Hansard Society telling UK MPs to engage online

A report has been co-published by the Hansard society and Microsoft discussing how UK Members of Parliament are using the internet and providing strategies on how they can better use the internet to engage with their constituencies and with interest groups.

It's been highlighted already in the Victorian eGovernment Resource Centre, and discussed widely in UK government blogging circles.

Entitled MPs online: Connecting with Constituents, according to Kable, the report found that while 92% of MPs used email and 83% had a website, only 23% used social media and 11% blogged.

The report urged MPs to,

develop strategies for online media that include assessing the target audience, whether the site is interactive and what resources are needed. It also says they should develop a clear policy for the use of email, publicise it on their websites, and provide automatic responses to senders.

Among the other recommendations are that they
- create links from websites to social networking pages and vice versa;
- ensure people referencing material provide a link to the source;
- make better use of community created digital media, including websites;
- support third party projects that promote democratic engagement; and
- connect their online and offline communications strategies.

It also urges the parliamentary authorities to review the access to its digital archives and consider the licensing and re-use of the content.

All of these are good sense in my view and reflect the same approach that government needs to take in Australia.

The report also highlighted that the internet is still being considered a one-way broadcast medium by MPs rather than as a two-way channel,

Andy Williamson, director of the eDemocracy programme at the Hansard Society and author of the report, commented: "MPs are transmitting and not receiving. They use the internet as a tool for campaigning and for organising their supporters, rather than opening up two-way communication with constituents."

Essentially this report reflects the comments made by Joe Trippi at yesterday's Politics and Technology forum.

As both US and UK commentators are saying the same things about what government and MPs need to be doing online, perhaps we'll see more local movement towards embracing the online channel across government.

A PDF copy of the report is available at the Hansard Society's website.

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Politics and Technology forum liveblog

This is my first go at liveblogging so bear with me.

A more professional liveblog of this event is on over at Stilgherrian's blog.



Here's a picture of the panel

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Government and the social life of brands - how to benefit from interacting with customers through social media

Everyone knows what brands are, 'products' that have been strongly linked to a specific (brand) name, lifestyle, belief or emotional attachment in order to establish their relative value to consumers.

As defined by David Ogilvy, a brand is:

The intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised.

Brands can be established around tangible and intangible goods and services, organisations or people - think Aston Martin, Coca-cola, David Beckham and Kevin Rudd.

Kevin Rudd? Yes I believe that government also has brands. Organisations such as Centrelink, ATO and Medicare, products such as e-Tax and people such as the Prime Minister all exhibit the traits of brands and can be marketed and promoted in that manner.

This makes it relevant to consider the latest report on the social life of brands from Ogilvy International, Can brands have a social life? How brands in Asia can benefit from interacting with customers through social media (PDF).

This report, discussed through their Open Room blog, looks at how social media is being used across Asia to accelerate and reshape the dialogue between citizens and between citizens and brands (including government).

In each of the twelve countries featured (China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam) the experience is slightly different in flavour, however the overall them and trend is the same.

This theme reflects the same experience in western countries such as the US, UK and Australia.

To pull out a few important themes considered in the report,

• Consumer opinion counts more than ever
• Social media is a pivotal part of the consumer's digital ecosystem
• The Y-Generation live their lives in social media and if you’re not talking to them,
• someone else will
• Social media is all about managing 'influencers', creating a dialogue with the most important influencers and having them spread the word for you
• Letting go of the brand is a reality of social media and it’s critical that the brand’s senior management fully understand the implications, and are willing to take the risk as well as commit resource
• Social media success has to be embedded in honesty and trust by playing to the brand’s core values and ideals. No falsifications
• Brands that disclose conflicts of interest, are responsive to questions, and permit negative as well as positive discussion are most likely to get accepted.
• Brands need to be willing to contribute to be accepted in social media. Even to go as far as contributing unconditionally.

It is interesting to watch organisations struggle to accept and adopt some of the mindset shifts embodied in the themes above as they take their first steps into online participation.

Truth, honesty, openness and collaboration are all values that are highly regarded but are often difficult for organisations to embody.

I think the real dilemma many organisations, particularly in the public sector, need to first address is how to reshape their own culture and values to allow them to fruitfully engage online.

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NSW government launches Anzac Day blog

The NSW Board of Studies has launched the 2009 Premier's ANZAC Memorial Scholarship students blog.

The blog features personal accounts by senior high school students selected to go to Gallipoli to participate in ANZAC Day commemoration activities.

The blog is a very personal way of connecting students with Australia's past, supporting the scholarship goal of ensuring that the Gallipoli story remains a living part of Australian history.

Although the trip is not for a couple of months, the blog is already worth reading to understand how young people are using the online medium to connect with their peers and help define their own feelings and experiences.

More information on the initiative is available at AnzacDay.gov.au.

Speaking with the people who created the blog, it was set-up in around 5 minutes using the free Wordpress service - demonstrating that the challenges governments face around blogging are more tightly linked to policy and resourcing than to technology costs and timeframes.

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Government-related initiative tops Fast Company's "The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies" list for 2009

It's uncommon (at least in Australia) to see a government-related initiative promoted as a leader in innovation.

It's even rarer to see publications such as Fast Company, with its focus on the most innovative companies in the world, feature government-related initiatives.

However this year Fast Company's profile of "The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies" is topped by a government-related initiative. One which,

took a skinny kid with a funny name and turned him into the most powerful new national brand in a generation.

This reflects my view that the government could be one of the largest beneficiaries of the online channel. The internet allows government to have real conversations with citizens on an unprecended scale - participatory democracy in a way that has not been possible since communities grew too large to fit within a single town hall meeting.

To quote Fast Company,

Barack Obama's presidential-campaign team relied on technology -- what was known internally as the "triple O," or Obama's online operation -- to connect with voters better, faster, and more cheaply than ever before. The team has become the envy of marketers both in and out of politics for proving, among other things, just how effective digital initiatives can be.

More information can be gleaned from Stilgherrian's live blog of the Media 09 event, which featured Ben Self (a founder of the company BlueStateDigital who provided Obama's online community infrastructure) providing insights into how it was done.

Digital initiatives tick many boxes for government - in my view even more boxes than they tick for commercial organisations.

There are the cost, speed and reach benefits - the ability to contact, engage and solicit views from more people than ever before in a matter of hours or days at very low cost.

There is also the benefit of being able to speak with your own voice, making statements and holding conversations outside the moderation, influence and slant of media gatekeepers.

These benefits reach across all organisations, politicians and other individuals using the internet.

For government there are additional benefits in understanding the ongoing mood of a community and proactively creating and amending legislation and policy to better meet current citizen needs.

It is also possible to receive feedback on existing initiatives and develop collaborative policy and programs to help the finetuning process often necessary after legislation is introduced.

Finally, the internet allows government to mobilise a population behind a given cause or initiative, such as has occurred around the Victorian bushfires. For this crisis, for the first time ever, I've seen people 'retweeting' (forwarding) messages sent out via the KevinRuddPM Twitter account.

Of course there are hurdles that need to be considered - the need to be transparent (to a point), and the need to engage in a human-centric manner, rather than as a media statement robot.

These last two factors can be stumbling blocks for government. Transparency involves willingly admitting mistakes and committing to doing better. Speaking with a human voice requires a willingness to allow government representatives to do more than copy and paste the words of existing media releases - to inject their own style into communications.

These are both possible and in many cases already supported in other channels, such as radio talkback and live television. However often the internet is treated more as a long lead time press channel than as a real-time multimedia one.

For Australia to remain a leading nation in the world, I believe our governments need to overcome these hurdles, demonstrating innovative approaches to engagement and governance as we're now seeing in nations from the US to Estonia.

Time and citizen feedback will tell if we manage to do so in a meaningful way.

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