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.

Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are the product of the dedicated minority.

In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.
Chris Wilson

Unlike Wilson, I have no problem with the flimsy veneer of democracy being peeled back from these sites, as I am not particularly interested in the ideology of social media; but the reality of maintaining Wikipedia does provide some salient lessons for public sector organizations seeking to implement these content management systems.

Resourcing

The first point that these findings suggest is that while the wiki will cost (virtually) nothing to set up, it does require dedicated resource to make it a success. This would be in the form of staff whose statements of accountability include curatorial responsibility for the content, and software that supports them in this role.

Some of the tasks that they might be entrusted with range from flagging redundancies, locking pages and migrating content into other wikis or the enterprise document management system, archiving superseded content, through to jointly managing the taxonomic structure of the site.

Without these sorts of controls, particularly over an extended period of time, you run the risk of, at best, the quality and discoverability of the content will inevitably degrade, and the worst case is that you breach the Public Records Act.

Documentation

Just because it is a social media project, doesn’t mean that you can avoid your due diligence. Terms of Reference spelling out the objectives, governance and – most importantly – your content management strategy. That’s right: what are you going to do down the track with this thing? Is it a case of just install and leave it for the next generation to deal with? Or assess after 18 months, migrate everything useful into another platform and archive the lot?

The other, perhaps equally important, benefit of documentation is that you can share it. If your agency does start experimenting with wikis, then it would helpful for your peers if as much of what you did, learned and, if necessary, bungled could be made available, so we avoid the costs of multiple agencies figuring this out for themselves.

One other point about the paperwork: in terms of selling the project to senior management, having robust documentation will get you a lot further than a Govt 2.0 elevator pitch. If that documentation includes another agency’s post-implementation review and/or final assessment of their project, you are making it as easy as practicable for them to agree.

Conclusion

Providing clarity for your organization about what the wiki will (and won’t) be used for, who will be responsible for managing it to success and how they will be supported in that role, should be a methodical and deliberate process.

If we expect to see these tools become part of the standard enterprise suite for public sector agencies in the immediate future, then we need to manage their initial implementations with particular care and attention to detail — and resist the temptation built into the utility of the product to just fire them up and hope for the best.

It is tempting to look at the rise of social media and assume that government is singularly unprepared to meet the challenges that the (socially) connected workplace have delivered to us. And if you restrict your field of vision to the technology, there is a good case to be made.

However, viewed in the context of the ongoing evolution of the public management system, here in New Zealand anyway where I believe we have a good record of evolving and developing in response to these environmental pressures, it is a much more tractable problem. It is the speed of that adaption that is the central issue.

The wave

As the Pew report points out, (online) social networking is not some novel behaviour that, along with rounded corners and reflective logos, arrived with Web 2.0. Usenet, bulletin boards and discussion lists provided media for this sort of activity as soon as people started connecting computers to each other. What has changed for organizations is the volume of participation.

As it has become increasingly painless to network online – you no longer require any real technical know-how, just an email address and some self-belief in the significance of your opinions – more of us are doing it. It is inevitable that this trend would extend to public sector employees, particularly the digital natives.

To give you a (purely anecdotal) picture of the change, in 2006 I had roughly four of five agency queries about social media, for that year. From late 2007 to today, I am averaging about one a week.

The strategy gap

The problem, as such, is not that public sector organizations are not adapting to the change; the fact that there is so much interest in understanding social media is a good indication they are. The problem is the rate at which they are adapting, and the consequences of that lag.

Government agencies naturally have a long-term strategic view; this is driven by statutory as well as practical considerations. The Statement of Intent looks forward three years, as do business plans and budgets. How many of you, given the chance, would have written social media into your business plans in 2005/06?

The tension we are all experiencing now, between the early adopters in agencies who expect to be able to use these networks as a matter of course and management struggling to understand and adapt to the shadow workplace, is an expression of the conflict between a shifting strategic perspective and tactical imperatives.

Managers are trying to adapt their strategy within a set of, in the immediate term, unforgiving constraints – like, for example, the Public Records Act and other accountability structures, and simultaneously manage the demands of tactical and operational contingencies that are reactions to, in most cases, ‘guerilla’ implementations that begin their cycle outside the corporate framework.

Let me give you an example (if you are still reading after that last paragraph, you have earned it): managers in Agency X discover that an enthusiastic employee has set up a Facebook group for the staff. They are now using it to communicate with each other across the geographically dispersed organization, to share knowledge and to build social and professional relationships.

Tactically, it is providing some value. Strategically, it is a nightmare. Why? There is no defined purpose, no exit strategy and, from a risk management point of view, they couldn’t have picked a worse application. It is, putting it quite conservatively, a crisis waiting to happen…

On the other hand, what this requires of managers is a rethinking of their strategic approach. They need to begin planning immediately to migrate the behaviour (which, to be clear, is both inevitable and desirable) to a medium, or possibly media, that is consistent with the security, legislative and cultural norms of the public sector. But, even with complete management support and the requisite funding (ie., in a perfect world) that won’t happen in a hurry. That’s your strategy gap in action.

And this sort of thing is not restricted to a few agencies, it is happening all over the public sector.

Change management

Public sector managers should all be conversant and comfortable with change. To narrow the strategy gap, what needs to happen is for senior managers to recognize that social media are a symptom of a wider cultural change, and to begin revising their strategies accordingly. Agencies should begin to consult, communicate and involve staff in the process now, because if the gap widens too much, our people will —literally— leave us behind.

As I noted at the outset, this doesn’t require any specialized management knowledge or technical skill; it is just another expression of the (hopefully commonplace) need to constantly manage change. What it does require, however, is a sense of urgency, a willingness to engage and a focus that is on people, rather than technology.

Photo: iMorpheus

Thompson wants to examine the view that the relationship between the media and the public sphere is damaged and that this is contributing to declining levels of trust in public institutions. He does this, perversely but perhaps understandably, by looking at a public media institution, the BBC.

Quoting Tony Blair, Thompson wonders whether the British media’s ferocity is a contributing factor:

It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.
Blair’s speech to Reuters

I am sure few public sector communicators were surprised by these comments. We all have our moments with the media. As we should. Democracy thrives on scrutiny. I wouldn’t want to live and work in a society where the media didn’t –or couldn’t– look critically at the government. As Thompson says:

One of the tasks of a free press is to uncover public malfeasance. The media is right to be alert to it and to pursue and investigate any evidence that it is taking place.

He is also right when he notes later that it is under this sort of intense scrutiny that a politician (and it applies equally to institutions) is in the best position to build trust and confidence in their performance:

[...] it’s in the big and sometimes tough interviews that you really build credibility and public confidence.

Quality

However, the underlying assumption here is the quality of the journalism. And this is the issue that, for me, seems to be central to any understanding of the role of the media in the trust people have in their public institutions.

Firstly, rigorous scrutiny should always be part of an open and objective inquiry. Shrinking media ownership (and newsrooms) has meant, to this avid news consumer, a move away from studied, investigative and local stories to the production of content that is more readily syndicatable to the other parts of the media franchise. What translates in all markets? Scandal, crime and, occassionally, human interest pieces with quirky angles.

Thompson is right about the tough interviews building credibility, but how often do we actually see those sorts of exchanges? Perhaps the British media are chock full of that sort of content but in the antipodes it is a much rarer occurrence. When he talks about the BBC’s commitment to make more space for ideas about policy and policy choices just reinforces the dearth of that sort of programming here.

Influence

Secondly, trust in public institutions, and indeed in the mainstream media, is now not just dependent upon the same. The democratization of the means of publishing content has seen a flourishing of commentary and critique (much of it well informed) about the way the news is reported, packaged and delivered to us. In fact, many people now trust blogs more than conventional media as a reliable source of information.

With the increasing accessibility of alternative commentary and criticism, people are becoming more literate readers/interpreters of news and what Thompson disingenuously disparages as scepticism (the ET argument is truly specious), for me, epitomizes this profound shift away from reliance upon a single, authoritative ‘medium of record.’

Trust

How does this affect trust in public institutions? As I noted above, the media are critical to a healthy democracy; it does not follow, however, that they are necessarily the dominant part of the trust equation. This is a function of a more complex relationship with our publics, one that is primarily the result of direct experience. As I said last year, trust is:

the fundamental social and political legitimacy that we have to keep earning every day.
Online reputation management

Part of that process is media relations. A small part. Most of the work is in successfully dealing with the multitude of engagement opportunities that your organization has every day, online and off.

Closing thoughts

At 18 pages (I had to print it out, there is no way I can read 6,000 words on screen), and given he is a broadcaster, you would hope that it would be written for the ear not the eye. Alas, no. There are no concessions for the ear, nor use of rhetoric; no repetition or stories, indeed nothing as fundamental as a key message. It is both abstract and prolix. Don’t ever write a speech like this; nothing will diminish trust in government more than subjecting an audience to this sort of ordeal.

There is one other egregious error. Thompson posts the transcript to the blog with this introduction:

The full text of my speech is below and I’d be interested to know what you think about it.

That may be so, but despite 34 people (as of this post going up) sharing their thoughts, Thompson himself is absent from the conversation. If you are trying to build trust, then perhaps it might be worth your while engaging with the audience whose thoughts you are professing an interest in hearing.

Photo: SeenyaRita

Once a decade or so, you happen across a piece of communications work that is so audacious in its conception, so consummate in its execution and so dazzling in its strategic vision that there is no response more appropriate than a stunned, slack-jawed silence.

This video has that presence. For me, it is far and away the most compelling content created by public sector communicators in, well, as long as I care to remember. It is the work of the Singapore government’s Media Development Authority and I urge you to take four and a half minutes out of your day to sit back, pump up the volume and gawp.

One further point: I haven’t actually managed to make it to the end of the video, but I am convinced that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant must be credited as the executive producers…

[RSS readers click through for the video]

On that note, I’ll wish you all a safe break. Transmission will resume in mid-January.

Hat tip: Red

What I found interesting about his first post (he has posted two more on the topic with the fourth to come) Reputation: where the personal and the participatory meet up was that the discussion (so far) is limited to individuals; the implications of what online reputations mean for organizations doesn’t feature. So I thought I might explore some of those implications, particularly as they relate to government agencies.

Before I get to the 3-step approach to a reputation management, it might be worth pausing to consider what exactly we mean by an agency reputation. I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with the definition Andy derives from the symposium, at least not in a public sector context:

reputation can be seen as a market in which people invest in reputation, store it, exchange it, and expend it as necessary for other goods.

My take on it is that reputation is a product of the degree of trust that your publics have in your agency. It is not an end in itself — and it is certainly not something that we are in a position to trade. Public sector agencies have public monies and public authority ceded to them by the citizens of the state. The extent to which we effectively manage that money and authority determines the level of trust that the citizens have in their public institutions; reputation is one expression of that degree of trust.

Other expressions of trust may be, for example, the willingness to comply with taxation policies, to engage in public consultations or elections or to participate in the census. None of which, in a functioning democracy, you would want to see compromised…

The 3 Steps

A public sector communicator’s job consists in part as being the curator of their agency’s trust. While their fellow managers have responsibility for the effective discharge of the public’s money and authority, the communicator is responsible for ensuring that this is transparent to that authorizing public.

Within this framework, what then can a public sector communicator do to effectively manage their agency’s online reputation?

Online/offline

Any consideration of an agency’s online reputation must first acknowledge that, no matter how much work you do in cyberspace, most of the transactions that impact upon your reputation will still take place offline. For that reason, you might want to focus your attentions on your internal communications. If you can engage your staff and have them embrace the vision of your agency (and the values of the public service), then you have a solid foundation on which to build your management strategy.

Online, all the time

Your online presence is, for all intents and purposes, ubiquitous. No matter how many people you have in the field, at the counter or behind the wheel, the simple fact of the matter is that your web sites are available 24/7 to anyone, anywhere. Or they should be.

And, as more and more people use their phones and other portable devices to access the Internet, the smart money would be on those agencies that make a strategic investment in exceeding these customers’ expectations.

Not busy, engaged

Social media offer real opportunities, if deployed intelligently, for an agency to engage with it’s publics in ways that are both convenient, transparent and, increasingly, expected by younger citizens who are only just forming their own impressions of what it is like to deal with government agencies.

Conclusion

Ultimately, any and all of these tactics are only ever going to assist you to manage the outputs of your online reputation, not the outcomes. These are contingent upon the nature of the many and complex interactions that your publics have with your agency. However, while you can’t control the outcomes, you are obliged to do your best to manage those elements within your control.

Trust in government is an indicator of a lot more than reputation. It is not just a measure of credibility or a record of successful transactions (the TradeMe model) but is the fundamental social and political legitimacy that we have to keep earning every day.

Photo: sonicbloom

Like Dave, what I found most interesting (and that was a tough call given the amount of dubious and unethical practice this guy was self-servingly touting) was his –and by extension– his firms’ attitude toward moderating comments. The heading gives you a pretty good idea of their contorted approach to the concept of integrity:

Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.
Dan Ackerman Greenberg

You have to respect their self-styled lack of fear in deleting criticism, don’t you? I certainly admire his courage for sharing his venal, duplicitous professional practices with us.

Of course, this is not an isolated instance. It seems the growth in influence of social media is accompanied by an increasing willingness to try and control the message using a lamentably old media mindset, albeit assisted by some very clever technology.

Another blogger details how the San Francisco Chronicle uses software to continue to display deleted comments to the people who posted them, leaving them completely unaware that their views have been hidden from everyone else that visits the site. Subsequent commenters to the post then reveal that other sites are using similar techniques.

All of this has led to the obvious Web 2.0-type social media solution: a forum for people to post their comments that have been censored by moderators on other sites. don’tcensorme.com claims that

Your right to free speech online is at the mercy of website moderators. There are no checks in place for moderators online. This site aims to change that and put the balance of power back in your hands.

I don’t think freedom of speech is really at risk here; it seems more a case of an inept attempt at reputation management by suppressing critical comment. The important lesson to takeaway is that, no matter how devious or cunning you are, your perfidy will be exposed and your reputation will be forever linked (and cached) to the evidence.

For public sector communicators there is more at stake. Agencies cannot afford to risk their reputations like this; we should openly suffer the slings and arrows and attempt to build our reputation by engaging with substantive criticism, rather than deleting dissent:

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.
Principles of public sector social media.

Ultimately, private sector organizations that are exposed behaving unethically will answer to their customers or the market. Government agencies endure; our job is to build trust, not to gamble with it.

Photo: spacesuitcatalyst.

It strikes me as being analogous to saying to someone who approaches you for advice about a specific topic you advertise your expertise in, yeah, I can provide you with advice; but you can’t rely on what I tell you.

Obviously, this sort of stance is even more problematic when you consider that people who approach government agencies for advice don’t –as a rule (of law)– have any other options. If, for example, they need definitive advice about licensing a motor vehicle they have to go to LTNZ.

It is for this reason I argued that the fourth principle for public sector social media should be 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.

Of course, the default position for government websites is to disclaim everything on their sites, often to a point that strains both credulity and, in this one case that I feel compelled to share, logic:

Nothing contained on this website is, nor should be relied on as, a promise or representation about past or future events.

This, to my mind, is so nonsensical it borders on being a zen koan. Let’s pause to think about this for a minute. Nothing on this website is, or can be relied upon as, a formal statement of the facts about past events (paraphrasing from the OED). This presumably includes the advice and the policy that is, mysteriously, published on the site in spite of it’s apparent lack of relation to reality…

The point that I am belabouring here is that, if you are launching a social media project, you would be well advised to avoid this sort of pseudo-prophylaxis. In any event, and I haven’t taken legal advice on this but the comments are open, I doubt whether the standard disclaimers you see on blogs would protect you from the law. What they will protect you from is the sort of trust with your publics that leads to engaged communication.

What you should be disclaiming is the comments or edits contributed by those publics, as they are not the intellectual property of your agency. But for all the other content, if you publish it then own it.

There are two reasons for this. One, it means that visitors to your site will be reassured that the content in the government namespace is authoritative and that your agency stands behind it. That builds trust in government.

The second reason is that the staff who are contributing content to your agency blog/wiki/podcast etc., will be a little more cautious about what they post if it is considered to be definitive. And, in terms of your online reputation management strategy, that is no bad thing.

Photo: prozaciswack.

The focus of the project is to consider:

• how can administrations create long-term strategies that shape society while still being responsive to a changing environment?
• how do administrations identify changes in the environment and what kinds of structures and processes are necessary to respond?

The paper begins by asking what is agility, and puts forward Eric Beinhocker’s argument that agility depends on both hard and soft elements. The hard elements are the institutional or structural systems and there are three changes that can increase an organization’s adaptability/agility:

1. Reduce hierarchy
2. Increase autonomy
3. Encourage diversity

The changes to the soft elements, or cultural norms, are about opening up the organization to experimentation within the framework of a strong and consistent set of values that provide focus and coherence:

1. Create a culture of cooperation
2. Foster a high performance culture
3. Develop a culture of innovation

Taking a step back and looking at the six changes that are proposed, it seems to me that the overall culture that is being described here can be summarized as one of high trust.

Managers would need to give their staff the mandate, the tools and the support to pursue ambitious, innovative and experimental approaches to their policy and service challenges. This latitude would be offset, however, by a clearly understood shared vision or purpose.

Why does this matter? Again, it comes back to trust. As the authors note:

Private markets are offering consumers unprecedented levels of product choice and service responsiveness …[this] certainly creates an expectation that public services should be better attuned to citizen’s wants and needs. If governments cannot keep up, they risk diminishing levels of public trust in their capacity to deliver. Without public trust, the operating legitimacy of public agencies is undermined. (8)

Agile capabilities

The paper then looks at the five capabilities that are entailed by the notion of agile government. Three of these warrant further comment.

Outward-oriented culture

What we refer to in Wellington as the outside/in view. The shift to a more customer/citizen centric view in the public sector is both welcome and, from a communicator’s perspective, overdue. Unfortunately, I would argue that the authors do not go far enough, agencies do not only need to look outwards and scan the environment they need to actively engage with their various publics. Trust is built on two-way interactions.

Workforce adaptability

Yes, we need a versatile and adaptable workforce. Again, this is not just about demands on staff. Managers need to trust their staff to experiment (and to make the occasional mistake) but more importantly, we need to re-engineer our working environment to better match the social norms of the workforce. Digital natives bring a very different world view and skills to the public sector, and we need to respond to their expectations around connectedness and mobility.

Successful use of information

The value of government information can not be underestimated. The potential is not just limited to

the creation of more responsive relationships with citizens, who can now get more information to make their own decisions and use channels such as the Internet to access services. (12)

While this is undoubtedly true, what must also be considered is the (largely untapped) value of social and economic benefit that this information represents, should it be published in an accessible format for people to reuse and mashup.

Conclusion

The authors close the paper by posing five questions, inviting readers to submit their answers/responses to be fed into the next phase of the project.

The provocation questions are:

1. How can government reconcile agility with the inherently slower processes of deliberation and accountability under which the public sector operates?
2. What advantages might government have over other sectors when it comes to scanning, responding and shaping?
3. To what extent are public sector functions aligned, or not, to enable rapid adaptation to changing circumstances?
4. What are government’s most significant constraints against agility and how might these be addressed?
5. What does agile government look like in practice?

I would also put forward another question: how can government move to this platform of enhanced capability without further impact on baseline funding?

Finally, I can’t help thinking that, given the nature of the project, how a much better a blog would have been for enabling transparent feedback and higher quality engagement — a missed opportunity.

Photo: Kwong Yee Cheng.