Treating bloggers right

Many organisations still haven't cottoned on to the influence of a number of blogs or how to appropriately approach and engage with them - including PR and advertising agencies who should know better.

I was reading an excellent example of this the other week, from The Bloggess, where a PR agency not only approached with an inappropriately targeted form letter, which indicated the agency hadn't even read her blog, but responded to her (relatively) polite reply with an annoyed response.

The situation really escalated, however, when a VP in the PR agency, in an internal email, called her a "F**king bitch" (without the asterisks). This email was accidentally (by the VP) also CCed to The Bloggess.

The Bloggess took a deep breath, and responded politely, however then received a torrent of abuse from the PR agency.

At this point she published the entire exchange on her blog - in a post that has already received 1,240 comments, has been shared on Facebook 8,397 times and via Twitter 5,328 times.

Her comments have also been shared widely and her post read by many of her 164,000 Twitter followers.

The Bloggess's post is a good read - particularly for government agencies and their PR representatives - on how to behave appropriately when engaging bloggers, and the potential fallout when they don't.

I'm also keeping a link handy to 'Here's a picture of Wil Wheaton collating papers' for those PR and advertising agencies who send me form emails asking me to post about their product or brand promotions on my blog (and yes there's been a few in the last six months - all Australian agencies).

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Allowing your customers to codesign your services

Crowdsourcing often seems to be a high stress area for organisations, who fear what might happen if they allowed their users to design their products and services.

However what is often forgotten is that it's not about handing over the design process, it is about sharing it as a codesign process - combining the brain power of a few internal or contracted specialist designers who don't necessarily use your products or services with the brain power of thousands of non-specialists who use or interact with your products and services, often on a regular basis.

A good example of this process was recently discussed in Inc., where Fiat crowd sourced the design of its 2009 concept car, the Fiat Mio.

The main part of this process was conducted in Spanish (as Fiat is Brazilian based), and while I watched it occur at the time, there was only a limited subset of the conversation in English.

However Fiat ended up involving people from 160 countries - taking on board over 10,000 suggestions.  The website about the making of the car provides more information on how Fiat went about integrating these suggestions.

The concept car won widespread critical acclaim. 


This isn't the only approach possible, and the article in Inc, Letting Your Customers Design Your Products, describes five different types of crowd sourcing:

• Crowdfunding: Sites such as Kickstarter that allow an individual or enterprise to receive funding.
• Distributed knowledge: The aggregation of data and information from a variety of sources.
• Cloud labor: Leveraging a virtual labor pool.
• Collective creativity: Tapping "creative" communities for user-generated art, media or content.
• Open innovation: The use of outside resources to generate new ideas and company processes.

 How many of these could your agency benefit from?

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RightClick presentation

I've been a little busy this week, what with my wedding on Saturday, however here, belatedly, is my presentation from last Friday at RightClick.

Gov 2.0 in a gov 1.0 world

View more presentations from Craig Thomler.

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We're all internet organisations now

For the last fifteen years there's been an interesting 'us vs them' going on in the world of organisations - both commercial and public sector.

The distinction, real world versus online (businesses or organisations - take your pick), was made using fairly clear lines. Whether the organisation had physical shopfronts or offices you could walk into. Whether they made and products that sat on a shelf, or were comprised of zeros and ones. Whether their workers sat in the same buildings, or were spread across the world, kept connected via the internet.

People in 'real world' organisations considered themselves as serious workers, producing real things for real people and could look down on 'virtual organisations' as producing little of substance or longevity, being fad chasers who would not survive.

Equally those working in online organisations considered themselves as more agile, adaptable, collaborative and smarter than those in 'traditional organisations' and saw themselves as the inheriting the world from the dinosaurs.

As someone who has worked on both sides of the fence I've seen many subconscious prejudices play out, leading to poor investment decisions, marketing strategies ignoring major channels and structural decisions that did not take into account the full range of cost-effective options.

However over the last few years I have noticed a major shift in attitudes amongst both groups. A new respect of why there are differences in how organisations operate based on the products they happen to make.

At the same time digital technologies have become essential for all organisations, the internet a vital backbone for connecting their brains with their hands and legs, for informing decisions and communicating with customers.

In essence, in a variety of ways, all organisations are now internet organisations - supported and empowered by the world's data networks.

Where organisations still produce physical products and services, these are designed, produced, marketed, distributed and sold with heavy reliance on digital solutions.

Where the currency of organisations is information, this is also collected, analysed and distributed electronically.

What this means for government is that Departments are also now internet organisations. We have internalised the use of email, online research and consultation and the use of digital technologies to organise and instruct our staff and produce and distribute our products and services.

This has happened to such an extent that few government agencies could continue to perform efficiently if you removed their internet connections and email links from the world. A weakness? Perhaps, but also a strength.

So if you ever have anyone telling you that online organisations don't produce anything of value, aren't 'real', won't scale and will die out, tell them to think about how their organisation would cope if it lost its virtual presence and digital links.

It's about time we began embracing and leveraging this for organisational advantage.

We need to kill any of the remaining 'us vs them' thinking and ensure that all our top management embrace, understand and can most effectively use digital technologies to maximise our productivity and efficiency.

We're all internet organisations now.

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RightClick 2011

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Happy belated 20th birthday Mr Web Browser

The first web browser, appropriately named WorldWideWeb, was released publicly in August 1991 by 'Father of the Web' Tim Berners-Lee.

While I realise this post is a month late, I thought it would still be worth wishing the web browser 'Happy Birthday' and commenting on the impact that web browser software has had over the last twenty years.

If you go back twenty years (and two months), the internet was primarily a text based knowledge storage and communication medium.

While it was already global - just - the number of users could be counted in the thousands and were primarily researchers and academics at universities, with a few large companies and individuals thrown in.

With the introduction of WorldWideWeb (which became open source code in 1993), the internet was capable of becoming a visual medium, displaying text in stylesheets, images, sounds and even movies (it even built in a spellchecker and a WYSIWYG web page editing tool).

Today, the web is the largest media distribution channel on the planet, used by 2 billion people directly, and indirectly by almost the entire population of the planet. It supports the largest video library in the world (YouTube), the largest and fastest updating encyclopedia (Wikipedia) and the dominant social networks used by well over a billion people to remain connected to each other, despite distance and time.

Much of this is due to the innovations embodied in that first web browser - the browser that literally founded the world wide web.

Source: The brewing browser brouhaha
Sydney Morning Herald 29/09/2011 

The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported on the current state of the web browser market, looking at the five main platforms available - all of which are free to download and use (see image right).

Internet Explorer, from Microsoft retains the single largest market share, a reported 43% share - well down from the 90% plus they claimed back in 2005 (when IE6 dominated).

IE's share is split across four versions of the browser, each with very different capabilities - for July 2011 from net applications this was divided into IE6 (9.22%), IE7 (6.25%), IE8 (29.23%) and IE9 (6.8%).

Similarly, Firefox's share across versions has increased as their development pace has accelerated - for September 2011 from StatCounter this was divided into mainly Firefox 3.6 or lower (9.44%), Firefox 4 (2.10%), Firefox 5 (10.09%) and Firefox 6 (5.73%).

Today's diversity of web browsers is both an opportunity and a challenge for organisations. It provides an ecosystem rich in innovation and increasingly compliant with industry standards, however requires organisations to constantly reassess whether they are still designing for the right standard, or equipping their staff appropriately to access the range of web content they need in their jobs.

On the whole I think it is good to see this competition, although I appreciate the incremental cost of web design it brings - compatibility adds at least 10% of costs to web projects and can add more than 20% if designing for 10 year old web browsers, such as IE6.

The web browser has changed the world, largely for the better. It has opens up global publishing and distribution to billions and generated enormous efficiencies in sharing information (many of which remain to be realised as laws and processes catch up with the changed environment).

And yet, if the web browser was a person, it would not yet (quite) be legally allowed to drink in the USA.

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring.

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The role of social media during the Arab Spring

John Sheridan posted a link on Twitter to a very interesting analysis of the impact of social media on the revolutions across the Arab world over the last year.

The paper provides strong evidence that social media was one of the key causes of these revolutions due to its ability to place a human face on political oppression and had a critical role in mobilising dissidents to organise protests, criticise their governments, and spread ideas about democracy.

The report claims that social media had a central role in shaping political debates, for example,

Our evidence shows that social media was used heavily to conduct political conversations by a key demographic group in the revolution – young, urban, relatively well educated individuals, many of whom were women.

Both before and during the revolutions, these individuals used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to put pressure on their governments. In some cases, they used new technologies in creative ways such as in Tunisia where democracy advocates embarrassed President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali by streaming video of his wife using a government jet to make expensive shopping trips to Europe.

The report also provides evidence that online conversations about liberty, democracy and revolution on Twitter often immediately preceded large protests. This supports the use of social media as a civic organising tool.

Governments that attempted to shut down the internet, or specific social media services, were clearly also of the view that these were key channels for public dissidence outside their direct control, unlike  government-run or influenced newspapers, radio stations and television channels.

Finally, the paper demonstrates how social media was used to open up internal discussions to the world, helping spread democratic ideas across borders, providing global support networks for local dissidents and informing the media, which then fuelled awareness, interest, engagement and support for the Arab Spring through media reports.

The paper is an excellent read and quantifies a number of the effects of social media during the Arab Spring, which could be used by political 'dissidents' in other countries to help influence local debate.

Note that like all research, it is a little of a two-edged sword, as the paper could also be used by governments seeking to minimise debate to pre-empt online dissidence by establishing frameworks that can be extended to allow strict control of online discussion.

These frameworks  include national firewalls, broad-based and readily expandable online censorship regimes, internet kill switches and approaches that place the control of national internet infrastructure into government-controlled monopolies.

Often justified as beneficial initiatives designed to protect people from international cyberattacks, online fraud or inappropriate online content (which they may also do), these frameworks, if implemented without appropriate legal and privacy checks and balances, can be repurposed to restrict citizen access and quash undesired public debate, exclude certain individuals or organisations from participating online or even identify specific troublemakers for incarceration or worse.

I have embedded the document below for easy reading, or it can be downloaded in PDF format here, Opening closed regimes.

Opening closed regimes - What was the role of social media during the Arab Spring?

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