Deloittes Australia social media report offers guidance for internal comms

Deloittes Australia has released its Social Media Report 2012, providing much more than a glimpse into how social media is empowering their staff to connect, collaborate and solve problems, sharing wisdom, knowledge and ideas to deliver better customer outcomes.

If your executive and internal communications area are still resistant to the use of social media within the firewall, this report provides some compelling, statistically-supported evidence and examples of how social media can transform the inner landscape of an organisation, making it more responsive, innovative and effective.

Roaming from recruitment through gamification to scone making (an example of complex problem definition and solution via internal collaboration), the report is one of the most accessible and readable I've found in communicating how social media tools can make a difference to an organisation - private or public sector.

They've also done a great job of distilling an internal social media policy down to three words: Empower and trust.

Visit the Social Media Report 2012 (PDF).

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Sharing and comparing political party policies - developing an XML schema for party policies

Something I've had on the backburner for awhile has been the development of a better way to share and compare political party policies.

If you've ever looked at the policy platforms of different political parties in the same election campaign, you'd recognise that each writes their policy in a different format, including different information and a different flow.

For example, compare the way the policies are presented by the three main parties in the ACT election:

• Labor policies: www.actlabor.org.au/policy/policy-announcements
• Liberal policies: www.canberraliberals.org.au/html/s02_article/article_view.asp?art_id=2281&nav_cat_id=141&nav_top_id=58
• Green policies: http://act.greens.org.au/policies/act

The differences in how policies are constructed and presented leads to four critical problems:

• It is hard for average voters to quickly understand policies from different parties (as they are formatted and written in different ways)
• It is very hard for average voters to compare policies on the same topic across parties (as they don't contain the same types of information)
• Sharing policies with constituents through third party sites is very hard. Parties rely on their own sites and have no effective way for supporters or media to rapidly embed their policies into other websites for promotion, comparison or discussion purposes.
• Accessibility of many party policies is poor. They are often presented as PDFs only (and not accessible ones), or in other inaccessible formats.

A solution must address the four problems:

• Make it easy for average voters to quickly understand policies from different parties - supporting a common format and approach
• Make it easy for average voters to compare policies from different parties - containing a standard set of information
• Allow policies to be easily shared with third party websites, mobile apps and other digital services but keeping a single point of truth
• Support accessibility by separating content from format

What's the best approach to achieve these four things?

An open XML schema for policies! 

Why is this the best approach?

• Because this allows political parties to provide their policy information in an easily reusable and comparable manner, without sacrificing their ability to provide unique information important to their own policy position.
• It preserves the party as the 'source of truth' for their policy, they can update it whenever they wish and anyone who has embedded a copy of their policies will have them automatically update (drawing on the updated XML), ensuring there's no confusion as to what a party's current policy may be. 
• It improves openness and transparency for the party, supporting an open government agenda and helping voters and the media quickly understand what the party is communicating. 
• It also promotes sharing, meaning that parties can enlist their supporters to communicate their policies - increasing reach and cut through across the community

To explore this idea I've created the Policy XML Schema wiki and invite others to participate in discussing and shaping this approach.

Comment - and edit at: http://policyxmlschema.wikispaces.com/home

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How to handle social media mishaps - from the New Zealand Government

The New Zealand Government's new Web Toolkit is beginning to ramp up with some very valuable case studies, advice and processes for managing a government agency's social media presence.

One of the latest useful documents released in the toolkit is on how to handle social media mishaps - which, as public servants are only human, are likely to occur from time to time.

In particular the document has a great matrix detailing the types of mishaps and their likely impacts, which then guides the type and extent of the response.

It is well worth reviewing when developing an agency's plans for responding to social media issues and emergencies.
Social Media in Government How to Handle a Mishap v1 0

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Government tops the list of effective email marketers

For all the claims of government communication being expensive or ineffective compared to the private sector, government has topped the Vision 6 Email Marketing Metrics Report for January - June 2012.

Vision 6, an email marketing company based in Queensland, has reported on the email marketing effectiveness of Australian companies and agencies for the last five years.

Government has consistently performed well in these reports, well ahead of industries such as IT & Telecommunications, Insurance and Superannuation, Advertising/Media/Entertainment, Retail and Consumer Products, Hospitality and Tourism and other 'traditional' heavy email marketers.

In the January - June 2012 report, Government topped the list of 16 industries both for most email opens (33.64%) and most clickthroughs (8.89%).

Open rates for industries from Vision 6's Email Marketing Metrics Report

Looking across all industries, the average bounce rate for emails was around 5.5%. This varied slightly by size of list, the lowest for lists of 10,000 or more email addresses at 5.01% and the highest for lists of 500-9,999 email addresses at 5.81%, with Government averaging 5.38% across the board.

The lowest bounce rate was received by the Trade and Services industry at 1.98% and the highest by Science and Technology at 11.67%.

All days saw fairly even open and click-through rates, dispelling the myth that people prefer opening emails on Tuesdays, and Thursday appeared to be the most popular day for sending emails, despite being average for open and click throughs.

Almost two-thirds of emails (64.65%) that were opened were opened within the first 8 hours (30.2% within one hour and another 34.45% between one and eight hours), four in five within 24 hours and 91.66% within 72 hours (three days) of sending.

Vision 6 says that with increasing use of mobile devices the time before emails are opened is falling - so with only about half of Australians using smartphones and 12% of households owning a tablet (compared to 18% in the US according to Pew Internet), there's plenty of scope for email open timeframes to continue to decrease.

Mobile has become so important already for consumers that Vision 6 also reported that the iPhone mail application has leapt into third spot (at 16.28%) behind Outlook 2003 (at 17.54%) and Apple Webkit (at 16.53%). In fact mobile accounted for 24.33% of all email opens.

To gain more insights on email marketing, and to view all of the reports back to 2006, visit Vision 6 Email Marketing Metrics centre.

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Making APIs for government data - should agencies do this or leave it to third parties?

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a technique for interacting with data (usually on the web) which liberates users from relying on particular applications or having to do complex programming to reuse the data in interesting ways.

Unfortunately few government agencies go the extra distance to release their data with an API, instead using specific data formats which require specific applications to access them.

This is a real shame, as APIs essentially makes data application free - great for accessibility and both easier and faster for any web user or website to reuse the data effectively.

It is often relatively easy for to create APIs from an agency's released data, as demonstrated by the Farmer Market API example from Code for America, which took less than an hour to convert from a spreadsheet into a map visualisation.

Agencies can certainly take the position that they don't want to do the extra work (however little it may be) to provide APIs for their public data and leave it up to third parties to do this - wherever and whenever they wish.

This is a choice, however, that comes with risks.

Where an agency simply 'dumps' data - in a PDF, CSV, Shapefile or other format online, whether via their site or via a central open data site - they are giving up control and introducing risk.

If a third party decides to create an API to make a dataset easier to access, reuse or mash-up, they could easily do so by downloading the dataset, doing various conversions and clean-ups and uploading it to an appropriate service to provide an API (per the Family Market API example).

Through this process the agency loses control over the data. The API and the data it draws on is not held on the agency's servers, or a place they can easily update. It may contain introduced (even inadvertent) errors. 

The agency cannot control the data's currency (through updates), which means that people using the third party API might be accessing (and relying on) old and out-dated data.

The agency even loses the ability to track how many people download or use the data, so they can't tell how popular it may be.

These risks can lead to all kinds of issues for agencies, from journalists publishing stories to people making financial decisions relying on out-dated government data. 

Agencies might see a particular dataset as not popular due to low traffic to it from users of their site, and thereby decide to cease publication of it - when in reality it is one of the most popular data sets they hold, hence a third party designed an API for it which is where all the users go to access it.

As a result of these risks agencies need to consider carefully whether they should - or should not - provide APIs themselves for the data they release.

Open data doesn't have to mean an agency loses control of the datasets it releases, but to retain control they need to actively consider the API question.

Do they make it easy for people to access and reuse their data directly, retaining more control over accuracy and currency, or do they allow a third party with an unknown agenda or capability to maintain it to do so?

Agency management should consider this choice carefully when releasing data, rather than automatically jumping to just releasing that CSV, PDF or Shapefile, or some other file type.

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