Craig Thomler's professional blog - AI and digital government thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective
Craig Thomler
I've worked in the online sector since 1995 in roles including founder, publisher, journalist, webmaster, marketer, channel manager, CIO, COO and visionary. I left the public sector in early 2012 to lead Delib Australia as Managing Director Australia and New Zealand. More...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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