[Media release for the Standards, again microformatted]

Fortunately – unless you have a burning desire – you don’t have to read the whole document. You can just use the audience page to read the sections that are relevant to your role type.

I would, however, recommend that you do read as much of the material as possible. The Internet is increasingly important as a delivery tool for content both in terms of government strategic direction and communications/public affairs practice. Understanding how the web works (and why standards are so important) is no different to understanding the printing process, or the media cycle. It is just part of our job.

If the whole web standards thing just leaves you cold, ask yourself this question: would it be considered acceptable to build a government office that had no wheelchair access? Or that was constructed from materials that were known to be of inferior quality? Or only allowed access to the wealthiest and those with the newest technologies?

Websites are no different. Taxpayers are paying for us to build them, so every New Zealander who wants to access the information or services on those sites should be able to do so. Irrespective of their physical location (and available bandwidth) and the technology they are using (assistive or otherwise).

This fundamental right to access is non-negotiable.

I don’t pretend to know anything about the governance arrangements of the swedish state broadcaster, so I can’t comment with any authority on that situation. However, I think it is useful to use this case as a lens to look at what is happening, or would happen here.

There are already a number of public servants blogging (see details of the seminar the Network ran last year), and we are only going to see that number increase in the coming months and years.

So, could a similar thing happen here? I don’t just think it could, I am sure that it will. As we move to adapt to any new technology, there will be inevitable behavioural impacts. The potential of social media to radically alter the status quo should not be lost on communicators. How does your organisation’s media policy deal with the fact that any employee can now publish comment about their employer? Does your organisation have a policy on blogging, or on commenting in public fora by employees?

In 2005, the State Services Commissioner said this:

A more recent online development is the rising number of weblogs (or “blogs”). Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to being part of political campaigns or a company’s business. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author to the collaboration of numbers of writers. Many weblogs allow visitors to leave public comments.

I am concerned about the potential risks blogs can pose. The existing principles of the Public Service Code of Conduct still apply in this very modern medium and State servants should still be very careful that they do not bring the Public Service into disrepute through their private activities.

SSC 2005 Annual Report, my emphasis.

This guidance is pretty clear and straightforward, but it still relies heavily on the judgement of the individual — and there, dear reader, lies the rub. People will make mistakes. They will hit ‘Publish’ without clearly thinking through the implications of the post (god knows, I do…). They may even be completely unaware of their obligations to their employer and the code, particularly if there is no explicit policy about engaging in social media.

How do we manage this?

As public sector communicators, we need to be aware of these issues and we need to ensure that they are understood by the rest of the organisation’s management. If people within your organisation are blogging (and you really should know who they are), talk to them about their blogs, the scope of their involvement in other social media and try to get a feeling for how they see the boundaries to their self-expression.

Experiment in social media. Read and comment on blogs, get involved in communities and conversations so that you become familiar with the environment, the mores and the technology. In order to be able to advise senior management on this stuff, you have to know how it works.

Trial it. Set up a blog as part of an internal communications programme. Think about podcasts as a potential channel for your internal comms. Try using a wiki for your next collaborative initiative. If the channel is strictly internal it will give you (and management) the confidence to see how it works and to identify the benefits and the risks specific to your business.

Acknowledge that it is inevitable. Include social media in your comms strategies even if, at this stage, it is only a part of your environmental scanning. Think about it in terms of the benefits around engagement, and the risks associated with relinquishing control over some of your agency’s communications.

It is also worth thinking about in terms of how you attract and retain excellent state servants. What will the brightest graduates who enter your agency and are networked with their peers through these media think when they sit down in front of their dumb terminal, effectively cut-off from their social networks?