Learning from the online missteps of the private sector

Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote about some of the latest social media 'reversals' experienced by companies, and has previously published a chronology of,

companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.

• Damage Control: Social Media Reversals
• A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media

There's no public sector organisations listed - however it's not much of a stretch to believe that many government departments are vulnerable to public damage in similar ways.

Note that in most cases the damage is caused by a lack of effective engagement, not from engaging - which some could conclude leads to a situation where not engaging online is significantly more risky than engaging.

A comment on Jeremiah's blog by Kersten Kloss sums it up for me (just replace 'company' with 'department':

Companies can no longer afford to avoid the social web as a communications medium. They need to become involved in it, to engage in the online world and mingle with their clients and peers. If you truly believe you are the best at what you do then you have nothing to fear by opening up to the social web. Allow yourself to be more transparent. Lead the rest by sharing yourself and offering assistance to others, even if that free assistance gives away some of your proprietary secrets.

If you can’t then you need to look deep inside your organization and fix a far more challenging issue, your stagnancy as an organization.

I often wonder how often non-engagement risk is considered in government programs alongside engagement risks.

Or how often a clever, inventive and funny response is considered as a way to soften and mitigate an already existing situation. For example, EA's reply to the 'Jesus shot' bug reported and widely discussed online in a Tiger Wood's golf game - in the video below.

Read full post...

View summary...

UK thoughts on adopting WCAG 2.0 for government websites

Jack Pickard has written an excellent post regarding How should the UK public sector adopt WCAG 2.0? which touches on many of the themes required for adoption in Australia.

If you were thinking about shifting your Australian government site to a WCAG 2.0 level of accessibility, this is welcome contribution to the discussion.

Sometimes I wonder if across government we have enough conversations on these types of topics - and my conversation I mean free and open exchanges of views and information in shared spaces, rather than formal responses to defined criteria (with no correspondence entered into).

Read full post...

View summary...

Gov 2.0 conference - Liveblog

I'm liveblogging at least the morning session of CEBIT's Gov 2.0 conference in Canberra.

Please add your comments and questions and I'll seek to pass them on to the speakers and blog the responses.

For those of you on Twitter, the hashtag to follow is #gov2.

Read full post...

View summary...

Creating a social media policy for your department - here's over 100 examples to draw on

Social Media Governance recently released a list of 106 social media policies that can be drawn on, including nearly thirty from government (including the APSC's Circular 2008/8: Interim protocols for online media participation).


A lot of Australians now use social media - including staff in your Department, your customers and clients and many of your stakeholders.

The latest statistics, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, suggest that there are 8 million Australians using Facebook and over 1.5 million using Twitter.

A report from Neilsen also indicated that social networking in Australia has doubled in usage over the last year, with Australians having spent 1.6 million hours on these services in June 2009 (from 800,000 in June 2008). Taking June as an average, this means Australians are likely to spend almost 20 million hours using social networks in 2009.

I believe it is important that Government Departments place social media policies in place to make acceptable usage clear to staff.

It's no longer practical or reasonable for Departments to simply ban access to these services - as it's no longer practical or reasonable to ban phone calls.

Is your policy in place yet?

Read full post...

View summary...

How would management of your website change if anyone could comment on or redesign it outside your control?

How would it change the management of your website if anyone could make an unmoderated public comment about any page at any time - totally outside your control?

How would your Minister and senior management respond if people could freely critique your content, pointing out any errors or misleading statements or airing their complaints (and compliments) publicly?

Or what if someone could redesign your website from the outside to make it better suit their needs, or to make a personal or political point - and then share this design with others?

This isn't just idle speculation - it's happening today.

Google recently launched its Sidewiki service which allows anyone at any time to make any comment on any website - visible to anyone else using Sidewiki.

This means that the public can hold a discussion on any page in any Australian government website completely outside your control.

Does that sound scary? It should if you're not aware of or able to participate in these conversations as needed.

Below is an example of Sidewiki in action - viewing comments in blogs related to the Whitehouse website.

At the same time, tools now exist that allow outsiders to redesign your website from the outside. For example the free Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox allows people to rearrange your content, or even translate the words into a different style (one recent popular script translates websites into 'pirate' speak) that becomes visible in their web browser. They can then share these rewrite scripts with others using the same tool.

Greasemonkey isn't the only tool that does this - and people are already writing scripts, such as this one to reconfigure parts of the National Archives website to display Australian government sites in a different manner.

This approach has been used to 'fix' the design of some websites which the community found hard to use - in several cases the website owner has even voluntarily made website changes based on these community suggestions.

It can also be used as a protest, adding, modifying or remove content from a website (as viewed in a user's web browser).

There's also organisations which externally redesign websites. In the US the Sunlight Foundation periodically redesigns a US Federal Government website to demonstrate how it could be done to work better. It would be simple for someone to do the same here in Australia.


In other words, while internally we control how we design and develop our websites - just as we carefully craft our media releases to say things the way we want - we can not control what people do with them once they leave our 'controlled' space.

Just as the media can pick and choose what material to use from our media release, the public has the ability to pick and choose what material they see in our website - and can comment on it outside our control.


People responsible for planning, developing and operating government websites need to be thinking about how these types of tools impact on how your official website is viewed externally.

So over to you for comments,

• What will you do if an organised group redesigns your website from the outside (either in a friendly or a malicious way)?
• How will you respond to comments that are visibly attached to your website?

Read full post...

View summary...