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Cheryl from the Victorian eGovernment Resource Centre recently brought to my attention the launch of the BrandKarma website.
The website aggregates information about top brands and allows the public to indicate whether they love, hate or want to watch them. It also allows comments and, in the best social networking style, the creation of personal profiles and 'friending' of others.
With a little more development the site will also probably support communities around brands - people who hate them and people who love them, potentially becoming a source of information and influence for others.
How is this important for government? Substitute 'brand' with 'agency' and you get a very interesting approach to rating government agencies and collecting user feedback.
It would be interesting to see how many people, for example, loved DIITR rather than hated them, and in comparison how many loved and hated DEEWR, DAFF, DHS or Defense - and why.
This type of site could make many public servants and politicians uncomfortable, just as BrandKarma is likely to make companies uncomfortable. However it also offers enormous opportunity for brands (or agencies) to engage, address their faults and, where necessary, turn community views around.
This type of internet-based public customer feedback is part of the new reality - just as PatientOpinion is now part of the UK's health landscape.
What is particularly interesting to me is whether governments will take the step of making it possible to publicly laud or complain about their agencies, or whether it will be left to the private sector - leaving government with less ability to influence.
Time will tell - but maybe not much time. It wouldn't require much modification to BrandKarma to launch GovernmentKarma.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Rating government performance online | Tweet |
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Innovative government use of Twitter highlighted in case study | Tweet |
The GovTwit blog has put me on to the latest case study in Twitter 101 (where they showcase how organisations are using Twitter in innovative ways).
It's on the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who are using Twitter to monitor earthquakes as they occur - an early detection system that is proving to be much faster than seismic instruments (at least in populated areas).
The case study, Science for a changing world, reflects some of the discussions I had with Geosciences Australia last year. Geosciences Australia were looking at how they could use social media to detect the human impact of natural disasters and perhaps even identify small earth tremors in populated areas where there are no seismic instruments nearby.
In the USGS's case they are simply listening for mentions of earthquake related words and using them to map the extent of human-felt earth tremors. They also say that,
In sparsely instrumented regions, they can be our first indication that an earthquake may have occurred.
There are many other examples out there of ways that government agencies are using social media in innovative ways to serve the public good.
I just wish I saw more examples of Australian governments putting these uses into practice rather than largely finding them used by overseas jurisdictions.
Many Australians tell me that we are early adopters of technology, highly creative and innovative. Those statements only become true if we prove them every day.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
When the public controls the printing presses and corporations have more 'citizens' than countries, who holds the power? | Tweet |
There are now over 1.7 billion internet users in the world, sending more than 270 billion emails each day.
Over 400 million people use Facebook each month (about 50% of them daily).
Over 50 million Tweets are sent each day and over 75 million people visited Twitter's site in January 2010.
There are approximately 3 billion searches per day via Google, 280 million each day on Yahoo and 80 million each day on Bing.
There are in excess of 133 million blogs, posting over 600,000 posts per day (600,001 including this post!)
Over 24 hours of video, mostly user-generated, is uploaded to Youtube each minute (or 34,560 hours of footage - nearly 4 years of continual viewing - per day).
This is a lot of content and connections between people outside any formal governance structures.
The companies involved are very influential. The giants, Facebook and Google, anecdotally each hold more than 10% share of global internet traffic. The companies they vanquished, MySpace and Yahoo, remain major destinations with hundreds of millions of users around the world.
To-date these companies have abided by the laws of sovereign states - censoring content or complying with local regulation as required.
However what happens when these companies, or a large group of enfranchised internet using citizens, refuses to play by a government's rules?
We've seen one of the first signs of this in the recent encounter between Google and China - the world's most trafficked website versus the world's most populated country (and home of more internet users than any other nation).
In case you've not been following the story, in January this year Google publicly revealed that the company had been hacked in a highly sophisticated and co-ordinated attack who stole intellectual property and read the gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. They announced that 33 other companies (including Adobe) had also been hacked (most of whom have not publicly admitted it) and that they had traced the hackers back to mainland China (even launching a counter-attack).
After the attack Google announced it was reconsidering whether to remain in China, where it held about 30% search share through www.google.com.cn. The company subsequently announced it would no longer agree to censor Google results in compliance with Chinese law.
On Monday this week Google announced it was ceasing to censor search results on behalf of the Chinese government and redirected its Chinese servers to Hong Kong (which, while part of China, is not under the same censorship provisions), but kept its sales and research functions in China - for now.
While Google users in China will now be able to search for whatever they choose (such as Tiananmen Square), their search results will still be filtered by the 'great firewall of China' - however they may now see which pages were blocked, rather than not receiving any results at all. And there may be ways they can outflank the firewall to see page contents.
A storm in a teacup? This would never happen outside China?
Maybe not.
Google has already flagged a similar position in Australia. Google officially refused a public request by Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy to self-censor YouTube to comply with the mandatory internet filter that the Government plans to introduce.
Perhaps the withdrawal of Google from China should be seen as one of the first statements that global companies are no longer bound by sovereign nations who ask more than they are willing to give up.
Groups of internet users are also beginning to challenge sovereign authorities in new ways. From the Filipino use of SMS texting in the 1990s student protests to the use of Twitter last year to organise and publish information about protests around the recent Iran Presidential election, individuals are using modern technology to protest against government positions.
Even more recently, I learnt in Hong Kong of recent protests about the route of a high-speed train to Beijing, which were partially coordinated by Twitter using the Hong Kong government's free wi-fi hotspots.
So what is the effect on sovereign nations when companies and individuals can self-organise, share and reveal information across borders in ways that governments cannot block (without turning off the internet and crippling their own operations)?
What happens to society's compact that governments can create laws and people and corporations will follow them when it is so easy to move your operation to another jurisdiction and continue operating in defiance to local laws?
Frankly I don't know - and doubt that anyone today can accurately predict the long-term outcome.
However it is becoming clear that while the world still labours under 18th century concepts of statehood and governance, but individuals and corporations use 21st century tools to communicate, collaborate and operate, there is an inherent tension between citizens and governments that will continue to grow.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
20 thoughts on government blogging | Tweet |
I was asked today by a representative of another agency for my thoughts, advice and observations on government blogging.
While I don't think I have any particularly unique insights, I realise that people who are new to the medium are at an earlier point on their learning journey. So here's the 20 thoughts I shared (slightly reordered, reworded and extended for flow).
- Post at least weekly to maintain an audience. Less than weekly tends to lose your audience as they don't develop a habit.
- Keep a couple of posts in hand at all times to cover busy periods. Otherwise you can easily miss a few weeks and start losing your audience.
- Where possible keep each post to a single concept or topic. If you have multiple topics, consider breaking them into multiple posts - even parts in a series if appropriate (people will return for Parts 2 and 3 - or seek out Part 1 if they start in the middle).
- Keep posts as succinct as possible. I use 250 words as a rule of thumb for length (though break this for in-depth pieces). Posting very short (50 or less word) items is fine if there is value.
- Create an RSS feed for your blog. This will account for potentially 50% or more of your readership. Consider using Google Feedburner or a similar tracking service to allow you to report on RSS traffic more effectively.
- Cross-promote the blog via your other channels. For example, in Twitter announce your posts with a link; in email announcements include a short summary and your blog and include it in email signatures.
- List your blog in appropriate directories and services such as Technorati. It leads to new traffic.
- Design your blog to look like a blog. Wordpress, Blogger or Typepad blogs are the 'norm' that everyone looks for, just like Google is what people expect in search. A blog that doesn't look like a blog won't be reacted to like a blog.
- First impressions count. Launch your blog with 5-10 posts already live to give people valuable content to start with and to communicate to them the scope you will be covering. This can include older information rewritten for the blog.
- At minimum moderate the first comment made by an individual. This reduces spam significantly. Moderating all comments is OK for risk-adverse agencies, but does stifle discussion - be aware and weigh the risks both ways.
- Make sure the topical scope of your blog and your moderation guidelines are visible and transparent. Review them regularly to ensure that they still cover what you need.
- Give people a reason to engage with you through comments. This can be done by asking questions or posing dilemmas and ideas. Avoid simply posting authoritative statements - save them for media releases.
- Use guest posts to add diversity of views and encourage the audiences of other writers/bloggers to 'try' your blog.
- Release information exclusively/early on your blog where possible. This will encourage people to visit it regularly.
- Keep post approval processes simple and fast. I appreciate this can be a challenge. Keep moderation approvals simpler and faster. Where possible write guidelines on what is acceptable/unacceptable and have it signed off by senior management so that you can manage the blog on a day-to-day basis with a minimum of overhead.
- If you post something incorrect, edit it ethically. If a spelling or grammatical mistake, or a broken link or formatting issue, correct your post. If a factual correction, add it below your post as an edit or as a comment that acknowledges the error. People will respect you for it.
- Blogging is a journey, not a destination. Keep your blog iteratively evolving and live. I 'play' with the design of my blog every month or so - adding new resources, links and features and removing those that didn't work.
- Put a name to your posts - just a first name is fine (if required for privacy). If there are multiple authors, use their different names with their posts. People blog, not organisations (organisations send announcements).
- Keep individual personalities (linked to names) in posts. Nothing rings more false than a sanitised and cleansed neutral tone. People have their own writing styles - used to great effect by newspaper columnists. These styles are what make the columns interesting, and make your blog interesting.
- Give your blog time to find its feet. It can take 6-12 months or more for a blog to find its audience. Few succeed overnight or in a 6 month pilot. However be ready to kill it if it simply doesn't work out. Not all blogs are successful.
Friday, March 19, 2010
The future of publishing - perhaps | Tweet |
This video reflects some of the sentiments I hear from time to time about young people - and provides an alternate view.
Thanks to Crikey for making me aware of it:
