TubeRank helps reduce the risks in creating viral government content

Viral content - content which gets shared across the internet and media very quickly (like a virus) - is often a controversial area of communication for organisations. While the approach can result in massive attention and awareness it can also lead to massive risks.

What if the content doesn't go viral, wasting your investment? (Like these nine viral failures)
What if it goes viral, but not in the way you'd prefer, damaging your reputation? (such as Witchery's girl with a jacket or Nestle's pedobear)?

Unintentionally viral content can also raise concerns, such as when Minister Shorten supported the Prime Minister, though it can have benefits, as demonstrated by the Prime Minister's 'misogyny speech'.

The concerns and risks around viral content have sometimes nobbled efforts to bring this approach into government campaigns. In fact the entire hit and miss of viral content makes it appear a high risk strategy for most organisations.

That said, agencies are still successfully employing viral techniques - such as the Dumb Ways to Die video from Victoria Metro (which reportedly has reduced 'dumb behaviour' by 20%) and the memes used in their Facebook pages by FaHCSIA and Queensland Police's What tha Friday Photos.

So are many companies and brands - as AdNew's Viral video chart (which is also powered by VAN) demonstrates at www.adnews.com.au/campaigns/viral-video-chart

So what if the risk of viral content going wrong was reduced? Would more agencies consider creating viral content?

I reckon so and that's what a new service from the Viral Ad Network (VAN), a sister company to Delib (for whom I am the Aussie Managing Director) now offers organisation.

The free TubeRank service is an online tool designed to assist organisations identify characteristics and approaches that help them create their own viral successes - reducing the risk of a viral dud.

TubeRank works by allowing creatives to select triggers (goals) and interests (audiences) for a campaign. TubeRank then provides relevant viral video examples, tips and a downloadable PDF tactics report on how to go about approaching the creation of successful viral content.

While TubeRank doesn't guarantee every viral will succeed, it improves the odds and helps reduce the risk of failure.

I've included the TubeRank tutorial video below and you can try out the service at http://tuberank.joinvan.com

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How to build a smart and innovative government agency - abandon 19th century organisational principles

NetFlix has released its 'manifesto' detailing how they operate and why, a document that Facebook's COO has described as "the most important document to ever come out of Silicon Valley" and that has attracted well over three million views on Slideshare.

It is the best document I've ever seen on building a smart and innovative organisation and has many lessons for government agencies, as well as for businesses, on how to set organisational goals, develop policy and select and manage staff - which I hope senior government leaders take on-board.

I equate this to the organisational equivalent of the NBN, compared to 1960s fax machines.

Organisations that learn from Netflix's approach will be well-placed to address the challenges of modern society, being far more productive, effective and attractive to staff.

Whereas organisations that persist in applying a 19th Century organisational model designed for managing itinerant and illiterate workers undertaking repetitive manual tasks to 21st Century highly-education staff undertaking knowledge-focused outcomes will struggle to compete for talent and survival.

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LinkedIn hits two million - Infographic places Australia in that mix

In January this year LinkedIn reached 200 million active users globally, demonstrating that professional social networking is beginning to be recognised as being valuable alongside personal social networking.

I've just been sent their 'early adopter' infographic, which unlike the infographic on LinkedIn's blog (which gives great demographic breakdowns by profession), provides a view on the country breakdown of usage. This places Australia as growing, but still with significantly less take-up than the US, UK or Canada.

By the numbers, using population, roughly 13.5% of Australians actively use LinkedIn, compared to 23.6% of US citizens, 20.5% of Canadians and 17.7% British.

I put this down to Australia's conservative workplace culture.

We may be innovative and tech-savvy as individuals, but in the corporate, public and NGO sectors our workplaces lag on many international indicators for innovation and technology adoption compared to other nations in the OECD and western world.

Of course this is changing as social media becomes normalised in workplaces and the initial fear, uncertainty and doubt bred by ignorance is replaced by more confident and managed approaches - so I expect there to be plenty of upside growth for professional social networking in Australia in the next ten years.

This is something government agencies and companies need to keep in mind when looking at how they reach professional stakeholders and working citizens.

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Your help needed: Crowdfunding the Tim Berners-Lee tour

Whether or not you attended one of the events given in Australia by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in his TBLDownunder tour, it's likely his visit will have an impact on how Australian governments and their agencies think about openness, digital channels and online engagement.

During his visit Sir Tim, the inventor of the world wide web, raised the profile of open government, privacy, open data, high speed broadband amongst many of Australia's senior government Ministers and bureaucrats.

He spoke about digital democracy, privacy and open data - what governments can and should do, and what they should not - to decision-makers, policy writers and the public; 5,500 in-person at events and thousands more online.

The tour was sponsored, however at the last minute one sponsor pulled out, leaving a $20,000 shortfall.


To meet this, the tour's organisers have launched a crowdfunding exercise. As they say on the crowdfunding site's page, "If just 1000 individuals donate $20 each, we can cover this shortfall."

If you were pivileged to hear Sir Tim present during his Australian tour, consider donating.

If you were not able to hear Sir Tim speak, but believe that his tour will help you overcome barriers at your work, consider donating.

And if you don't think Sir Tim's presentations will help you in your job but will help Australian governments become more open and improve citizen engagement, consider donating.

$20,000 isn't that much to raise, if we're each prepared to give a little.

I've given. How about you?

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A counterpoint & follow-up to my post on: Should government agencies & councils be entitled to ban people from their social media channels?

Yesterday I blogged about Should government agencies & councils be entitled to ban people from their social media channels?

The example I used related to a Twitter conversation I'd had with Peter Hinton, who had been blocked from Parramatta City Council's Twitter account. As a Parramatta council resident and rate-payer he was concerned at his experience.

I didn't have details of his specific case, nor did I make any claims about his comments or the council's decision, rather using the situation to explore the area of agencies blocking citizens on social media channels.

Peter has published an articulate and well-reasoned letter providing details about his experience of being blocked. I thought it worth featuring as a counterpoint to my post, which he has kindly allowed me to republish as a guest post below.

Without commenting on the specifics of Peter's situation, I believe Peter's letter supports my views from yesterday. Agencies and councils have the capability (and willingness) to block citizens on social channels and they need clear guidelines in place about why, when and how they block them (if they do).

This needs to be supported by appropriate governance and scrutiny such that inappropriate blocking can be identified and corrected, with appropriate changes to processes or staff if required.

Peter Hinton:

If you’ve got a Twitter account and even the teensiest amount of gumption, you’ll probably know what it is to be blocked. Some receive a blocking with a sense of pride while others prefer to take offense. I’ll never forget the feeling of exhilaration when I received the telltale FORBIDDEN message when attempting to access the account of a Pray Away the Gay preacher in the US.  

Whether it’s used ag ainst an ex-lover or a dissatisfied customer that just won’t stop hijacking a carefully planned social media campaign, the result is the same. The blockee can no longer view, let alone comment on, your tweets. If you include their handle (eg: @peterjhinton) in one of your own tweets, it will be seen by others but not the intended recipient.  

Throughout my 10,000 tweet career on the world’s most popular microblog, I’ve been both the blocker and the blockee on many an occasion. 

But when I was blocked by Parramatta City Council last week, my immediate feeling was one of disenfranchisement . You see, I’m a resident of Parramatta. I pay rates to its council. I participate in the local government elections that install the Councilors who decide on matters that are quite literally close to home.  

My council isn’t a celebrity whose films I can ignore or an international brand that I can choose to boycott. To be blocked by a level of government is whole other matter and, I’d like to suggest, one that challenges the role of social media in our young democracy. 

Many Australians are surprised to learn that the drafters of our Constitution neglected to explicitly include many of the rights and freedoms that we exercise on a daily basis. There’s a whole section dedicated to lighthouses and telegraphic services but you will not find one reference to ‘freedom of speech’. For a document that forms the basis of our legal system, it lacks all of the life, liberty and pursuit of shiny things that spring from the parchment of the American Declaration of Independence. 

In fact, one of the few freedoms we officially enjoy is merely inferred. In the 1997 case of Lange vs. the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the High Court ruled that Australians had a constitutional right to freedom of political communication. While it’s not explicitly stated in the actual document, the full bench deemed free and open political communication to be vital to the preservation of democratic and responsible government. 

It’s this ruling that gave me the confidence to criticize my Lord Mayor, John Chedid, over his office’s treatment of the GLBT family support organization,Twenty10.  

On 17 January, dedicated Twenty10 volunteers were helping kids build kites at Parramatta City Council’s Family Fun Day when advisers, allegedly acting on Chedid’s advice, ordered the removal of the organisation’s signage. Chedid has never denied the allegations, instead stating that his advisers were only responding to complaints that the sign was “offensive”. Chedid eventually issued a private apology to Twenty10 but only after 12,000 people signed a Change.org petition demanding he do so. 

Like thousands of other netizens, I took to Twitter to hold my Lord Mayor accountable for the actions of his office. My comments swung wildly between the visceral and rational but they were always based on statements provided by either Twenty10 or Parramatta City Council. 

Council stuck to their social media crisis handbook. They knew not to block me while the crisis was still building. That would only aggravate the situation and provoke accusations that it had something to hide. Instead, it waited for the inevitable moment when the Twitterverse was caught in the gravitational pull of someone else’s very public faux pas. 

The realization that I had been blocked by my local government came on a Saturday morning one week after #ChedidGate when I attempted to review @parracity’s Twitter stream. My kids were bored and I wanted to see if Council was running any (ratepayer funded) activities. What I got was a big cross and the word FORBIDDEN. 

Forbidden? For what?! Surely not for exercising my right comment on the suitability of elected officials for public office! Surely not for defending some of Australia’s most marginalized families! You can bet it wasn’t for all of the favourable tweets that I’d submitted over the years: the photos of my kids laughing in playgrounds that were eagerly retweeted by Council’s own social media apparatchik. 

While social media offers new opportunities for citizens to converse with all three levels of government it’s a conversation for which the rules are still being defined. You only have to look at the replies to Julia Gillard’s or Tony Abbott’s tweets to know that the conversation isn’t always polite. But, then again, there was nothing in the High Court’s ruling to suggest that political communication needs to be polite. 

Constituents were insulting politicians long before Twitter, whether it was in a Letter to the Editor or a town hall meeting. Which leads conveniently to my mainpoint: there would be serious implications for the council that barred a ratepayer from a town hall meeting and quite rightly so. 

When it decided to block me, my council made a conscious decision to deny me access to its virtual town hall meeting. I’m not so unreasonable as to suggest that I’m now completely shut off from my politicians. I could still write a letter or appear before them in a real town hall meeting. 

My sense of disenfranchisement stems from the fact that somewhere inside the intensely ugly administration building of Parramatta City Council, a public servant took away a small part of my freedom. They did so without having to appear before a judge or even advise the person from which the freedom was removed. It was swift, opaque and final.  

I understand and even appreciate that social media offers few boundaries. It’s precisely because it’s not encumbered by the rules of the old guard that it’s become such a powerful tool for grass roots democracy. But, with your permission, I’d like to tender just one overarching rule: it should never be used by government to disempower its citizens.

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