Community managers' survey

Kommein is currently holding a Community Manager's survey to build a picture of the role across different organisations around the world.

To quote their request,

Are you a community manager? If so, we’re interested in learning about your experience. We’ve put together a survey for community managers that will tell us a little something about community managers salaries, who they report to, job challenges and more. And yes, we’ll post the results here.

Please note, we’re not asking for names and don’t need to know who you are. Feel free to speak openly and candidly about the issues facing you as a community manager.

Please access the community manager survey here. We’d be doubly appreciative if you could pass this around to other community managers in your network.

In case your organisation wants to better understand this type of role, the results of this survey will be published online.

And if your role could be described as a Community Manager, please complete the survey.

Read full post...

View summary...

IAB publishes social advertising best practices guidelines

The Interative Advertising Bureau (IAB) has published guidelines for best practice in social advertising, prefacing it with the statement,

Social media has overtaken email as the most popular consumer activity, according to a recent Nielsen study

If your department or agency is looking to use any of the online social channels that now exist, from Facebook to Youtube to Twitter, to reach your audiences, these guidelines are a must read.

To quote the guidelines,

This document outlines recommendations for these key social advertising topics and is intended for social networks, publishers, ad agencies, marketers, and service providers delivering social advertising. These best practices were developed via a thorough examination of the critical consumer, media and advertiser issues to help social media further realize its advertising potential.

They are available at the IAB website's social advertising section as a PDF download.

The IAB also provides definitions of social metrics for measuring social media sites, blogs, widgets and social media applications.

Read full post...

View summary...

A method to measure the level of government 2.0 in a government site - egovernment index

Andrew Krzmarzick has posted an interesting article on his Generation Shift blog regarding a method to measure the level of government 2.0 services included in a government site.

Developed by the Brookings Institute, the approach involves scoring agencies against a set of criteria and tracking them over time. The Institute has analysed over 1,500 US state and federal government sites against the criteria, providing a large sample for comparison purposes.

The Brookings Institute has produced a report on the topic, State and Federal Electronic Government in the United States, 2008 (PDF).

It is a very interesting read and might provide a useful benchmarking tool for Australian government agencies to measure their own sites.

Read full post...

View summary...

British vote 'yes' to egovernment

A study of 4,000 UK adults has found that 42 percent had used the internet to access information about government or local council services, or completed a government form or process online in the last year.

This shot up to 55 percent amongst adults with home internet access.

The study, conducted by OfCom also indicated that,

More than 70 per cent of those we surveyed online (and 60 per cent of the general population) said the web had made it easier to engage in citizen participation activities, such as contacting an MP or signing a petition.

But despite an increase in web-based activities, many people still want to keep traditional methods of contact.

For example, 33 per cent of those we surveyed online would rather deal with someone face to face, such as when contacting their MP.

However in areas of 'multiple deprivation', where people are more likely to be experiencing poverty, low employment, high crime, poor health and less access to services,

More than 70 per cent in those areas were also unaware of online citizen participation opportunities, almost half did not sufficiently trust the internet for these activities and 40 per cent said they lacked confidence to participate in citizen activities online.

In other people, poor and less educated people (who presumably also have less access to the internet) are less likely to realise the benefits they can receive from egovernment, trust the internet or be confident online participants.

These findings suggest that alongside education and employment access improvements, improving access to internet services can improve participation in egovernment - which makes sense to me.

They also suggest, in my view, that the internet is a great supplement and mechanism for expanding participation, but doesn't replace the need for face-to-face and phone services.

Finally the findings also suggested to me that, at least in the UK, the digital divide may still be a very wide one indeed, hence their initiative to roll out 100Mb broadband as a basic service alongside electricity, sewage and water supply.

Read full post...

View summary...

Delivery of a website 'realignment'

Last year I posted about redesigning sites to put customers at the centre of the universe.

At the time we were reviewing my agency's primary site based on usability research and surveys. Through these our customers had indicated that the site was perceived as about us rather than about them (the tools and information they wanted to access quickly).

I'm pleased to say that, after working through a redesign process to align the site more closely with agency goals and styles and some tough decisions on specific content to feature, the new design is now live, largely reflecting the original wireframe concept.

I think we managed to meet the rules I set for my team,

• put customer needs first
  
• use less words
  
• minimise disruption
  
• lift the look
  

You can view the site at www.csa.gov.au.

Feedback is welcome.

Read full post...

View summary...

Is your department tribalising?

The Tribalisation of Business is holding its second annual survey on social media use within organisations.

If you run communities or leverage social media as part of your business you can participate in the 2009 survey here.

Sponsored by Deloittes, Beeline labs and the Society for New Communications Research, the 2008 survey had some very interesting findings around the management and cost of online communities.

For example the 2008 survey had the following major takeaways,

#1: Communities are about Delivering Game-Changing Results

• Communities can increase revenue per customer dramatically, i.e., 50%
• Communities will increase product introduction success ratios
• Communities amplify everything you do- increasing effectiveness and decreasing costs

#2: The Rise of the CMO 2.0?

• Communities should be an important part of the CMO’s toolset (but for many large companies - there is an under-investment and scale problem)
• Companies should evolve the role of the CMO into Chief Community Officer (but that will require drastic changes in attitude and approach to marketing)
• If done properly, communities will transform the way marketing works (reduced costs, improved effectiveness, new opportunities)

#3: The Need for New Management Thinking

• Mismatch between community goals and associated investments
• Major gaps between Community Goals and what is being measured
• Communities have yet to combine with major talent initiatives
• Communities will transform most business processes

#3.5: The Worst Practices Enjoy Wide Adoption

• The “build it and they will come” fallacy
• The “let’s keep it small so it doesn’t move the needle” phenomenon
• The “not invented here” syndrome

Also the survey found that,

• Marketing, Research, Sales and/or PR departments ran the organisation's online community in 60% of cases. IT ran the community only 6% of the time and Customer Service only 2% of the time,
  
  
• most communities (71%) were managed by one or fewer full-time staff, with another 13% managed by 2-5 staff,
  
  
• the annual operating budget for 58% of communities was under US$50,000 and between US$50,000 and $200,000 for another 24% of communities,
  
  
• the majority of organisations (85%) learnt about online community through participating in online communities or reading blogs - attending conferences was used for learning by 53% of organisations and the media by 51% of organisations, Consultants and agencies were only used by 28% of organisations and Analysts by 26%,
  
  
• the biggest obstacle to success (51%) was getting people to engage, the second biggest was having enough time to manage the community at 44% and attracting people to the community was third at 35%.
  

More interesting graphs from the 2008 survey are listed here.


So my takeaways?

• Online communities are about community, not technology - don't give IT control,
• there's not a large investment to start,
• you should participate online to learn about online communities - don't rely on consultants and agencies to build your internal understanding,
• you have to work the community - don't rely on the community building itself,
• tap into existing communities where possible, it's faster, cheaper, easier and more effective than re-inventing the wheel.

But if you're reading my blog you've already figured these out already - correct?

It's the people who are not reading blogs who need the education!

Read full post...

View summary...

Australia ranked lucky 13th in egovernment - down from 7th position in 2008

The Waseda university in Japan has released its 2009 Waseda University International e-Government Ranking, the fifth consecutive report on how 34 leading countries are progressing in their egovernment activities.

Australia managed to reach 13th position, down from 7th in 2008. In fact Australia experienced the second greatest year-on-year fall in ranking of any country (only Hong Kong did worse).

Australia ranked 6th in 2007, 8th in 2006 and 6th in 2005.

The top ten for 2009 included Singapore (who beat the US into the top position for the first time in the ranking's history), USA, Sweden, UK, Japan, Korea, Canada, Taiwan, Finland, Germany, Italy and Norway.

We did beat New Zealand, who came in at 19th place (down from 15th last year).

The ranking found that network preparedness was a requirement for success, with countries with more mature (and faster) networks being more effective at launching and maintaining egovernment initiatives.

It also found that usability was a key factor in the adoption of egovernment services and that more countries were treating this as a key priority.

Other factors included a shift towards a central online portal for nations and the support and scope of the whole-of-government CIO in terms of egovernment initiatives.

Web 2.0 adoption was also highlighted as a factor, particularly in the success of Asian countries - who now hold 4 of the top 10 positions in the ranking.

Australia scored in the top ten for two areas of egovernment, Interface Function and
Applications and e-Gov Promotion. We did not reach the top ten for the other three areas, Management Optimization, National Portal or CIO in Government.

A press release with details of the ranking is available at www.giti.waseda.ac.jp/GITS/news/download/e-Government_Ranking2009_en.pdf.

A press release for last year's ranking is available at www.obi.giti.waseda.ac.jp/e_gov/2008-02_World_e-Gov_Ranking.pdf

Read full post...

View summary...

Practical benefits of online media for government

Some of the practical benefits for government of online social media are beginning to emerge from various jurisdictions around the world. One that has particularly struck me as very positive is the use of online media by Washington DC to convince felons to voluntarily turn themselves in.

Written about in Using Social Media to Improve Public Safety - DC’s Fugitive Safe Surrender Prompts 530 Offenders with Warrants to Voluntarily Surrender in a Church (Doc) (and also available in the DC Public Safety Blog blog), the paper details how many fugitives wanted to turn themselves in, but had difficulty trusting police and the legal system to treat them fairly.

While the DC Safe Surrender program was in operation to allow fugitives to turn themselves in at a place of worship, thereby creating a more comfortable experience and a greater sense that they would get a fair go, there were fugitives who still were unsure of how they would be received and, frankly, thought it was simply a scam.

So Washington DC employed an integrated media strategy, using television and radio advertisements to drive fugitives and their friends and families (who often did the research for them) to the DC Safe Surrender website where the program could be clearly explained.

To add faces and personal experiences, the website featured videos of fugitives who had surrendered speaking about their decision and how they felt.

The website not only supported fugitives in making the hard decision to trust the legal authorities, but also convinced the media and other institutions to support the program.

By building the sense of trust and transparency the site has led to a large number of people surrendering and allowing their cases to be heard, reducing the workload on enforcement agencies and also the possibility of those on the run of re-offending simply to stay out of the clutches of a legal system they didn't trust.

That's the power of the online channel. To allow individuals to share their experiences in a one-to-one fashion, establishing a level of trust that is hard for an institution to match.

Once this trust is established it can be referred or inferred from the individual back to an institution, allowing institutions to build their level of trust with individuals.

This isn't a new approach for the commercial sector - it's known as word of mouth advertising. It has been shown many times that the trust built out of personal relationships is much more powerful than trust in 'traditional' advertising.

Could your agency improve its outcomes by improving the level of trust and respect your customers have in it?

If so, online may offer you approaches to build this trust in a more cost-effective and interpersonal way than the old 'print-radio-TV-outdoor' mix of advertising options.

Read full post...

View summary...

Hansard Society telling UK MPs to engage online

A report has been co-published by the Hansard society and Microsoft discussing how UK Members of Parliament are using the internet and providing strategies on how they can better use the internet to engage with their constituencies and with interest groups.

It's been highlighted already in the Victorian eGovernment Resource Centre, and discussed widely in UK government blogging circles.

Entitled MPs online: Connecting with Constituents, according to Kable, the report found that while 92% of MPs used email and 83% had a website, only 23% used social media and 11% blogged.

The report urged MPs to,

develop strategies for online media that include assessing the target audience, whether the site is interactive and what resources are needed. It also says they should develop a clear policy for the use of email, publicise it on their websites, and provide automatic responses to senders.

Among the other recommendations are that they
- create links from websites to social networking pages and vice versa;
- ensure people referencing material provide a link to the source;
- make better use of community created digital media, including websites;
- support third party projects that promote democratic engagement; and
- connect their online and offline communications strategies.

It also urges the parliamentary authorities to review the access to its digital archives and consider the licensing and re-use of the content.

All of these are good sense in my view and reflect the same approach that government needs to take in Australia.

The report also highlighted that the internet is still being considered a one-way broadcast medium by MPs rather than as a two-way channel,

Andy Williamson, director of the eDemocracy programme at the Hansard Society and author of the report, commented: "MPs are transmitting and not receiving. They use the internet as a tool for campaigning and for organising their supporters, rather than opening up two-way communication with constituents."

Essentially this report reflects the comments made by Joe Trippi at yesterday's Politics and Technology forum.

As both US and UK commentators are saying the same things about what government and MPs need to be doing online, perhaps we'll see more local movement towards embracing the online channel across government.

A PDF copy of the report is available at the Hansard Society's website.

Read full post...

View summary...

Vision of the future - 35% of US Adults using online social networks - 75% of 18-24yr olds

The music industry has a maxim - most people prefer to buy and listen to the music they listened to in their late teens or early twenties.

Of course they still listen to, enjoy and buy other music, but at the end of the day the Beatles, BeeGees, ABBA, the Rolling Stones and other bands would not have the continuing strength of following they have today if those who were teens in the sixties and seventies didn't continue to love and pay for their music.

This imprinting also holds for internet usage. While people of all ages use the internet, commonly those over the age of 35 or 40 are termed 'digital immigrants', while younger people are termed 'digital natives'.

This reflects how the internet is placed in their world view. There's a simple way to check to see which of these groups you're likely to be,

When you need to find the phone number for a restauant do you first think of the yellow pages or Google?

When you are booking a holiday do you first think of a travel agent or an online booking site?

If the internet is central in your approach, you're likely a digital native (whatever your age).

This is very keenly visible in the ages of people using online social networks. PEW Research recently released a review of online Americans' use of social networks (PDF), which demonstrates the age differences discussed above.

Most importantly this provides Australian government with an early warning as to how it needs to change its engagement and communications to continue to be relevant.

So what is going on in the US?

PEW reports that,

Young people are much more likely than older adults to use social networks.

• 75% of online adults 18-24 have a profile on a social network site
  
• 57% of online adults 25-34 have a profile on a social network
  
• 30% of online adults 35-44 have one
  
• 19% of online 45 to 54 year olds have a profile
  
• 10% of online 55 to 64 year olds have a profile
  
• 7% of online adults 65 and older have a profile
  

Also very interesting was usage by income level. PEW reported that lower income earners were more likely to use these networks than higher income earners, as follows,

The percentage of Americans in each demographic category who have a profile on a social media network,
Earns less than $30,000 - 45%
Earns $30,000 - $49,999 - 38%
Earns $50,000 - $74,999 - 30%
Earns $75,000+ - 31%

Perhaps more telling for government is what people are using these networks to do. When PEW asked, Do you use your online profile for..., the below were the results for adults,

• Stay in touch with friends - 89%
  
• Make plans with friends - 57%
  
• Make new friends - 49%
  
• Organize with others for an event, issue or cause - 43%
  
• Make new business or professional contacts - 28%
  
• Promote yourself or your work - 28%
  
• Flirt - 20%

So what does this mean for Australian government?
My research over the last twelve years of watching online trends closely indicates that Australians are much like Americans in their internet usage, but 18-24 months behind. Therefore if your agency needs to target people under the age of 35 then within the next 18 months it is likely that 60% or more of your customers/audience/clients/younger staff will be using social networks.

This gives Australian government 12-18 months to become proficient in effectively using these networks to engage with any and all of these audiences - for communication, consultation or employment.

That's a nice window to have - but it will pass quickly.

We need to begin now to align our communications and service delivery management with the mindset and skills required to deliver messages and engage audiences successfully through these channels.

We also need more agency experiments with social networks to build our practical expertise and IT skills.

The ATO seems to recognise this, with their e-Tax Facebook group.

While e-Tax isn't the most riveting subject for most of us, it's a tool with the potential to save both government and citizens significant time and money.

Facebook is the obvious place to find people who would choose to use an e-Tax package, and is full of people prepared to give their frank and fearless views on the current product, helping the ATO understand the improvements necessary to continue to broaden its appeal.

Canberra University is also actively using Facebook to seek new employees - quite a smart approach in my view, although I don't know how successful it has been.

So how is your agency planning to address the need to understand and adapt its communication and marketing to a mostly online audience?

What is it doing to build internal expertise in social networks and position itself to use these channels to reach audiences?

If instead you're waiting on the sidelines, what are you waiting for?

Read full post...

View summary...

Australia's 2008 eGovernment Survey results released

It has taken me a little while to post about this report, as when I first saw the media release in my webfeed I mistakenly thought this was news about the previous survey.

However having finally caught up, thanks to the eGovernment Resource Centre, I'm pleased to see that the 2008 eGovernment survey shows the same trends as previous years of increasing internet usage by Australians and increasing online engagement with government.

It also bursts a few of the prevalent myths about internet users, such as all internet users being young and hip (ok so they are all hip, but some of them are also older).

Some of the key findings included,

• 79% of Australians use the internet, this decreases by age, with 94% of those 18-24 years old, 93% of those 25-34 years old, 90% of those 35-45 years old, 81% of those 45-54 years old, 74% of those 55-64 years old and only 44% of those over 65 years
  
• Nearly two-thirds of people had contacted government by internet at least once in the previous twelve months
  
• More than three in ten now use the internet for the majority (all or most) of their contact with government
  
• The internet has replaced contact in person as the most common way people had last made contact with government
  
• Those who use the internet to contact government have the highest levels of satisfaction followed closely by those who made contact in person. Those who used mail to contact government had the lowest levels of satisfaction.
  
• Over two-thirds of people use broadband at home
  
• More than four in five people use newer communication technologies at least monthly. The most common are email, SMS, news feeds, instant messaging, social networking sites and blogs

So, in short, 

• most people can contact government online, 
  
• more people are choosing online as their most preferred way to contact government, and
  
• those that contact government using the internet are more satisfied.
  

That's a great story to sell to senior public servants!

The full report is available for download from the Department of Finance as, Interacting with Government - Australians' use and satisfaction with e-government services—2008

Read full post...

View summary...

Anatomy of an online political (or program) campaign - social media lessons from Obama

Edelman Digital has published a paper that really drills into the strategy and tactics used by Barack Obama in his campaign to be nominated and then elected as US President.

Entitled, The Social Pulpit: Barack Obama’s Social Media Kit, the techniques used by Obama's online campaign staff, led by one of Facebook's founders, are useful in more than simply a political campaign.

The same techniques could be used by any organisation with an ongoing program or online communications need - ergo almost every public sector agency.

I've paraphrased some of the key strategies used below (the ones that stood out for me):

Provide multiple channels and depths of engagement
Allow individuals to select the channel and depth of their engagement with your organisation/program. As individuals become more confident over time, some will shift between channels to greater engagement levels.


Support super users
A one-size-fits-all approach to users (people!) doesn't take into account the natural propensity for some to become intensely involved. These high-involvement individuals are often key gatekeepers or community leaders and by supporting them in a leadership role they stimulate a lot of their followers to engage through generating trust and confidence.

This isn't new for the public sector - when government agencies meet with 'business leaders', 'community leaders', 'religious leaders' and so forth, these individuals are being given a level of engagement (and respect) by the agencies that reflects their influence in the community. Online is exactly the same - treat online community leaders (super users) with respect by empowering them with tools and channels that support them as leaders in their communities. Note this including listening to them!


Feed the online community
Give a person a fish and he'll eat for a day, give a person access to online content they can mash-up and republish and you'll feed a community for a lifetime.

User-generated content is at the heart of the internet. By supporting and feeding this with content that your users can reuse (in appropriate ways) your organisation will massively increase engagement and reach.

I know that government in Australia is often very cagey about appropriate use of data, and holds deep concerns over inappropriate misuse or material being taken out of context. However this still happens every single day in the media and in peoples' homes. In the US, where government data and photos is all copyright free there is enormous re-use and useful extensions to data through community engagement. in the UK the government is giving cash prizes to individuals and groups who can re-use government information to add value.

Even in Australia the most popular government site (roughly 1/3 of ALL traffic to government sites) is the Bureau of Meteorology - because people reuse the weather data in many different ways in many different websites and applications.

Liberating data builds engagement - appropriate usage can be addressed through existing copyright schemes (such as Creative Commons) and yes, the ABS releases data under this copyright already.


Go where the people are - use the tools they know
A large number of Australians use Google, Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Wikipedia and a number of other sites on a daily basis. By comparison they rarely go to government sites.

Therefore to reach Australians, use the tools they already use in the places they already know.

It's not really difficult to understand. Federally we run 'community cabinets', government agencies run stands at public festivals and shows and police are told to get out into the community. To remain relevant and in touch, government must go to the people - both offline and online.

Plus this saves a lot of IT dollars by reusing existing infrastructure and tools. I've seen government websites go down regularly for maintenance. In comparison how often are Google, Facebook or Youtube offline?


Make it findable
If people cannot find you, they cannot engage with you. Ensure that you make the community (particularly community leaders) aware of what you're doing. Use simple web addresses and ensure you rank high in Google and other search engines (Yahoo and Microsoft Live). Search rankings may be rocket science, but getting listed isn't.


Right-size your infrastructure
Make sure that you put sufficient infrastructure in place to start with, and that it can scale upwards and downwards extremely rapidly. These days most major hosting companies allow very flexible bandwidth scaling, and if running virtual servers it can be very easy to scale the traffic limits of a site up and down quickly.

This helps both avoid messy and public timeouts, as well as minimising overspend when too much infrastructure is provisioned.

For the users it means they get rapid service when they need it - helping increase the stickiness and engagement of your program.


Put the right team on the job
Government has a habit of rating people by level rather than by skills. This means that often people are on steep learning curves or in roles they simply do not have the interest or disposition for.

It is critical to put together the right team, with the right skills and the right mindset to do the job right.

It's also useful to involve people with strong external networks, who can tap advisors that further extend the effectiveness of your online campaign.

Read full post...

View summary...

Almost 20% of Australians are on Facebook

About this time last year Laurel Papworth reported that Facebook listed over 2 million Australians as members in a post in her blog titled, Australia has over 2 million Facebook members.

I've just rechecked this figure, using the same approach as Laurel (via Facebook's ad tool), and found that Facebook now lists 4,252,860 Australian members - a growth rate of over 100% for the last twelve months.

Of these, 3,957,900 are over the age of 18, 1,400,900 are over the age of 30 and only 185,780 are over the age of 50.

It seems that women are more active users (2,407,200 females versus only 1,724,340 males) and only 93,100 confess to being university (college) graduates (versus about 200,000 university students) - though education level can be left blank by members and does not provide a full picture.

It is also possible to look at Facebook members by city/town, marital status and sexual preference, but with less accuracy.

What does it mean for a government when 20% of it's population, and almost 4 million voters, have chosen to use a particular medium?

Governments regularly advertise their initiatives and engage constituents in mediums with a fraction of this 'readership'.

Perhaps we need to see greater government involvement in social media as well.

Read full post...

View summary...

Storing and exposing public data sets

Governments collect and distribute a massive amount of public data each year. It is a continual challenge to make this data accessible and usable for citizens, commercial organisations, researchers, scientists and policy makers.

This challenge isn't limited to a few dedicated statistical organisations, such as the ABS. Many other government departments collect, collate and publish extensive public data about their customers, about the market and about their operations.

Putting on my previous private sector hat, public data can be difficult to locate, download and use in a meaningful way to add value to an organisation. I have struggled at times to discover all of the data I needed and combine the different datasets (from different public providers) with internal data in ways that add value to my employers.

The challenges around public data have led Amazon to launch Public Data Sets on its Amazon Web Services platform.

Described as a "convenient way to share, access, and use public data", the system is designed to provide "a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications."

Why is this significant?

The approach makes it much faster and easier for organisations to locate, download, customise and analyse large public data sets - such as census, scientific or industry data.

Using Amazon's system,

Now, anyone can access these data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and start computing on the data within minutes. Users can also leverage the entire AWS ecosystem and easily collaborate with other AWS users. For example, users can produce or use prebuilt server images with tools and applications to analyze the data sets. By hosting this important and useful data with cost-efficient services such as Amazon EC2, AWS hopes to provide researchers across a variety of disciplines and industries with tools to enable more innovation, more quickly.

Amazon has already exposed data sets such as the US Census and various labour statistics. Shortly it will also provide transport databases and economic databases.

All of these are public data sets being provided by US government bureaus.

Also available are scientific information such as Human Genome data, a collection of all publicly available DNA sequences and chemical structures.

Amazon is also working to provide further public domain or non-proprietary data sets and invites organisations to submit applications for data to be included.

Given that this data capacity sits alongside Amazon's cloud computing service, providing an expandable virtual computing environment, it becomes possible for a range of organisations, researchers and individuals to access and make more effective use of large sets of public data, supporting innovation and democratising the marketplace.

It also allows for the creation of data mash-ups, combining data across different agencies with other data sources, maps, graphics, charts and analysis tools to generate new ways of experiencing data and new insights.

I don't expect Amazon to be the only provider of this type of capacity, Google is very committed to cloud computing and organising the world's data. Microsoft and IBM are also moving rapidly into these spaces.

In the long run I see this type of platform as a very valuable distribution tool for governments seeking to make their public data accessible and usable by the broadest possible group of citizens and organisations.

In turn this will broaden and deepen innovation and permit new realisations based on cross-referencing data from different providers - becoming a competitive advantage for countries savvy enough to make their public data more accessible.

What would it take for Australia to make its public data available via this type of channel? A phone call or email to Amazon and some work in structuring our datasets.

That's a low entry cost compared to the challenge of building a replica system.

Read full post...

View summary...

Global Intranet Trends for 2009 report released

Jane McConnell of NetStrategy jmc has released the Global Intranet Trends for 2009 report.

As one of the participants in the survey, my agency received the report last week. I personally found the report provided an excellent insight into current intranet best practice and the shared challenges of intranet managers around the world.

It's worth taking a look at the free sample pages (available on the NetStrategy website) and I expect that Jane will provide further insights from the report in her various presentations and online articles.

I also encourage organisations to take part in next year's global intranet trends survey. While it is reasonably easy to benchmark websites, intranets are generally hidden within organisations and difficult to view, let alone benchmark.

Read full post...

View summary...

How much would your department pay for a 10% improvement in customer satisfaction?

I've been reading an article in the New York Times regarding the public competition Netflix has been holding.

The competition, named the Netflix Prize, has a prize of US$1 million for the individual or group who can improve their movie/TV recommendations engine by 10%.

The article, If you liked this, sure to like that, discusses how Netflix's programmers had gone as far as they could with their available resources and skills, so the company decided to make a large slice of their information available publicly (anonymised to protect privacy) and see where others could take it.

There are now over 33,000 teams around the world competing to come up with insights and algorithms to improve Netflix's recommendations, with a public leaderboard tracking the top forty (the best is currently at 9.44%) and a forum where the teams collaborate on improving results, sharing tips and code.

I can't help but think about this in the context of government.

Every agency struggles to provide the best possible outcomes and customer service with the resources they are given. However few departments or agencies look outside for help - even to other government bodies.

I'm sure there are many complex problems in government that could be looked at in a similar context to the issue Netflix is facing - ranging from simple IT programming issues, to customer service maximisation (such as the most effective placement of face-to-face locations to cover audience needs) and those huge thorny issues, such as devising fair policies or reforming tax regimes.

I wonder if government would be more effective if it allowed talented people to devise potential solutions (for kudos or prize money), which could then be tested, reviewed and the best solutions potentially adopted.

This isn't just a pipe dream. The UK government is running a competition at the moment, asking the public to come up with innovative ways to use government data to add value. The US and Japanese Patent Boards are piloting having the public examine patents and provide views before they are granted and New Zealand had the public write the Police Wiki Act 2007 (on how the police are to act towards the public).

I cannot think of any Australian examples - if anyone know of some let me know.

Clearly there's all kinds of guidelines and governance required for Australian governments to feel 'safe' in inviting outsiders to assist us in improving governance in Australia - but what do we really have to lose?

Read full post...

View summary...

Is there a groundswell of demand for collaboration tools in your agency?

This is based on some thinking (and rewriting of a reply) around a post by Stephen Collins from Acidlabs on the topic of how and why to implement 'Enterprise 2.0 technologies in organisations, entitled Enterprise 2.0 - Identify problem. Determine solution. Then tools.

Stephen was making a good point - that it is important to identify the needs before introducing the solution (or the tools), also noting that it was necessary to engage in some experimentation and 'intrapreneurship', rather than spend months on painstaking research.

In my travels and conversations with peers I've become aware that many of them are seeing needs emerging within organisations for better collaboration tools - people are seeking better and more cost-effective ways to work together to achieve organisational objectives than via shared drives, email, telephones and cross-country business trips.

However in most cases this need is forming in a 'lumpy' manner. Some groups in the organisation are happy with the tools they've used for years, others are seeking something better - particularly where budget limitations and rising costs are making old ways of working too expensive.

Within my agency I've had around eight groups approach me over the last few months seeking tools to allow them to collaborate or communicate more effectively within the agency or with external parties.

Most of these groups were not aware of the others.

Each by themselves did not have a strong enough business case for an organisational investment in new technologies.

However by aggregating their needs I'm close to a position where I can demonstrate a strong organisational ROI to senior management.

I can picture other agencies being in a similar position. Many small groups expressing needs that could be met by 'Enterprise 2.0' tools, but without a clear big picture view across the organisation of the overall need.

I recall a story I once heard regarding a large bank back in the early days of personal computing. They brought in someone to audit the use of computing technologies across middle management and discovered that hundreds of line managers had individually bought Mac personal computers because the Supercalc spreadsheet was so compellingly useful for them in their jobs.

These purchases were not authorised by the central computing department (who managed the mainframe). The individual purchases were made out of petty cash as each manager could not demonstrate sufficient need to have the central department take notice.

This was a collision between rising staff costs, increasing demands on managers to perform more complex calculations, greater technology availability and growing workforce skills. It led to the perimeter of the organisation knowing more about staff needs than the centre.

I think that we are in a similar time now. Traditional collaboration and communications approaches are rising in cost, while agencies are being asked to increase their collaboration and transparency. (Free) social media tools are growing in popularity on the internet and more and more of the staff joining the public service are experienced users of these tools.

Therefore I believe it's important for government departments to review what staff need to do their jobs and aggregating the needs of different groups to build effective organisational business cases.

Otherwise we'll see agency staff doing as the bank managers did - finding what they need elsewhere.

Read full post...

View summary...

The 2008 Australian Web Analytics survey is now open

If you're interested in web metrics, pop over and complete the 3rd annual Australian Web Analytics survey at Bienalto's website.

Respondents will receive a copy of the survey results, which should provide insights into how your organisation compares to others in their use and prioritisation of web analytics area.

The 2006 and 2007 survey results are also available from their site.

Some of Bienalto's key findings from the 2007 survey included...

89% of businesses actively measure website performance
77% of respondents were satisfied with web analytics data 75% of the time or more
Google Analytics was the most popular web analytics tool.

Learn more about and complete the Web Analytics survey

Read full post...

View summary...

US satisfaction with egovernment services rising

The US government has recorded the second consecutive increase in satisfaction, to an average 73.5 percent in the latest E-Government Satisfaction Index, part of the broader American Customer Satisfaction Index (private sector website satisfaction is at 80 percent).

As reported in CRM Buyer, 25 percent of sites achieved a rating over 80 percent.

The feature constituents were least satisfied with was navigation (37 percent were satisfied), whilst 96 percent were satisfied with search functionality.

Commentators are expecting the upward trend to continue as a result of the ongoing US financial crisis.

This upward trend will likely continue, Freed [Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results] said, if for no other reason than current budgetary constraints. With the U.S. government now committed to a US$700 billion financial rescue plan, money will be tight in all other categories. "E-government can deliver a huge payback because it is so much more efficient," he observed.

Type rest of the post here

Read full post...

View summary...

Putting Australian government web traffic in perspective

In August I analysed traffic to our agency's website in July 2008 using Hitwise's data measurement service, comparing our share of web traffic against the total to Federal government websites, other government websites and the top websites visited by Australians.

The results provided me with a view of how important government websites are in peoples' online lives - not very. Less than 2.5% of website visits were to government sites.

It also helped me form some ideas as to how Australian government departments can make their online channels more effective means of engaging citizens.

Reviewing Hitwise's reports from July 2008, tracking around 2.95 million Australians' visits to over 647,000 websites (using ISP logs), the total government sector (6,634 sites) accounted for only 2.26 percent of all tracked website visits by Australians.

Of these,

• Federal government's 2,094 sites accounted for 57.61% of all Government traffic and 1.3% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• State government's 2,183 sites accounted for 30.82% of all Government traffic and 0.70% of visits to all websites,
  
• Local government's 1,596 sites accounted for 6.51% of all Government traffic and 0.15% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• The other 761 sites (often foreign government agencies) accounted for 11.4% of all Government traffic.

In comparison, Google.com.au and Google.com  together  accounted for 9.64% of Australian visits to all tracked websites, four times as much as the total government sector (Google.com.au, the number one site visited by Australians, accounted for 7.85% and Google.com for 1.79% of visits).

Facebook, the fourth most visited website, received 2.36% of total tracked visits - slightly more than the entire Australian government.

MySpace, the seventh ranked site, received 1.78% of total visits - almost 50% more than Federal government sites.

Only one government website regularly reaches Hitwise's Top Twenty list of Australian sites, the Bureau of Meteorology (coming in at 16th position with 0.51% of traffic in September 2008). In fact, this site alone accounts for almost a quarter of the visits to the total government sector.

To put these figures into perspective, I roughly estimated from my Agency's actual web traffic that each Australian web user in July 2008 made 270 visits to Hitwise tracked websites (note that at an average visit duration of 10 minutes, this is significantly less that the figure reported by Netratings in March 2008 (PDF) - of 13.7 hours/week online).

Of these estimated 270 visits,

• 26.6 visits were to Google,
  
• 6.3 visits were to Facebook
  
• 4.8 visits were to Myspace
  
• 3.5 visits were to Federal government sites,
  
• 2.4 visits were to State government sites,
  
• 0.4 visits were to Local government sites.

Even if you discount my estimate and take another measure of the average number of website visits per Australian each month, the proportion based on Hitwise's tracked websites remains the same.

What does this mean for government?
Even a few visits per month by Australia's estimated 11 million plus regular internet users users adds up to a significant online audience for government in Australia.

However my conclusion is that Australian government departments should not rely on reaching our citizen audiences simply via our official websites.

We need to reach out and engage our customers via the websites they choose to use.

These non-Government websites account for over 97.5% of regular internet usage by Australian (per Hitwise's July 2008 figures).

If Australian government wants to effectively communicate with citizens online, our departments need to invest in understanding where our audiences spend their time, reaching beyond our official sites to engage them in the online communities they choose to frequent.

How do we engage citizens on their own turf?
There are many different ways that private organisations reach out to user communities, and government can learn and use many of these approaches, such as

• using search advertising to promote Australian government services prominently across top search engines and community sites,
• providing web feeds (RSS, Atomic, etc) that other sites can merge into their own information channels,
• providing data feeds that can be mashed up into widely used sites and new functions (as the Bureau of Meteorology does so well),
• creating, and promoting, useful portlets and widgets on popular platforms (Google Gears, Facebook, Blogger, Ning) that can be added to  individual and group social sites,
• white-labelling services that can be embedded in other sites (Slideshare, Youtube),
• reaching out and participating sensitively in forums, blogs and wikis relevant to our communities,
• engaging online advocates and supporting them as we do media representatives (as US consumer goods firms engage 'Mummy Bloggers' and US political parties engage political bloggers),
• creating and supporting themed community spaces for citizens (as Huggies has done in Australia for mothers).

Note
Hitwise checked the numbers drawn from their web reporting service (thank you Alex and Rebecca). The idea for this post, the conclusions drawn and any calculation errors are mine alone.

Read full post...

View summary...