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Government of Canada on Twitter: Floodgates Open

9 February 2010 by Peter

Looks like the floodgates are opening for “official” Government of Canada Twitter presences.

New ones I’ve spotted in the last week:

This is by no means a comprehensive list. I’m sure there’s other recently launched GoC accounts on Twitter that I’ve not spotted yet. Tell me about them in the comments!

Posted in uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Branding: It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

5 February 2010 by Peter

In my post from earlier this week on branding and usability, I referred to Gerry McGovern’s quip about how “Organizations need to stop trying to use traditional advertising techniques to create false images” (source: Building a brand on the Web). I’d like to delve more into this argument.

The “false images” dig refers to an idea of branding that’s along these lines:

The idea behind a brand, as opposed to a product, is that it’s intangible. Advertisers try to create a series of social associations with a product: these nebulous associations, not any physical attributes of the product itself, constitute the brand. The idea is quite simply to fool people, to make them think of one thing when they are paying for another [via Russell Smith, in the Globe and Mail]

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Here’s what I mean: those all-important associations that marketers try to create when they are building a brand don’t need to be a smokescreen — people thinking about X while they are shelling out for Y. Why does the attribute  have to be dissociated from the product or service?

And when it comes to branding in a government setting, there simply cannot be any sleight of hand. None.

I’m sure you can imagine some possible outcomes for a government program or service that does not embody its brand promise. Take, for example, innovation, when in fact the systems and processes underlying the program or service are outdated and inadequate. Or service excellence, when frontline staff are inadequately trained or don’t receive the information they need to do their job. Or transparency when in fact opaqueness is the management team’s preferred operating style.

Leaving aside hypothetical examples, it’s basically this:  when undertaking branding in government, realism has to be the order of the day. This is because our operating context is fundamentally different from the private sector. We’re not trying to attract citizens away from competitors. It’s not like citizens can choose which government they want to pay taxes to, or which government office they’d like to receive their passport from. It’s not that citizens particularly like dealing with governments.

Under these circumstances, governments cannot afford brands that promise feel-good abstractions. These are in fact distractions of no service to our citizens. Reality is paramount. The attributes that we need to restrict ourselves to are really basic stuff: competence, accountability, impartiality, helpfulness, efficiency. And then we must deliver on these — I’m sure you know the drill. So that citizens can get what they need from government and then government can get out of their way.

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Social Media for Government: Barriers to Entry

3 February 2010 by Peter

Let’s say you’ve determined that entering into social media is right for meeting your org’s objectives. In my case it would be because we want to extend our web presence beyond the confines of our corporate website.

But let’s say you trying to be realistic and you know that you are not properly resourced or organized to start a full blown social media factory. Even starting a blog can be daunting — after all, while blogging may be easy, blogging well is not. (Take for instance the difference b/w this blog and those that really do cover similar territory well.)

So what’s the entry point with the lowest barrier?

… And of course the koolaid-drinking chorus says: Twitter. I say, yes it’s probably either that, or outbound commenting – listening and responding in various points around the web.

But. How easy is it really? These things take some planning. Like a 20-page Twitter strategy, or a bulletproof set of commenting and participation policies.

What I’ve found that developing these takes a lot more time than you’d think. I’ve been quite amazed at how challenging it’s been for my team (even while liberally using the modern copy-paste-adjust method!). We’re still far from nailing down exactly who does what, when and how often while representing the org online.

For example, we were working through the mechanics of how we would handle @replies on Twitter recently, and it’s been quite surprising how much there is to cover. A partial list of what we’re grappling with:

* how to handle official languages
* what microsyntax to use or avoid
* acceptable service standards and turnaround times
* triaging and handing off questions for response
* dealing with irrelevant or off-topic responses
* trolls and negative tweets vs legitimate complaints
* keeping it impartial
* privacy issues

And that’s just one aspect of interaction on one particular social site. 

Anyhow — What’s your take? What are other low barrier entry points to social media for government? Are there any?

Posted via email from Peter Smith’s Posterous

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Usability = Brand

1 February 2010 by Peter

Some thoughts on branding in the online space, from a recent issue of Gerry McGovern’s New Thinking newsletter. The set-up: he’s just gone through a litany of UX problems with the websites of many major Irish banks. Here’s the kicker:

This isn’t usability. This isn’t interface design. This is branding. This is marketing. This is advertising. This is management. And you know what? I’ll bet senior management in all these banks could not care less about my online experience. In fact, I have rarely, if ever, met a senior manager with more than a passing interest in the Web. They think this stuff is technical – something you give to the IT department.

Where customers spend their time is where you build your brand. Organizations need to stop trying to use traditional advertising techniques to create false images. For an increasing number of customers, you are your website. It’s about time senior management woke up to that fact.

[via Building a brand on the Web.]

(I won’t get into McGovern’s apparent quarrel with branding as it’s commonly understood — the “false images” bit — that’s fodder for another post.)

What strikes me here is how well the goals of website usability dovetail with many of the attributes that we’d want in a government brand.

First the brand side of the equation. Off the top of my head, some typical brand attributes for government: reliability, consistency, helpfulness, fairness, accountability, efficiency (ok ok, but I can dream right?). It’s a far cry from the attributes of that hip consumer brands strive for, but hey we are talking government after all.

Now, think about what we want to achieve with government web presences: create reliably working sites that treat our users consistently and fairly, that allow citizens to efficiently do what they need to do when interacting with government while online. Information and transactions are handled in an accountable manner, and navigation and content is helpful to our citizens. Lookit the highlighted words — these are the same  as the attributes for a government brand.

And for an increasing number of customers, you are your website. (McGovern is mostly oriented towards private businesses, but this also rings true for those of us in the public sector.)

So for government, usability = brand.

Posted in branding, government, web communications | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Breaking the #gc20 Twitterbot

25 January 2010 by Peter

Energizer bunny

It just kept going and going and going and ...

At the end of last week, I made some tweaks to the #gc20 twitterbot I built — and today, the @gc_20 account started re-tweeting the same stuff over and over. Obviously stuck in a loop of some kind.

Of course, my little bot blew up while I was attending a training session — so I was nowhere near a PC for the whole day. At break this afternoon I made a valiant attempt to kill off the account via mobile, but that didn’t work — I kept getting errors partway through the confirmation process, so I couldn’t finish the job properly.

So it just kept on keeping on – as robots will when there’s nobody around to take care of them.

I’ve now managed (I think) to turn it off. About 15 hours after it started spewing garbage. That’s a long time in a 24-7, always on, realtime world.

Takeaway: when you are experimenting in Twitter, there’s nowhere to hide when things go wrong.

So if you are doing this kind of thing while representing your org, then it’s really important to keep close tabs on your creations — especially when you change how they work. And to make a contingency plan. Neither of which I did. ‘Course I created this thing without much forethought either. It was just a little experiment in getting the hang of building a hashtag bot. Which is another no-no if you are doing this more seriously — did I mention that it’s not a good idea to be going about this without a plan?

Anyhow, credit to my network — a couple of folks tipped me off (thanks !), otherwise @gc_20 might still be re-tweeting madly. Also credit to my peeps for not chewing me out for screwing it up. Then again, maybe they’re just practicing what mama taught them — “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”

Still, if I was an org, this could have been very damaging. Annoying the audience is never a good idea.

Image credit: Creativity+ on Flickr

Posted in social media, strategy, tactics | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

@StatsCan Comes Alive

19 January 2010 by Peter

Screen grab of Statistics Canada's English Twitter account

Screen grab of Statistics Canada's English Twitter account

Statistics Canada is about to start tweeting. The accounts @statcan_eng and @statcan_fra will begin posting links to The Daily starting tomorrow.

What’s the significance? The national statistical agency’s Twitter accounts have been live but inactive since late 2008 — and combined, they have amassed nearly 1500 followers without a single tweet. As far as I can tell, this is more than any other “corporate” Government of Canada presence in Twitter. A testament to StatsCan’s brand.

The agency issued two teaser tweets this afternoon. Here’s the first one, to alert people (and make the existence of the French account known).

From: @StatCan_eng
Sent: Jan 19, 2010 15:02

Thank you for following. Starting tomorrow we will be tweeting from this account and our French account @statcan_fra.

sent via web

On Twitter: http://twitter.com/StatCan_eng/status/795753821

And here’s the second one, which provides additional detail on what the contents of the tweets will be.

From: @StatCan_eng
Sent: Jan 19, 2010 15:23

On 20-Jan-10, StatCan will start posting major data releases from The Daily. Stay tuned for more. http://bit.ly/8Obdy7

sent via web

On Twitter: http://twitter.com/StatCan_eng/status/7958176789

Why The Daily? It’s the agency’s flaship communications vehicle — as such it makes sense to extend its presence into Twitter. Here’s the official “about” blurb:

The Daily is Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin, the Agency’s first line of communication with the media and the public. The Daily issues news releases on current social and economic conditions and announces new products. It provides a comprehensive one-stop overview of new information available from Statistics Canada.

I will be interested to see how this develops. How will StatsCan handle interaction? What about official languages? What corporate voice will be used? What’s been tweeted so far has given us some hints about these issues but we shall see.

Anyhow, well done Stats Can, happy tweeting!

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Creativity in the Bureaucracy

18 January 2010 by Peter

From Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen:

Maria Barrados, president of the Public Service Commission, has commissioned a study on the implications of generational turnover as the baby boomers retire. The twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who are starting their public-service careers today have grown up in a different world from that of their parents. There’s bound to be some friction, but friction can be useful, if it leads to positive change.

If it doesn’t, the new recruits will quickly become disillusioned. They might stay in their jobs because of the great benefits, good hours and security, but they’ll stop trying to be creative if creativity isn’t prized. They’ll learn, soon enough, how just to put in their hours and go home, and channel all their creativity into other parts of their lives. That won’t serve the taxpayers.

Full story: Tomorrow’s bureaucrats.

My own experience, from the perspective of more than 10 years “inside”: I still feel that creativity is possible, perhaps more so now than ever. The adjustment for me was learning that every so-called great idea (or brain fart) that I had was not necessarily the best thing organizationally speaking.

In the first few years I spent in the bureaucracy, I spent a lot of time being frustrated about this, but I gradually came to learn that it’s not just about me. How can it be? I am but one individual among more than 200,000 that make of the federal public service. Let alone the 30+ million citizens that we serve.

I wouldn’t call this realization disillusionment. Instead it’s far closer to enlightenment. I still bring creativity to my work. But I now have a much better sense of where to focus my creative energies. What’s that saying? Pick your battles. To me, it’s about leverage — spotting the achievable, realistic points at which you can effect change, and then taking advantage of them.

That’s not saying cherry pick the easy stuff — often the easiest changes to make are change for its own sake, stuff that doesn’t matter. I’m talking about making real, concrete changes that benefit Canadians who are touched by the services I provide. Pinpointing what those changes could be and then following through is a long process, and requires patience and persistence.

In my case, it’s about making GC websites and web communications better. Not prettier or flashier, but more useful. And for the websites I am currently responsible for, I feel like I’m just at the beginning. There is a lot to do. Good.

Posted in bureaucracy, government, observations | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Old media incorporated into the new medium

12 January 2010 by Peter

Excerpt from Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite (1996):

Today, on the Internet the main event is the Web. A lot of people think that the Web is the Internet, and they’re missing something. The Internet is a brand-new fertile ground where things can grow, and the Web is the first thing that grew there. But the stuff growing there is in a very primitive form. The Web is the old media incorporated into the new medium. It both adds something to the Internet and takes something away.
(W. Daniel Hillis)

And here it is 2010, and this still feels true to me in a lot of ways.

We have started to figure out that where the action is on the Web is with *interaction* – but still a lot of what happens with that interaction is “old media incorporated into the new medium.” Lookit what now represents the cutting edge — the golden triangle of realtime/mobile/social. It’s mostly about spreading news around, isn’t it?

Posted via web from Peter Smith’s Posterous

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AddThis and Finance Canada

7 January 2010 by Peter

A while back I blogged about Finance Canada’s use of the AddThis widget to facilitate sharing their website content. Just noticed that the AddThis button has vanished from www.fin.gc.ca. Bummer!

Here’s to hoping that it will make a reappearance once whatever issue they had gets sorted out.

Posted in Web 2.0, government, social media, uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

Liking Feedera

6 January 2010 by Peter

Like many Twitter users, my activity can be quite random. I’m far from being one of those "always on" types who spends the whole day with one eye on their tweetstream. I don’t even have a predictable, routine time when I’m on Twitter from one day to the next.

Sometimes I’ll check out my tweetstream in the morning on the bus, other times I’ll spend a couple hours with it on in the background in the afternoon, or maybe in the evening.

As a result I find myself missing a lot of what my network is tweeting about. Sometimes I’ll lose track of my favorite tweeters for days. And it’s frankly tedious to scroll back through my timeline for cool links and info. So I rarely do it.

Enter Feedera. I signed up a few weeks back (via this post on Mashable — as far as I can tell the offer is still active, but it seems like you can also just request to sign up via the Feedera site directly), and ever since, I’ve been receiving a daily email summarizing what my network’s been sharing. Since getting this daily digest, I’ve been more easily able to see what’s been top of mind for the people I follow. And I’ve been able to see activity from some familiar faces that I hadn’t been lucky enough to stumble across in a while. Very nice.

Minor quibble: the email digest has a very nice layout to allow for quick info absorption,  but it’s in HTML, so optimized for desktop or laptop use. I would love to get a text only version, since a lot of my email reading is done via mobile (an aging Blackberry to be precise). However it doesn’t seem like I can choose to receive my digest as a text email. Or maybe I can and I just haven’t figured that out yet.

Posted via email from Peter Smith’s Posterous

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