Disregarding the wisdom of issuing categorical imperatives for the moment, time and a little more analysis have led me to reassess my stance on the sovereignty of public sector social media initiatives. In my haste to arrive at a series of principles that would serve as a discussion guide for public sector communicators, I overlooked those instances where government agencies would be well advised to use hosted services.

The most glaringly obvious example is video sharing. It would be a waste of taxpayers’ money to try and replicate a service like YouTube in the government namespace.

The important point to note here is that the content you post to these types of sites is not beyond the control of the Crown. You are only uploading a copy that can be accessed and shared by others. In each case the content that you are ’socializing’ could, and should, remain part of the public record.

Much the same argument could be made for social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or, somewhat less strongly, photo sharing sites like Flickr.

This isn’t intended as (additional) encouragement to start creating agency YouTube channels and Flickr streams. There are still some considerations before you go into an uploading frenzy…

As an example, let’s look at a case where your agency has produced a video. You would like a wider audience than public servants, so you just create a YouTube account and away you go? Alas, no. The Government Web Standards still apply. So, once you have posted the video to YouTube, you link to a full transcript on your agency site.

In terms of sovereignty, government agency channels on hosted sites could be thought of as a little like diplomatic posts; they may be ‘offshore,’ but the same standards still apply.

How long do you think it will be before everybody (or at least those people with access to broadband) just give up on the old model entirely?

The answer –or at least a pretty compelling indicator– has been provided by this recently published survey of people’s attitudes to TV and the Internet.

Don Tapscott, one of the people behind the Government 2.0 blog and wiki, surveyed 7,600 young people between the ages of 16 – 29 in 12 countries and found that:

77% of today’s online youth would sooner live without television than live without the Internet. China has the most devoted young Internet users, with 87% choosing the Internet compared to 13% favoring television. In the United States the figures were 77% for the Internet and 23% for TV.

Tapscott puts these findings down to the fact that television is unidirectional and passive, and doesn’t allow meaningful participation by the viewer, and I would agree with him. I would suggest, however, that it is also a reflection of the fact that the Internet has already superseded television. Why would you expect youth to choose an obsolete technology? In most instances (Vista being one exception that readily springs to mind) almost everyone prefers 2.0 over 1.0.

The video shift

At the end of 2006, Peer-to-Peer traffic was 60% (and rising) of all Internet traffic, the majority of this being video.

A more recent study, in June this year, points to HTTP traffic having clawed it’s way back to the top spot, a move attributed to the phenomenal popularity of YouTube.

What, you are wondering, is the point? All this traffic, this content, is what people would otherwise be forced to watch on their TV, when it suited the networks.

Of course, they would prefer to give up Television over the Internet. Take an example close to home. You read about the Flight of the Conchords premiering on HBO in your local paper, follow the reviews as they begin to appear online. Now, do you wait the 6/12/18 months before it is shown locally? Or do you find a torrent and download it and watch it when it suits you?

The end

The Internet won’t kill television. Television (the channel) will just quietly atrophy while television (the industry) works harder and harder to develop content (and advertising) for people who will access it on their terms.

And if you are wondering who Flight of the Conchords are, check out this clip:

Photo: ark.

So let’s take a look at the growth of social media, and see if we can draw some conclusions about how it is shaping our work environment now, and what it may be like in the next couple of years.

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp purchased Myspace in 2005 (for US$580m) the site was seeing 14 million unique visitors a month. At the time he remarked, rather presciently,

We’re looking at the ultimate opportunity… the Internet is media’s golden age.
Wired

In May 2006, there were 51 million unique visitors to the site. Shortly thereafter, in a controversial post (the methodology has been likened to apples and oranges) Hitwise declared Myspace to be in #1 position for all Internet sites.

Setting aside the premature announcement of Myspace’s ascendancy, what is clear is that social networking sites are enjoying a huge swell in membership and are exerting considerable influence in how people interact and shop on the ‘net.

In fact, if you look at the combined total of unique visitors to social networking sites, the numbers per month are around 80 million, and that the ages of these visitors is shifting, with more than 50% of visitors to Myspace now 35 or older.

Social networking has become so popular that recent statistics released by Hitwise show that this year (if it hasn’t already happened) social networks will overtake adult sites as the most heavily trafficked in the US.

Even if you accept the notion that a lot of the adult traffic is now peer2peer and as such is not tracked by Hitwise et al, this still marks a watershed moment in media and in the Internet specifically.

And this is just the social networking sites. It doesn’t include blogs (70 million and 120,000 being created every day), or wikis or the other giant presence in this space, YouTube and other video sites: in July 2006, YouTube served 100 million videos per day to over 63 million unique visitors.

What does this mean?

I think we can safely draw a couple of conclusions from these figures, even if the methodology is a little suspect. First, this is about a social and cultural change. Yes, the catalyst is technology, but to continue to disregard the overwhelming evidence, and influence, of the growth of social media would be foolish.

Second, this rate of growth is only going to increase. This isn’t a passing fad, it is an evolutionary leap in the way people are communicating with each other. One way or another, all of us are going to have to confront, engage and understand what social media means for us and our agencies.

The Digg Revolution

By way of an example of the power of social media to give people an avenue to share their interests and passions, read this Read/Write Web post on the events last week on Digg. It is a salutary reminder of how quickly the media landscape is changing.

Photo: Claudecf

…act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender’s modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

My first reaction on reading this was w00t! I’m in the clear you are kidding, right?. Then, upon more considered reflection, I decided they were not and, while RD are unlikely to crack the sort of Web 2.0 jackpot that YouTube managed, they will probably do very nicely preying on that wonderful mix of human frailty that is a combination of gullibility and youthful indiscretion.

We all have had those moments that we would like to forget or, more importantly, have forgotten. Unfortunately, now many of those moments are published on the web, generally courtesy of people we loosely refer to as “friends”. Now, thanks to the good people at RD, you can rest easy, knowing that those pictures of you and your colleague doing the “lambada” at the christmas party will no longer appear when you egosurf.

Apparently, the business case for the firm rests on the interesting statistic that

26 percent of hiring managers say they have used search engines to research potential employees, and one in 10 has looked on a social networking website.

26 percent? I would have thought that would be a conservative estimate. If I was in HR, I would pretty much restrict my quality control to googling – why deal with the mundane (ie, actually reading the rank fiction that is passed off as a resumé or the fulsome praise of an employer who is only too keen to offload a freeloader) when you can cut straight to the tawdry and the scandalous?

Will this service really help anyone? Who knows. Why should we care? It is about reputation management -albeit an odd sort of retroactive variant- and it is a reminder of the changing environment in which we work.

Oh, and for the record, as I have noted before, in the age of Google, once it is posted, it is there for good. So before you hit Enter, make sure that you are happy for whatever it is to stay there for a long, long time…