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I'm in Paris for the World e.Gov Forum due to my selection in PoliticsOnline's Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics for 2010.
Liveblogging hasn't been possible so far, so keep an eye out for my tweets under the hashtag #wegf
See a program of the forum.
I am recording notes and will publishing them as soon as I can.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
World e.Gov Forum Day 1 | Tweet |
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Mind the Gap - rebranding in the social media age | Tweet |
Last Monday (4 October) one of the US's most loved brands tried to introduce its new logo.
The company went about it in the traditional, time-honoured way.
Marketing staff had consulted internal stakeholders (who thought after twenty years the logo looked a little tired), considered the research and wrote a brief. Working with a creative agency they tested new concepts and finally publicly unveiled their new logo to the public in a soft launch via their website on 4 October.
This is about the time they realised that the world had changed.
The company had been very successful at marketing its brand online, using Facebook (721,000 fans), Twitter (35,000 fans) and other social media channels to engage customers and build their loyalty.
So naturally the company announced its brand online first to its fans - its most loyal and engaged customers.
Within hours of the announcement criticism began pouring in. Not from a few scattered individuals, but from a massive group of people.
Customers began rallying around the old logo, self-organising their own groups in protest to the new one. A website, Crap Logo Yourself was created to mock the brand (give it a try!)
The company did what any socially aware organisation would do. It listened to its most important stakeholders - its customers.
Within three days (on Thursday 7 October) the company's President blogged publicly about what they would do to address customer concerns.
"We chose this design as it's more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward.The company looked at ways to engage its customers - seeking their views and designs to help bring their customers with them on a new brand journey.
Now, given the passionate outpouring from customers that followed, we've decided to engage in the dialogue, take their feedback on board and work together as we move ahead and evolve to the next phase..."
However it was too late in the process for this. Customers had rallied around the old brand and were not in the mood to consider a new look.
A few hours ago (on Monday 11 October), the company announced it would keep its old brand, stating in a media release that:
Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand...
... our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.
And on Twitter:
We’ve heard you. We only want what’s best for Gap. No crowd sourcing, but the Blue Box is back. http://bit.ly/9xvtvJ
Yes, the company was the clothes brand, Gap.
An embarrassing backdown? No - it has been lauded as a social media success story for the company.
Executives put their egos in their pockets, listened to customer sentiment and gave customers what they wanted. They did this before the company suffered sales losses, downward profit corrections, shareholder anger and an expensive and time consuming process of rebuilding customer trust.
Of course if the company had embedded social media into its branding process - as it had its marketing - the story may have been different. By engaging customers in a dialogue about what the brand stood for, crowdsourcing branding concepts and taking customers on the journey throughout the creative processes it could have reimagined the brand successfully.
However regardless of this, the company has retained its customer loyalty, created enormous positive publicity about its existing brand and learn the valuable lesson that successful organisations are the custodians, not owners, of their brands. Their brands are owned by their customers.
And it has achieved this in a week, where before social media it would have taken months or even years for a company to recognise, accept and address mistakes (with corresponding greater damage).
How does this relate to the public sector?
We too have brands. We too have customers (also called clients and citizens). We too have processes for introducing new logos, services and products (and policies).
Our customers are as capable as those of Gap at using social media to organise and make their views known.
And we too can engage our customers online in ways which bring them with us - or in way which cut them out of decision loops, leaving them feeling betrayed and angry.
When attempting to design and then sell new policies, in areas including climate change, taxation, education and so on, are we really engaging our end 'customers' - citizens?
When we rebrand a Department, rethink a service or redesign a website, do we put our citizens at the middle of the design and decision making process?
Are we using cheap and fast engagement channels - such as social media - to engage, listen and bring our citizens with us?
Or are we falling back on traditional and time-honoured approaches, as Gap did?
Defending a 'traditional' approach as 'process-driven' and 'proven' may protect a few egos, but can fail to achieve public good, desired outcomes and even damage the reputation and credibility of agencies and governments.
No good public servant wants that.
Gap case study
Gap sources:
- Gap's Facebook page
- Gap's Twitter account
- Media release (11/10): GAP LISTENS TO CUSTOMERS AND WILL KEEP CLASSIC BLUE BOX LOGO
- Gap President Marka Hansen's blog post on the Huffington Post (8/10): The Gap's New Logo
- Advertising Age (12/10): Gap to Scrap New Logo, Return to Old Design
- SmartCompany (12/10): Gap does back to old logo after social media users attack redesign
- Harvard Business Review (8/10): The Gap Logo Debacle: A Half-Brained Mistake
- SmartCompany (8/10): How Gap turned its logo disaster into a social media opportunity
- Crap Logo Yourself
- Twitter account: @GapLogo
- Twitter account: @OldGapLogo
- Twitter account: @NewGapLogo
- Tweets about the incident: New gap logo
Friday, October 08, 2010
Mapping Australia's blogosphere - identifying key influencers for communicators | Tweet |
If you're seeking to communicate with Australians it is wise to step beyond traditional media channels and investigate how to engage through Australia's blossoming blogosphere.
The Australian blogosphere is the collective term for the entire ecosystem of Australian blogs - how they interconnect, how ideas (memes) spread and how links allow audiences to flow between them.
Dr Axel Bruns, an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, is currently researching the extent of Australia's blogosphere and the connections between individual blogs.
To achieve this he is using a range of computer-assisted tracking and mapping tools to build a visual map of our national blogosphere, mapping close to 3.4 million links and 8,300 blogs (which he acknowledges is highly incomplete).
He has been using data collected during the Federal election campaign, allowing him to particularly observe the flow of ideas across politically-orientated blogs - allowing him to test some interesting hypotheses.
Alongside this he's mapped distinct clusters of blogs based on their topics - light green for politics, red for parenting, yellow for food blogs, green for arts and crafts and light blue for design and style.
Taking the colours and looking at the connections and relative sizes of the different blogs it becomes possible to identify the most important connectors and influencers - the blogs that a communicator would wish to build strong relationships with.
I've included an image of this work below (marking where my blog 'lives').
To learn more about Dr Brun's work, check out his blog, Mapping Online Publics and particularly the posts, First Steps in Mapping the Australian Blogosphere and Mapping the Australian Blogosphere Some More.
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| Map of the Australian Blogosphere - view a larger version in this PDF |
Australian Government sets default copyright to Creative Commons by Attribution | Tweet |
Yesterday was a historic day for Australian intellectual property rights.
Ann Steward, the Australian Government CIO, announced that the Australian Attorney-General's Department had released an amended Statement of Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government Agencies.
The amended version endorsed one of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce's recommendations - that the default copyright position for public sector information be CC BY rather than the existing Crown Copyright, which has been in place for over a hundred years.
This change is likely to get little media attention or fanfare, however it denotes a seismic shift in Australian government. From now on almost all information that is released publicly by the government will be legally reusable, modifiable and mashup-able by citizens and corporations without the need to pay money or ask for legal permission.
This unlocks a potential enormous economic driver for Australia. In the UK the value of open data has been estimated at 6 billion pounds per year, although it might take some time to realise gains like this.
Also historic - though maybe less so - is that this major shift in government policy was announced on a blog.
So what is Creative Commons licensing?
It is a form of copyright that is more liberal and flexible than old-style copyright regimes, however still allows organisations and individuals to manage the reuse of their intellectual property.
Creative Commons is recognised in over thirty countries and has already become the default position for UK government data. The US, New Zealand and Canada have also made steps towards adopting Creative Commons as their default government copyright license and the OECD has recommended that public sector data be made public in a raw and reusable form, licensed under standard open content licenses and priced as close as possible to zero.
More information is at the Creative Commons Australia website.
And what does it mean for federal government agencies?
When releasing future public sector information into the public domain, federal government agencies must use a default position of a CC BY (Creative Commons By Attribution) license. They may only use a more restrictive license after a process of ‘due diligence and on a case-by-case basis’.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
The media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook | Tweet |
I felt that it would be useful to compile the online discussions during media140 #OzPolitics into a single work, a permanent record that could be reread, referenced and reconsidered.
So over the long weekend, with assistance from PeopleBrowsr, the support of Julie Posetti and permission from FirstDogOnMoon and Mike Stuchbery to reuse some of their material, I compiled the following Tweetbook.
You are welcome to read, print, share and comment.
media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook
By the way - as far as I know this is the first conference Tweetbook created in Australia. It is based on the very useful Open Government and Innovations Conference Tweetbook from their conference in Washington in July 2009.
I hope the media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook will also serve as an inspirational model for future Australian conferences and events.
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