What value should government place on online expertise?

On Sunday I was made aware of a Seek advertisement for a 'web and social media expert' position in a 'VERY high-profile government client' in the ACT.

The ad (which is here), seeks someone with,

a strong understanding of how the web and social media operate, the ability to contextualise that within the Government’s needs and find creative solutions; and have the technical skills to transform those solutions into product within tight deadlines!

You will need excellent communication skills, and experience in website design and development and in project and database management. You will be proficient in using a range of web design applications including Adobe Photoshop, have a sound knowledge of HTML, and a strong understanding of web publishing principles and techniques.? Knowledge of relevant web standards and guidelines and community engagement practices are essential! Experience in multimedia authoring and video production would be a strong advantage.

This is a wide range of complex skills, so let's do some unpacking.

Being a 'social media expert' - if such actually exist in Australia - would require years of experience, not just book-learning and seminars, in employing social media techniques and technologies across diverse audiences.

Being a web designer is itself a profession, as is web development, project manager and multimedia and video production. All require years of experience to gain proficiency.

Together these skills would take upwards of fifteen years to gain - possibly twenty or more for a true expert.

In fact this role could easily be split into many separate career roles, each with a professional skillset, including online communications/social media professional, web designer, web developer, database administrator, project manager, multimedia producer)

So at what level does this ad indicate the government client will reward this combined skillset?

At the APS6 level - circa $70-80,000 salary per year.

I wish this agency all the best in finding the right person for this role, however I do feel that the compensation significantly under-values the formal skills they are seeking. The agency will probably have to choose someone without the level of expertise they want, simply because the person with the combined skills they are seeking either does not yet exist in Australia or would be seeking a much higher salary (and could get it simply by employing one of their skillsets).

This is a problem I have seen before in government. Often departments seek highly trained web designers or developers at salaries well below their commercial or digital agency equivalents.

Jobs asking for social media experts seem to hope that these people exist, whereas there has been limited opportunity for people to have gained these skills in Australia. The few professionals who have substantial experience in the social media field are generally freelancing, working in high paying (usually commercial sector) roles or have left Australia for greener fields overseas.

This isn't an issue just related to online skills. Government compensation packages sometime struggle to reward specialists and experts of all stripes, something highlighted in the recent APS reform report released by PM&C, Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration.

I hope moving forward that Australian governments are in the position to acknowledge that there are many kinds of online professionals, that it is highly unlikely to get a full set of online skills in a single person and that these people need to be appropriately compensated for their expertise.

Otherwise we will remain caught in the trap of advertising for experts but being forced to employ 'learners'.

While these people are also needed (and will become more expert with time), they start out far more prone to error, require much greater training and external support and don't bring the same sized tool kit to the table to enable government to deliver the best possible outcomes for the community. In fact when placed in senior 'expert' positions these learners may cost the government much more over time in opportunity cost than the salary of a true expert.

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UK Labour and Liberal Democrat parties crowdsourcing election advertising

Now that the UK general election has been called, it will be interesting to see the role social media will play in a Westminster election, compared to the US's last Presidential election.

One of the first examples of how this election will use social media has been demonstrated by the UK's ruling Labour party, who held a three-day web competition inviting supporters to submit advertising ideas for an election poster.

They received over 1,000 ideas in three days - in itself a great awareness building exercise.

The Liberal-Democrats are also crowd sourcing election advertising as well at Art Creative, although this competition is still in progress.

Back on Labour's competition, as reported in Campaign's article, Labour picks winner of crowd sourcing competition as Tories launch counter campaign,

The winner, 24-year old Jacob Quagliozzi from St Albans, devised a poster depicting David Cameron as the 'Ashes to Ashes' character DCI Gene Hunt, along with the headline 'Don't let him take Britain back to the 1980s'.

Saatchi and Saatchi helped on the program and in a quote reproduced in Blur's post, How Can British Politics Adapt To The Crowdsourcing Model?, said that,

"We are learning that the way to do communications is not to tell people what you want them to hear but to let people play," says Richard Huntington, director of strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi. "This is the sort of thing that all marketers ought to be exploring right now."

Another key quote from the Blur post sums up my thinking on government online engagement both for political and departmental purposes,

For Crowdsourcing to have a genuine effect on the British political system, the parties must not jettison their crowds until the next election campaign comes along. Crowds take time to develop and to see Obamaesque effects, they must be interactive and innovatively maintained during a Parliament term.

Engagement needs to be ongoing to build an audience and drive effective outcomes rather than 'turned on and off' like a tap as our campaigns are today. The turn on/turn off approach means that governments pay more to build an audience and don't leverage ongoing community interest in topics (such as defense, health, education and immigration) at a low ongoing cost in order to reduce high communications costs during major campaigns.

Below is the video produced in support of the winning UK Labour competition entry:

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What are the top Australian Facebook pages (and how many are government-run)?

Social media commentator Laurel Papworth published a list last week of the top Australian Facebook pages (by number of fans). She's just updated it to include more identified through a crowd sourcing process in her blog.

The post, Fanpages: List of top 100+ Australian Facebook Fan Pages, provides the first glimpse of which organisations and brands in Australia are constructively using Facebook to build communities of interest, support campaigns and seek community feedback.

The diversity of Facebook's audience is visible just by looking at the five most popular pages:

• ACDC 1,950,000
• Bananas in Pajamas 1,132,000 (others include BiP 643,000)
• NZ Flight of the Conchords 726,000
• Hamish & Andy 648,552
• Hey Hey It’s Saturday 432,000

I'm happy to say that Australian government isn't totally absent from the top half of the list - with Tourism Australia's Australia page in 6th place with 372,000 fans, the War Memorial's The ANZACs page in 21st place, with 150,000 fans, the Department of Health and Ageing's binge drinking campaign Don’t Turn a Night out into a Nightmare page at 29th place with 110,000 fans (note: I am involved with the management of this page) and the Australian Institute of Sport at 50th place with 50,000 fans.

There are a number of other government sites further down in the list as well, starting with the Victorian government's Melbourne Australia page in 58th place with 23,000 fans.

It would be fantastic to see a comprehensive list of all the Facebook pages run by Australian governments - like the Twitter list I developed.

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Open Gov Day - 30+ US Federal agencies release their Open Government strategic plans

In the last 24 hours, over 30 US Federal agencies have released their Open Government plans in a strategic outpouring that demonstrates some of the best whole-of-government Gove 2.0 leadership in the world.

Govloop has published a complete list of these Open Government plans via the free online public database service Socrata (a 3rd party provider of data.government sites), so you can review all the plans in a single location.

Reading through some of these plans I am very impressed at the level of strategic thought and time that has gone into their development. They are a fantastic reference for Governments around the world seeking ideas and structure in their own strategic planning for openness and transparency.

To me this release also brings home one of the major challenges that I see in Australian government - we don't consistently resource for online strategy.

In my experience Australian Government Departments are funded for the bare minimum level of effort on web - maintaining existing websites to some level of currency, accessibility and quality. Often online teams are fully occupied with content changes, and as 50% or more of the content of a Government website is likely to change each year this a big task in its own right.

Departments receive occasional bursts of funding for new technology, usability and content reviews or for the launch of new websites. However ongoing funding for strategic planning to craft and shape Departmental online channels over time or lead continual innovation is, to my knowledge, uncommon.

Many Departments employ ongoing IT Architects to lead the strategy and ongoing development of Departmental IT infrastructure (a critical task). Few Departments employ strategists for leading the strategy and ongoing development of their online channel from a business perspective.

In my opinion this is a business role, not a technical one as it is not about the 'plumbing' but about how the overall 'building' (online presence) is structured and presented.

Also it doesn't simply involve Communications-type areas for outbound messaging via the web or intranets. HR, Procurement, Legal, Policy, ICT and other business areas also have major stakes in online channels for a variety of business needs, both outbound and inbound. An online presence enables virtually everyone in an organisation.

Existing website maintenance remains a very important task and needs to continue to be appropriately funded and maintained.

Equally critical is funding strategic online planning. The ongoing development, implementation and adjustment of comprehensive Departmental online strategies, particularly for Departments with large families of purpose-driven websites that need to meet changing audience needs.

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The meaning and value of Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is a topic of considerable interest and discussion in the US, but rarely a topic in Australia.

However it could significantly impact how the internet operated in Australia, and all other countries around the world, if the US moved away from the principle.

The video below provides a definition and view in support of Net Neutrality and covers the issues of interest to those who oppose abandoning the principle.

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