Tag Archives: Social media

Embracing failure

While chatting with Matt Lane last week about what New Zealand examples of social media in the public sector we should add to the Government 2.0 Best Practice Wiki (a terrific initiative launched by Mike Kujawski, a Canadian public servant consultant) it occurred to me that by only including successes when we discuss with other [...]

Election 2008

In case you had missed it, the Prime Minister announced yesterday that the country will go to the polls on November 8. That puts us, public servants, fairly and squarely in the pre-election period. What does that mean? For public sector communicators there are a couple of issues that we should consider.
SSC has guidance on [...]

The future of communications

For the last couple of months I have been focusing on (what I hope has been) a less technical and more strategic approach to public sector communications; with a particular emphasis on using change management as the context for understanding what social media and govt 2.0 mean for our agencies.
This has been motivated partly by [...]

Social media & change management

Reading and responding to the comments left on the last couple of posts had me returning to a question that I have wrestled with periodically over the last year or two: how do you convince senior management of the need to begin planning for online engagement? One tactic that occurred to me is to use [...]

Rate your agency

As we approach the end of the financial year, public servants (with varying degrees of apprehension) start to turn their minds to their performance reviews. And while typically this is when you demonstrate your unswerving devotion to the cause and highlight the prodigious efforts you have been making throughout the year, it is also an [...]

Social media metrics

Last week, while looking at the effectiveness of microformatting government media releases, the vexed issue of metrics reared it’s head. Vexed, because it is an ongoing issue for communicators, public sector and otherwise, to collate and report communcations metrics; even more so for the newer social media tools.
The sense of dissatisfaction I felt with my [...]

Public sector wikis

Chris Wilson posted an interesting article on Slate last week, The Wisdom of the Chaperones, that uses some interesting data on Wikipedia and Digg contributors to look critically at the notion of the wisdom of the crowd.
Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are [...]

Blog Open Week

This week it is your opportunity to put the social in social media
When I started this blog, there were two primary reasons that drove me to the keyboard week in and week out and, after a period of reflection, I have decided that I haven’t been at all successful in the second. And while I [...]

Online reputation management

Andy Oram wrote a post on Friday that triggered some thoughts of my own about reputation management, and how public sector communicators can approach this issue. Oram attended a Yale symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace and has since been providing thorough coverage and analysis.
What I found interesting about his first post (he has posted [...]

The limits of sovereignty

When I first posted about the principles for public sector social media, sovereignty was the first of the ten principles I discussed because, once you have decided that you need to incorporate social media into your communications plan, the next most important decision is where you host the project. The answer at the time was, [...]