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I'll be speaking at Ark Group's conference Driving Interoperability and Collaboration in eGovernment in Brisbane in late August on the topic of eMetrics - using them to benchmark and drive the ongoing success of eGovernment initiatives.
If you're planning to attend this conference - or even if you're not - let me know via comments to this post the areas you'd like to see covered within the eMetrics topic and I'll endeavour to cover them in my presentation.
My presentation will be posted on my slideshare site and blog after the event.
For an extract from one of my previous conference presentations on the eMetrics topic, see my post eMetrics primer
For the full presentation I gave on web strategy recently at a conference, see my post Web Strategy in Sydney
Friday, June 13, 2008
Tell me the topics you'd like covered in my eMetrics presentation | Tweet |
Blogging guidelines | Tweet |
Blogging is still a new phenomenon for many people, while it has been around as an activity for thousands of years in a paper form (diaries) and public 'blogging' existed long before the internet in the form of biographies, newspaper columns and radio shows.
Given there are reportedly 112 million blogs active, and thousands of new blogs started every day, there's a very good change that there's at least a handful of people in any organisation who are actively sharing their thoughts online in a blog.
Magnify this by all the online forums, chat groups, social mediums (such as MySpace and Facebook) and I think that every organisation needs to think about having a corporate policy or at least guidelines on what their employees can say publicly online, just as they have policies for speaking to the media, customers and competitors.
These should also apply for internal blogs - which could also take the form of executive newsletters via email or intranets.
These guidelines are not to stop people from communicating online on legitimate topics, nor to force them into a narrow range of acceptable areas, they are to provide ground rules for how people are to represent the organisation and advise employees of their responsibilities.
However they also form part of the employee code of conduct and therefore before enforceable where there are persistent breaches that place the organisation or its staff and customers at risk.
In the last organisation I worked in I developed the blogging policy in co-ordination with the legal team. It wasn't particularly hard as there are many good examples of these policies online.
My current agency doesn't have explicit guidelines at this time, I've had a discussion about it with appropriate people but have not had the time to follow this up, however the APLS guidelines actually do a fairly good job in a general sense of covering the area.
I'm going to pick this up again in the next few months - given that I'm aware of at least 5 people in my agency who maintain personal blogs, we're beginning to engage officially in online forums and there are at least 50 people at work involved in online networks such as Facebook and Linkedin I can see that there is a need for more explicit guidelines for public comment in the online medium.
Here's some good examples of corporate blogging policies and structures to create them:
- Comparison of 8 corporate bloging policies
- Links to guidelines from around 20 organisations
- Blog and forum participation guidelines
- Executive blogging guidelines
- IBM's blogging and social media guideines
- Feedster's blogging guidelines
eObama - the US Presidential election goes digital | Tweet |
I've been watching the campaign for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency with 'shock and awe'.
This has been the first election to see social media become a significant factor in the outcome - even (in many commentators' opinions) the deciding factor.
There has been very little coverage of this in Australia and I'm not sure how aware many Australians are at the high degree of impact the online channel has had on the outcome.
However in the US and in the UK the shift in election focus from presentation to participation has been widely discussed and dissected.
Leading commentators have compared it to the shift in the 1960s when television first became a factor in US politics and Kennedy demolished Nixon in a televised debate - not because he made better points, but because he presented better on camera.
...the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s.
"They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it," says Joe Trippi, who masterminded [Democrat candidate Howard] Dean's Internet campaign in 2004. "It's light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They'll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That's never happened before. It never was possible before."
The Machinery of Hope - Rolling Stone Magazine (20/03/2008)
How Barack Obama won the online market
Barack Obama's staff - led by one of the founders of Facebook - developed the my.barackobama.com website before he announced his nomination. This site combined all the elements of social media, election-style.
It allowed grass-root supporters to organise local precinct and state-based support chapters, create mailing lists, develop websites, blogs and online forums.
This led to the formation of hundreds of local groups, who were able to organise and mobilise rapidly and, while organised outside the campaign machine, could be co-ordinated with it when Obama's paid campaign workers arrived in an area ahead of a vote.
The site also spearheaded the donations machine for the campaign. It allowed the creation and division of phone lists, contained pre-developed scripts for supporters (to cold call people for donations) and naturally allows people to make donations directly from the home page.
As a result Obama raised a record sum of over US$270 million in donations at last count to support his campaign,. This is roughly US$50 million more than Clinton (whose campaign now owes about US$20 million) - see Open Secrets for the details of funds raised.
Remember that when Obama announced he would run Clinton was the clear front-runner. He has come from a long way behind to take the nomination, enabled by his powerful online organisation.
So how was this all kept a secret during the campaign?
It wasn't. Below are a selection of articles dissecting Obama's online machine and, in many cases, providing details of its inner workings.
- Politics 2.008 - American Journalism Review (June/July 2007)
- Obama Campaign Masters Digital Media While McCain Efforts are "Old and Clunky" - JackMyers.com (10/06/2008)
- The 21st Century Election - PoliticsOnline (04/06/2008)
- Barack Obama is master of the new Facebook politics - Times Online (25/05/2008)
- Internet key to Obama victories - BBC (22/05/2008)
- Will the US election be won on Facebook? - CNN (01/05/2008)
- Barack Obama is Rocking the Youth Vote - SearchEngineWatch (17/04/2008)
- The revolution will not be televised - Tokblog (April 2008)
- The Machinery of Hope - Rolling Stone Magazine (20/03/2008)
- How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop - Portals and KM (05/03/2008)
- Obama's Web Marketing triumph - Fortune Magazine (03/03/2008)
- Inside Obama's surging Net-roots campaign - Wired Magazine (03/03/08)
- Democrat Barack Obama: 2008 Presidential Candidates & Online Marketing Strategies - Search Marketing Gurus (08/01/2008)
- Barack Obama, Social Networking King - Washington Post (06/10/2007)
So if all of this was known - why didn't Clinton copy and improve on it?
The simple answer is that Obama's campaign was run by Digital Natives - people brought up using the internet or who understand and make use of it's amazing potential as a way to connect and empower individuals at the grassroots, organise and co-ordinate resources and create new paths to solve old problems.
Clinton's campaign staff were focused on traditional, tried-and-true command and control ways of running campaigns and simply did not have the capacity to change mindsets in time to stop the Obama juggernaut.
Traditional media is based on command and control. But the digital world is all about grassroots. Traditional media is about authority. Digital is about authenticity.
You can see it in the language they use. Obama uses the language of "we and you," which is inclusive and nods to the wisdom of the crowds. She [Clinton] uses "I and me." His stuff is about "yes, you can." Which is about the buyer. She talks about "experience from day one." That's about the seller. That doesn't resonate anymore.
Obama's Web Marketing triumph - Fortune Magazine (03/03/2008)
I wonder which politician or organisation will next be able to replicate Obama's success?
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Did you blog today? | Tweet |
Blogging cannot really be seen as a fringe activity anymore, with over 112 million blogs in existence around the world (as counted by Technorati, the world's leading blog tracker).
Within this number there are a number of blogs written by senior executives, public officials and politicians.
However these 'official' blogs are rarer than hen's teeth in Australia.
This article, brought to my attention by Smartbrief (one of my favourite enewsletters), provides a great deal of information on the reasons why senior executives and public officials should be blogging, and the benefits they can bring to an organisation.
Have you written your blog today?
Lots of CEOs and senior execs are blogging as a way to communicate with employees -- and increase search engine rankings. Pundits say "blogs help disseminate a company's message, answer public criticism and develop a relationship between the public and the company's most visible figures." KansasCity.com/Detroit Free Press (6/3)
Should government agencies websites still be designed with 800x600 monitor resolutions in mind? | Tweet |
Every time I have redesigned a website or intranet over the last 12 years I have asked the question of what is the minimum monitor resolution we need to support for customers.
I was very glad when we could stop catering for 640x480 resolution and make the new minimum 800x600.
Since then each time I check I have still found a dedicated minority of users (down to around 2-3% now) still on 800x600 resolution monitors.
Over the past three years I've seen a number of major sites move to 1024x768 as the minimum resolution (including most news media sites) - for a large commercial entity it may make sense to abandon the few remaining 800x600 users to focus on their more lucrative audiences.
With today's computers starting with a default resolution of 1024x768, the users still on 800x600 are most likely to be older, have poor vision or a vintage computer. They may be using internet access in public areas or simply not have the knowledge or confidence to change their monitor resolution.
These are the people most likely to draw on government services, so my conclusion is that government agencies cannot leave these people behind.
However if government has a commitment to serving all citizens it must also ensure that the other 90%+ of people are well catered for. Presenting a fixed 800x600 site, or even an expanding site which simply increases the whitespace at higher resolutions doesn't provide additional value for the majority of users.
It could be considered reverse discrimination - limiting citizens who own modern computers and have good eyesight to basic 800x600 pixels worth of information at a time.
So my view is that while government agencies must support 800x600, they must also seriously consider adaptive designs through the use of css (Cascading Style Sheets) - a standard HTML tool - to present better designed and more effective websites for the majority of citizens.
