Posts
There's an excellent and very active discussion over at Adriel Hampton's blog regarding, Templating a Government 2.0 Blog.
The discussion ranges beyond the pure technical and moderation challenges of establishing a blog (which are very easy to overcome) and into the mindset of government.
In fact my view of the discussion is that setting up and running a blog is easy - changing government's approach to support blogging is the tough part.
Fortunately there are now many excellent examples of well-established government blogs so it is clearly possible to change government mindsets.
As a side issue, per Phillip Sheldrake's post at Marcoms professionals, Continuous engagement... the death of market research, it is important to differentiate between a blog and market research, or as is very clearly stated in a post over at Online Consultation, Market research is not community engagement.
Blogs are designed to continually engage and live for a sustained period of time. Market research generally takes place periodically, occurring over shorter periods.
So you're establishing a 'blog' simply to ask questions for a limited period, you should clearly consider its goals and whether you're simply using a blog-like format for market research, or are actually created an ongoing dialogue with your audience - a blog.
The difference in goals may influence your approach in order to maximise the effectiveness of the medium, and avoid audience confusion when audience expectations may not be met.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
What form should a government blog take? | Tweet |
Monday, March 16, 2009
What does the future look like? | Tweet |
Microsoft have developed a Future Visions series to provide some insight into where technology is headed, and how it will help people.
If you are looking to anticipate the needs of your customers, rather than simply play catch-up, the series provides some very thought provoking ideas.
Here is the montage video, exploring different concepts in brief. Below I've placed links to the full videos on each topic.
And in case you think this technology is still a long way off, read this article from the Inquisitor, If You Want the Future, Look to the Hackers. It talks about companies placing working brainjacks into people's heads, and how to create a Minority Report-style interface using your Nintendo Wii.
The others videos in the Microsoft Future Vision series are:
Is your department tribalising? | Tweet |
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
- 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)
- 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
- 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
- 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%.
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.
It's the people who are not reading blogs who need the education!
Friday, March 13, 2009
Less online hurdles = more egovernment customers | Tweet |
The complexity of screens and the registration and sign-in processes for some Australian egovernment (online) services disturbs me.
In the commercial world I lived by a simple rule of thumb, on average each hurdle I erected between a customer and their goal reduced the overall number of customers who reached their goal by 30%.
To visually demonstate,
| Hurdles 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | Customers 1,000,000 700,000 490,000 343,000 240,100 168,070 117,649 82,354 57,648 40,354 28,248 | Percentage using 100% 70% 49% 34% 24% 17% 12% 8% 6% 4% 3% |
This mean that if I started with one million customers and had ten hurdles, only 28,248 of them (3%) would be willing and able to jump all of them to use the service.
If I cut this to six hurdles, this would increase usage to 117,649 customers (12%) - or four times as many - a 400% increase in usage!
If I could cut it to only three hurdles, that would raise the number of customers able to use the service to 490,000 customers (49%) or another three times as many - 300% increase from the six hurdles figure or a massive 1,700% increase from ten hurdles.
In other words, removing hurdles can dramatically increase usage. While in reality it is never as linear as this, remove the right hurdles and the number of customers using an online service will soar.
When engaging customers online we already have built-in hurdles people have to meet to use and interact with our egovernment services:
- Access to a computer
- An internet connection
- Comfort with using the above
- Mandatory registration processes (even for simple transactions)
- No sales pitch for services - explaining by video/animation and audio how a service works and what benefits it provides customers
- Difficult-to-find services and registration/sign-on links
- Overly complex registration/sign-on processes
- Unnecessary information collection - to the extent of asking customers information they are unlikely to have access to
- Badly written service, security and privacy information
- Poorly constructed workflows with unnecessary or out-of-order steps and no clarity on where the customer is in the process (how many steps remain)
- Error messages in bureaucratic or tech-speak that dead-end the customer (no way forward)
- A lack of appropriate acknowledgement when steps or transactions are correctly completed
- Forcing customers to switch channels in the middle of a process without warning or when tasks could be completed entirely online
- A requirement for complex and non-intuitive password and usernames
- Difficult password and username retrieval processes (if a service is used less than weekly, most customers will forget their password at some point)
- A lack of tutorials, contextual help or step-ups to live online interactions with customer service officers (such as Avatar-based agent interactions, or actual staff interactions via text chat, voice chat or video chat)
- Services that require the use of plug-ins, older web browsers or are not friendly towards mobile devices
Most of these can be adopted by government without compromising security or privacy and all lead to greater usage and satisfaction with online services.
Some of these 'hurdle-repellents' include:
- Upfront video demonstrating what the service does (the benefit) and how it works (ease of use)
- Larger and more prominent registration/sign-on) buttons, with less clutter on pages to distract customers
- Use of plain english in all instructions and error messages, generally in informal language
- Extra large form fields (12pt or larger) for easier reading
- Simpler workflows with less steps and clear progression bars explaining the next step
- Customer-defined usernames and passwords (or use of email address as username), with visual aids to maximise security (such as password strength indicators)
- Secret questions (some user-defined) to provide a second line of support for customers who forget their passwords
- Clear and simple 'forgotten password' processes which do not require customers to switch channels (to call)
- Contextual help integrated into every screen
- Video or text and graphics tutorials for each workflow - clearly accessible within the workflow and before a user authenticates (double as sales tools)
- Live online help, potentially with co-browsing (where the customer service officer can see what the customer is seeing)
There are other commonly used approaches to reducing the hurdles for your customers when using egovernment services. Try out some commercial sites and you'll quickly gather more ideas.
So why reduce the hurdles for customers - potentially at a cost to the government?
The benefits for the government agency include faster outcomes, lower cost transactions and greater customer satisfaction. There's a side benefit of more timely and accurate reporting as online transactions can be easier to capture and report on than those over a counter or phone.
The benefits for customers include less stress when transacting (therefore more likelihood they will keep using the same approach) and faster outcomes.
The downside? Government will need to invest more in our online infrastructure to make it easier and faster for customers.
I reckon that trade-off is well worth it.
So what is your agency doing to remove online transaction hurdles for customers?
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Australia ranked lucky 13th in egovernment - down from 7th position in 2008 | Tweet |
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
