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.

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.