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Same time, different channel

by JoannaTMcLeod on Jun 10, 2009

993 views

Web 2.0 is not a big deal. It is not a scary freaky place. It is you doing what you’ve always done (or at least should be doing), just through an extra medium. New technologies may assist government/...

Web 2.0 is not a big deal. It is not a scary freaky place. It is you doing what you’ve always done (or at least should be doing), just through an extra medium. New technologies may assist government/public participation, but most of the old rules still apply. Don’t be afraid.

Key learning points:
1. People are using new technologies to communicate in the exact same ways that they always have communicated.
2. Therefore, you have nothing to fear from using new technologies to get your message out.
3. But there are a few things you should consider.

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media 20 blogs egovernment govis09 zealand social web twitter facebook govis new government

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Social media is nothing to be afraid of. The ideas at the heart of it are things that you are probably already doing, in a slightly different capacity. It's not scary, I promise! But there are a few things that will help guide you with your work. The topic of my talk is 'Same time, different channel' and but in order to illustrate that, I'd like to take you back in time, to 1914 when this postcard was made. (click)
Yes, it's a picture of a cat dressed up and looking most unhappy about it. Hmm, that sounds a little bit familiar.
image: lol cat. This is a lol cat. It was the hot big thing on the internet in 2007. In 1914, people dressed up their cats and took photos of them and shared them around. In 2007, people did the exact same thing. They just had the internet to share the images through. the result was the same thing though - some people were entertained, and some people probably got a very nasty but well-deserved clawing and a dead rat left in their bed. So,� the internet is a place to share things that they think are hilarious or topical.
Thanks Wikipedia!
Here’s an example of one blog. Cats that look like hitler dot com is pretty much self-explanatory. It’s a collection of photos of cats that resemble a certain notorious german leader. Viewers can contribute their own pictures and leave comments on the cats.
Here’s another blog. This is from Salon.com, which features news, but also a lot of personal opinions that try to be topical. Again, this kind of indepth analytical comment on society is not a new concept.
This is from the Tuapeka Times 10 June 1893 Page 4 ADVICE TO YOUNG LADIES. From the fabulous National Library who twittered about it People have been oversharing their opinions for a long time. But sometimes their opinions are actually a much greater historical record than just a shopping list of what they’d like in a women.
This is one of Florence Nightingale’s letters home from the Crimean War.
This is from the blog called Baghdad is Burning, written in 2003 by a girl who calls herself Riverbend. Both she and Florence Nightingale despite living 150 years apart could agree that war is not a very good thing. There are a lot of similarities in their writing which I encourage you to check out, in your own time of course.
So that’s some examples of how blogs are just a continuation of conversations and opinions that people would have had and shared before this internet thing came along. Now I’d like to show you how blogs are being used successfully by government agencies.
This is the blog from NZAID. When development programme managers travel to places that NZAID is working in, they write personal accounts of what they see. The personal approach makes NZAID’s work seem much more real and tangible.
This is Signposts, which is part of Te Ara, the encyclopedia of New Zealand. It works because it’s written by a whole bunch of bloggers, and they pull out items from the collections which are relevant to the day, and it’s a way of opening up their collection and making it more accessible to the public.
This Create Readers blog is by the National Library. It works because they have a very clearly stated purpose “we want to help create motivated and engaged young readers”
Again, government agencies missing the point of something is not a new concept. It’s been happening forever. But I’m not here to name and shame particular blogs. Instead, let me talk about social networking sites.
The lovely wikipedia, source of all knowledge defines social networking sites thusly. Examples include Myspace, Bebo and Facebook. Since Facebook has outgrown the other sites, I’m going to use it as my shorthand word for social networking. So what exactly is a social networking site, in practical terms?
Take one noticeboard
one family's boring slide shows
And add making small talk with strangers at parties in the hopes of impressing them enough that they'll take you home and you get facebook, myspace and bebo.
So, what impact does facebook have on government? Is it something that you need to be worrying about? The short answer is “not really”.
This is a group for the Royal New Zealand Air Force. It’s pretty hard to tell if it’s “official” or not, but I don’t think it is. I don’t think that agencies SHOULD be starting their own groups on facebook, which might seem contrary to my belief that government should go to where the people are instead of expecting people to come to government. But I have yet to see anything that would convince me that ‘official’ groups would be welcomed. I do think it’s important that agencies are aware of what groups related to them that there are on social networking sites, but it’s vital that context is appreciated. Social networking is a casual place, and people may need blow off steam. That doesn’t mean that they’re destroying the organisation’s reputation or anything that requires disciplinary action. Probably. Unless they’re like the Burger King employee who posted videos to the internet of himself bathing in the restaurant’s kitchen sink. He was fired pretty quickly for that one, luckily. But again, it was one employee acting inappropriately. The internet didn’t invent that concept. But back to Facebook. I do think that facebook can be valuable to a government agency is like this though:
This is Facebook’s ad feature. Because people fill in their profiles on the site, it has a whole wealth of information about everyone, so if you wanted to target females of a certain age for a health campaign, for example, or people who are currently at university, it will let you do that. I’m not shilling for them, I swear, but you know, I just think someone should take advantage of all the data that they’re mining from their users! Therefore Facebook ads could be part of your organisation’s marketing campaigns. It doesn’t mean that your organisation should have a profile on the site though. Because like I said, no one wants to be friends with the IRD. Or do they?
This is a FAN page for the Australian e-tax application. People become fans of the online application that lets them pay their taxes online. They’re not really fans of the Australian Taxation Office itself, probably. The Tax Office is trying to push e-tax (a way to do your taxes online) wanting to get 2.2 million users. Their online work came about because they found a YouTube testimonial about the project. The facebook page is by the Australian Tax Office, but it’s about e-tax, not the ATO. And people are happy with e-tax. Their facebook page is integrated with other marketing strategies. The facebook page was a pilot, and now it’s an “extended pilot”. The page is spread by word of mouth from e-tax users. They aim to get people to do their taxes ahead of time, so they created a countdown widget.People give them positive testimonials, and no one has complained about the lack of Mac or Linux access to e-tax.So that’s social networking, which brings us to the last buzzword of social media: twitter.
Essentially, it is a million conversations going on at once.
A lot of conversations may just be noise about what’s happening on whatever TV show is on that day, or arranging social lives, but sometimes people say things that are worth listening to. Take this screenshot – it’s a search of what people on Twitter are saying about the State Services Commission in relation to Govis.
Does it make for fun reading? Not necessarily. But it is really important that we at the SSC know what people are saying. Searching twitter is like having a spy in every pub, or intercepting every note passed in class that is relevant to you. But of course, the thing about a conversation is that it’s a two-way communications channel. Instead of just watching others talk, some agencies are joining in, and even starting conversations.
I would not have seen this pamphlet if it wasn’t for the National Library’s twitter about it, and so I wouldn’t know that I need to give my child cod liver oil to make him sturdy.
The companies office use their twitter feed to share news. They also use it as a customer service function – people can contact them through it.
So, Lance Wiggs complains about the NZ companies website, and because they’re monitoring twitter, they can respond:
You do of course have to consider the context of twitter though. It would not be the best channel for announcing massive redundancies, for example.
I have one simple question for you.
Do you trust them to talk to their friends in the pub?
Do you trust them to speak at conferences?
Write a letter to the editor or an opinion piece for the newspaper? If you trust them to speak in that capacity, you should trust them to blog, twitter and just generally interact in the social media workspace as representatives of your organisation.
This is the code of conduct for the State Services. Other organisations and groups will have very similar documents. Even when I went to the American school in Japan, we had as our guidelines \"be safe, be kind, be legal, be proud\". It was a little bit new-agey, but it got the message across. Surely your organisation has something similar.
It’s true that most codes of conduct were written a long time ago before all this Facebook blog twittering stuff came along, but all the same, they have a simple message.
It’s that simple.
We received a comment on our blog a little while ago asking us if we had any guidance for email lists. Our reply was that \"no, we don't have it specifically\". And no, we don't have specific guidance for the new technologies that are yet to be invented, The point is that you should just use basic good sense. So on that note, we’re pretty much at the end.
1. Not everyone is on a social networking site. Not everyone reads blogs. 2. No one likes a tryhard. The National Library is great at social media because they’re using it to answer the question: how can we open up and share our collections better. 3. 4. I’m here to answer questions now, but you can also contact us for more advice.
These are my slide and image credits. Essentially what you need to know is that I used the creative commons on Flickr in which people provide their photos for others to use for non commercial purposes.

Same time, different channel — Presentation Transcript

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