’t look at the issue of generating quality content to a merciless deadline, for two reasons. If this hasn’t already occurred to you then your social media strategy is in the sort of shape that no amount of further commentary will salvage and, secondly, producing non-quality content –but doing it with clockwork regularity– has always worked for me…

Moderation

I touched on this when I wrote the principles for public sector social media:

6. Timeliness: post regularly and be prepared to engage people when it suits them. This may mean checking comments or making edits after work hours and on weekends — be prepared to make that effort.

This may seem difficult for some senior public servants to grasp, but the reality of engaging with social media is that it can’t be restricted between 8:30 and 5:00.

An example: when we first dipped our toe in the water earlier this year, with a guest post on Public Address, the post went up on Thursday and, inevitably, the comments continued over the weekend, effectively leaving us out of the conversation. Not particularly well planned on our part…

This is will be less of an issue for younger public servants who are permanently plugged into the matrix. They will have comments forwarded to their Gmail accounts (aka nerve center) which they will access via mobile devices, meaning they can clear comments on the fly, day or night.

Of course, it is not just about moderating and responding to comments in a timely fashion, it is also about managing the volume of contributions. The Police Act Review wiki I posted about last week was very quickly overwhelmed by the volume of contributions, resulting in it being shut down only days after it was launched.

Adequate resourcing for moderation, related to both time and volume, definitely needs to be factored into the planning of public sector social media sites.

Participation

Again, when I posted the principles I recommended that agencies think about more than just their own sites when they utilize social media:

9. Participation: don’t just focus on your site and expect your publics to find, engage and maintain a conversation. Get out among similarly oriented communities and participate there. Post comments, email other bloggers and recognize that your site is only part of the solution.

This is time intensive. You not only have to respond to people that visit your site and leave comments or edits, you will need to follow any trackbacks to other blogs and, perhaps, comment there.

You will need a good understanding of the other social media sites covering your particular niche, and you will need to develop relationships with some of them. Don’t underestimate how much time this involves. Colin at SoSaidThe.Organization has an excellent post on public sector blogger outreach that captures the complexity of this part of your strategy.

This is compounded by the fact that, as a government agency, you will also need to be much more discriminating about which other sites you link to as, all disclaimers aside, linking is a form of endorsement.

Conclusion

Social media, like blogs and wikis, offer public sector communicators tremendous opportunities to more effectively engage with their publics. The (apparent) simplicity of the tools and the ease with which they can be deployed can mask some of the real costs of using these tools in the ways that those same publics will expect that you use them.

I would be interested in the views of those readers who are not public servants as to what your expectations are around the government’s use of social media. Do you expect 7 day a week moderation and responses to your comments? Prompt attention to trackbacks and engagement in distributed conversations? Or are you happy with glide time?

Photo: Eduard.

Please note, I am only covering corporate projects here, if you are a public servant and you want to start your own blog, then these may apply, but the advice is intended for government public affairs staff working on their agency projects.

There are 10 principles to consider:

1. Sovereignty: do not use an (external) hosted solution, eg blogger. If this is an agency initiative, then you should host the site in the .govt.nz namespace. I would recommend WordPress, as a powerful, extensible and semantic publishing platform. It is also open source, so it is free and easy to deploy, meaning there is no significant cost to the taxpayer to set up.
2. Access: the site must be Government Web Standards compliant. If it is funded by the taxpayer, then it should be accessible to all New Zealanders. This is another good reason for choosing WordPress as your solution.
3. Transparency: make it very clear who is posting (do not claim that your CE is writing the posts if they are being ghostwritten by you and your team), and how to contact them, online and off. This is one instance where you are not an anonymous public servant. Similarly, (and I know I don’t need to tell you this) no flogs, astroturf or sockpuppets.
4. Trust: do not disclaim the content on the blog/wiki/podcast etc. If you are engaging your publics through these media they should be able to expect a straightforward exchange of ideas and information. If your Legal team intend on vetting every post, the venture is doomed.
5. 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.
6. Timeliness: post regularly and be prepared to engage people when it suits them. This may mean checking comments or making edits after work hours and on weekends — be prepared to make that effort.
7. Openness: share content that is an honest reflection of your thinking and position. Don’t set up a social media channel to broadcast your risk-averse, legal-approved and comprehensively qa’ed copy. Remember, this is about engaging people, not boring them into apathy…
8. Ethics: respect what you can legitimately say about your agency/project in public. No matter how small you think your audience, once you hit the ‘publish’ button your content is in the public domain. Make sure you don’t surprise your Minister this way…
9. Participation: don’t just focus on your site and expect your publics to find, engage and maintain a conversation. Get out among similarly oriented communities and participate there. Post comments, email other bloggers and recognize that your site is only part of the solution.
10. Integrity: at all times measure your actions against the Code of Conduct. If you think that you are close to the line with a post, or a comment, check with someone who has some distance from the issue — or hold off posting for overnight. Once it is published, there is no taking it back.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. In most cases we are just talking about common sense and sound judgement. It is probably not an exhaustive list either, so if you have suggestions, please add them in the comments.