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Steve Radick has published an insightful post regarding different Government 2.0 personality types.
Can you recognise yourself in one (or more) of these type?
The amended post is at What’s Your Government 2.0 Personality Type? and a copy with other comments is visible at Govloop.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Government 2.0 personality types | Tweet |
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Social media now more popular than personal email - Neilsen | Tweet |
In their Global Faces and Networked Places report (PDF), Neilsen has found that social networks and blogs (Member Communities) are now the 4th most popular online category - ahead of personal email.
In December 2008 Neilsen found that 59% of online Australians used social networks and blogs, compared to 80% in Brazil, 69% in the UK and 67% in the US and France and only 51% in Germany.
In the UK people spent 17.4% of their online time at social networks and blogs, whereas Australians only spent 10.9%, or one in ten minutes. Based on previous reports that online Australians spend 16 hours a week online, this would mean online Australians spend at least an hour and a half each week on social networks.
Over the year from December 2007 to December 2008, total internet use grew by 18%, whereas Facebook use grew by 556%, with its greatest growth coming from 35-49 year olds.
Emphasising that high social media use is not restricted to the young, a quarter of Facebook users globally are aged over 50 and a third are aged between 35 and 49.
Neilsen said that the Social Media Communities area is growing at more than twice the rate of the other top 4 categories.
Neilsen said that the Social Media Communities area is growing at more than twice the rate of the other top 4 categories.
In an unrelated report, covered by Mashable, Forrester estimated that within the United States, US$716 million will be spent on the social marketing medium in 2009, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. At that point social media will overtake email and mobile advertising, but will remain just 10% of the spend on search advertising (US$31.6B).
Traditional advertising approaches remain challenged when applied to social media.
The Neilsen report discussed above found that in December 2008, 38% of Australians online considered advertising on social networking sites to be an intrusion compared to 29% the year before. Forrester's report indicated that 'False' remains the word most identified with advertising.
Few organisations today would consider doing without email. How many would consider doing without social media communities?
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
The benefits of crowdsourcing - US$1,000,000 prize from Netflix | Tweet |
I highlighted the online Netflix prize quite some time ago as an example of how an organisation could work with its community to drive innovation.
Netflix has a longstanding prize of US$1,000,000 on offer for the group who could improve their online movie/TV recommendations engine by at least 10%. The goal is to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.
Over 40,900 teams from around the world (49,000 people) have been involved over the last few years, striving for the recognition and the prize money.
Now a group of four of the leading teams from the U.S., Canada, Austria and Israel have formed a successful collaborative team (BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos) which has achieved a 10.05% improvement in movie rankings, making them the potential winners of the prize.
Firstly this achievement demonstrates the power of collaboration. Each of the four teams could only get so far on their own. By working together (across the world) they have successfully achieved what none of the teams could have achieved alone.
Secondly it demonstrates the power of crowd sourcing. Few organisations could have afforded to employ an extra 49,000 people for several years in the hope of achieving a 10% improvement in operations. However by opening up their information and inviting the public to compete to solve this data manipulation problem, Netflix has managed to improve its product and attract massive positive press at the same time for a relatively small investment.
If 49,000 people are willing to work on a 10% improvement to a movie ratings engine, think of the potential if we provided an incentive for people to develop innovative applications or solutions for public data and policy issues.
This is being tapped into in the US, with their Apps for America competition and smaller but similar events at state levels.
The approach is also being adopted in the UK.
Will it be much longer before we see it used in Australia?
Perhaps the Government 2 Taskforce will lead the way.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Drawing on experience within your Department for online initiatives | Tweet |
It is common practice for government Departments to go to consultants when they need specific skills or experience. The strategy is often to draw on this expertise to get started, transfer as much knowledge as possible to staff and move forward.
However sometimes it can be more cost-effective to draw on the existing skills of people already employed within a Department - insourcing rather than outsourcing. In many cases staff have past experience that is directly relevant to an initiative, or may even have expert knowledge in the area.
This is particularly relevant for online initiatives. Web development skills are not limited to degree-qualified IT staff and there are many people with experience in scripting HTML, Javascript, PHP and similar languages who might not choose to work in an ICT area.
Equally social media engagement skills are not limited to Communications professionals. Forrester reported late last year that about 45% of Australians have joined social networking groups, 35% comment on blogs and forums and 26% are content creators - writing blogs and articles and/or posting videos and photos online. Matt Hodgson has a good blog post on this topic, Social media engagement: What are Aussies doing?.
It is extremely likely that some of these people are public servants and work in your Department - not necessarily in the Communications, Web or ICT teams.
If you can identify these staff and enlist an hour or two of their time each week you may be able to build a sustainable online engagement team without needing to rely as heavily on consultants or other outside expertise.
This insourcing approach has been used successfully in the private sector and in the public sector in other jurisdictions. For example the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office encourages diplomatic staff to blog and the US military is encouraging servicemen and women to engage in social networks.
So now you know where to find experienced online professionals, all you need is to identify them.
Vote for the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce banner - closes the morning of Thursday 9 July | Tweet |
The Government 2.0 Taskforce are asking for the public to vote on their preference of user-submitted banners for the taskforce website.
There are 24 banners to choose from, of a very high standard.
While this vote is non-binding (meaning that the Taskforce reserve the right to pick a different banner to the public) the process is transparent.
You can vote now at the Taskforce website.
Voting closes on the morning of Thursday 9 July - so vote fast!
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