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Reduce the ROT (or Not)

4 November 2010 by Peter

ROT is in the air. Not because it’s late fall and everything is dying in the garden, no. I’m talking about web ROT – redundant, outdated and trivial content that clutters up big websites.

In the Government of Canada context, with CLF updates coming down the pipe, the opportunity to reduce the ROT [NB internal GCpedia link] is there. You’re gonna have to update your site anyhow, so why not kill off those old pages that have been online & unchanged since the 1990s?

It’s a noble quest, but I do wonder if it’s tilting at windmills.

The “reduce the ROT” idea is basically to prune back your content so that what’s left is the good stuff. The quality stuff that most of your users want, the long neck of your website. The top tasks.

Thing is, to remove the ROT, precious hours of your web team’s time will be spent identifying, unposting and archiving all that mess. If your site is big enough, it’s a question of many hours on that “mind-numbing” journey through the depths of your web content. & if responsibility for web is shared (as in decentralized situations that are still very common in government web management), you’re likely going to have to do battle with small-minded content owners who refuse to see the big picture.

Weeding out the ROT is actually an indirect way to fix your website. So instead, why not just cut to the chase and push the good stuff to the top of the pile? Rather than cutting away ROT, why not directly optimize your killer content?

Here’s some ideas on how that might happen:

  • tweak your on-site search to push the top content up the results
  • offsite, enhance the findability of your best content via SEO
  • provide dedicated landing pages for top tasks and content — and then make sure search results and site nav get you to these
  • tweak your nav to provide more direct paths to the good stuff
  • feature the good stuff prominently on your home page
  • and most of all, switch your focus from managing content to managing those key tasks.

… and there’s many more things that can be done. That’s just a quick off-the-top-of-my-head starter list. What are you doing to bring quality forward on your site?

(Of course, both reducing the ROT and optimizing the quality content would be the best possible approach, but since I live the reality of limited time and resources, I need to prioritize… and so these days, I’m putting my energy towards surfacing the good stuff first.)

Posted in government, web communications | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments »

A Surprise I Found in the GoC Communications Policy

27 September 2010 by Peter

What does this sound like?

Encourage public service managers and employees to communicate openly with the public about policies, programs, services and initiatives they are familiar with and for which they have responsibility. Openness in government promotes accessibility and accountability. It enables informed public participation in the formulation of policy, ensures fairness in decision making, and enables the public to assess performance. An open and democratic government implies that all employees have a role in communicating with the public while respecting the constitution and laws of Canada. Public service managers and employees must respect privacy rights, matters before the courts, national security, Cabinet confidences and ministerial responsibility. They serve the public interest best by communicating openly and responsively about policies, programs, services and initiatives they help to administer, while treating sensitive information with the discretion it requires.

A strong rationale for government bureaucrats to widely adopt social media communications, perhaps?  (Complete with caveats about doing so responsibly). Surprise — it comes from the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada.

Interesting: it looks like this has been part of the communications policy from at least 2002. Well before most of us had any idea about blogging, web 2.0 or social media. Go ahead, take a look at the text of the archived 2002 policy statement, it says the same thing.

(The GoC Communications Policy is a bit of a laundry list of requirements — 31 in total — for various aspects of communications: advertising, publishing, web, crisis communications, media relations, corporate identity, and so on. It’s easy to get lost in the details of each of these requirements and forget the overarching principles, laid out in the policy statement at the front end of the document. I’ve often skipped past this section — usually b/c I’m looking for some specific detail buried deeper in the document. But the other day I re-read the policy statement again for the first time in a long while, and that’s when this jumped out at me.)

Posted in government, social media | Tagged , , | 5 Comments »

Mobile Strategy — Avoid User Frustration

17 September 2010 by Peter

Here’s an example of a common mobile frustration alluded to in the comments on my last post (http://wp.me/paqt7-pj).

Several people in my networks have been sharing links via Twitter to an article in Backbone Magazine on some of Canada’s e-government wins : http://ow.ly/2Fr8w

Last night and this morning, I’ve tried to click through from different tweets while reading via mobile — but instead of being served the article I want, I keep getting bumped to the front page of Backbone’s mobile site: http://m.backbonemag.com/ While there’s other interesting stuff on that home page, it’s not what I wanted to read, so highly frustrating.

This is an example of what commenter Aaron called “forcing [users] to the mobile interface based on detection” and correctly identified as a major no-no. The solution? I think Aaron’s approach makes sense:

I think the ticket is to push for mobilization (top tasks interface) supported by miniaturization (mobile-friendly stylesheets).

The problem with a top tasks interface is that it is usually only served up to those coming in on homepages or major landing pages. With the propensity of Google searches (especially on smartphones) the mobile interface is never even seen to those landing “deep” in content pages. Forcing them to the mobile interface based on detection is a major no-no. Miniaturization would reinforce the content linking strategy, such that mobile users would not be unduly inconvenienced when navigating from mobilized version to standard website content.

So basically: when pursuing your mobile web strategy, your first objective should be to avoid frustrating your users: don’t prevent them from getting at what’s available on your “normal” website.

Posted in strategy, web communications | Tagged , | Comments Off

Mobile and Government of Canada Sites

14 September 2010 by Peter

The Government of Canada’s Common Look and Feel standards are the playbook for maintaining our websites. They were last updated in 2006, before the buzz on “social media,” before the explosion of the mobile web. (“Web 2.0″ was a major trend at the time, one that these standards more or less avoided completely.)

Now, updates to CLF are in the works, but until they are released, we’re still playing by 2006 rules. & we all know that four years is an eternity online.

This nugget on mobile got me thinking:

The spread of mobile media devices, whether smartphones or iPads or Nooks, has led to tailored software applications that make reading text and watching video easier on screens smaller than those on personal computers. So people are not viewing this mobile media through a Web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox, a central point in the Wired “Web Is Dead” article. But the books, magazines and movies viewed on an iPad, for example, are downloaded over the Internet. Indeed, Wired added the headline declaration, “Long Live the Internet.” Similarly, the case for Facebook’s fall someday is that it is a cluttered Web creation when mobile devices demand sleek, simple designs. [via Now Playing - Night of the Living Tech - NYTimes.com]

The same can be said for GoC CLF-compliant websites — they are “cluttered web creations” that may happen to be viewable via mobile devices, but provide relatively poor user experience.

So for me, a mobile site or app is needed. A colleague remarked to me recently that he felt that given improvements in how the browsers work in smartphones, it would make more sense to focus efforts on dedicated mobile apps. I’m not so sure. I don’t have access to an iPhone, but I can tell you that the browser on the Blackberry is, to put it mildly, not so hot.

& there’s another reason why I think mobile sites have their place — in a lot of cases, I feel that users would have a low level of motivation to go through the effort of downloading and installing a dedicated app to interact with GoC content.

Anyhow, here’s a couple of screencaps from my Blackberry browser (version 4.7.1, so not the latest but fairly recent) that illustrate how CLF sites look when you first access them. If you are using a desktop display (such as what I’m using now), keep in mind that these look much smaller on a mobile device.

I find I always need to spend some time zooming and panning to get at readable content. And if I’m not familiar with the site in question, while I’m exploring, I’m also trying to envisage what it “ought” to look like if it were on a laptop- or desktop-sized screen. Even if you know the site well, it often takes several tries to make the page readable. I’m very familiar with the weather forecast for Ottawa example for instance (it’s the start page on my BBerry browser), and I’ve got the routine for it down pat: on load, click the magnifying glass, then scroll to the text forecast, then hit the menu button and select column view to render it in a way that I can read it without squinting.

I’m not sure I’d want to force my users to put up with this kind of experience. Patient and forgiving users (like me!) are few and far between. But even the impatient and unforgiving are starting to use the mobile web in a big way — so we should be adapting to this in a way that lets them get at our content with a minimum of hassle.

A proper mobile site, such as the ones for CIC or PHAC, would be optimized for the screen size on which you are working and would allow you to starting using it productively right away.

The approach that CIC and PHAC appear to have taken is to create a separate mobile site that focuses on top-task content drawn from the main site. Another route could be to implement mobile styles on the main site itself so that users can experience any page without all the zooming and panning. I can think of advantages and pitfalls to both — what’s your take?

Posted in government, web communications | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments »

Twitter Users Going Mobile — Time to Take Your Website Mobile Too

13 September 2010 by Peter

Recent data from Twitter showing the plethora of devices and apps used to access the service

Twitter released data last week showing an explosion of mobile use of their service:

Total mobile users has jumped 62 percent since mid-April, and, remarkably, 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start on mobile now, as opposed to the five percent before we launched our first Twitter-branded mobile client. As we had hoped in April, these clients are bringing more people into Twitter, and, even better, they are attracting and retaining active users. Indeed, 46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience. [Official Twitter Blog: The Evolving Ecosystem]

That’s a lot of different numbers,  but basically it boils down to this: the Twitter experience is transforming into a mobile one.

How I tweet. Mobile clients highlighted.

This certainly rings true for me personally — For example, my TweetStats shows that since staring on Twitter, mobile has been a very common part of how I tweet — I’ve highlighted the mobile clients in the graph at right, which shows the breakdown in clients used for 4029 of my tweets since I started using Twitter. Combined, my mobile apps — UberTwitter, Dabr, the official Blackberry app and TwitterBerry — accounted for 1709 of my tweets. If I were able to look at amore recent slice of this data, I’m sure it would show that mobile clients account for the majority of my tweeting. (And that’s just my output, rather than looking at how I consume others’ tweets. I often start my day by grabbing my ‘Berry and checking my Twitter timeline and lists, so you get the idea how that goes.)

Importantly, I’m not just issuing and reading tweets via mobile. I’m following links. Lots of them. As we all know link sharing is one of the most common ways of using Twitter. And I can tell you that when I get to the other end of those links, I much prefer dealing with site that’s optimized for mobile than one that’s not. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

What’s the takeaway for us GoC web communications types? If you are running a Twitter account that posts links to your website into the Twitterverse (and soon that’ll be all of us), it looks like its time to start thinking about taking your website mobile if you haven’t already.

Posted in government, social media, uncategorized, web communications | Tagged , | Comments Off

Does it Make Sense to Have Departmental or Agency Websites?

31 August 2010 by Peter

The dominant way in which the Government of Canada manages its web presence is along organizational lines. Each dept or agency has its own website and manages its own content and services. But does this make sense? Should the overall federal government web presence use organizational boundaries as its main organizing principle?

I think maybe not. it is a truism in government communications that our citizens and stakeholders don’t understand or care how government is organized, or which dept or agency is talking to them. All they want is to receive the services that they are after. They tend to see the GoC as a monolithic, singular entity.

But when it comes to web I don’t think one monolithic uber-site is the answer. Online, segmentation is the order of the day — it is niche that plays well. Digital communities tend to coalesce around issues or topics rather than organizations. So targeted sites divvied up thematically — regardless of which orgs have a stake in the topic.

An example: Today, GoC consumer information and services are spread across a range of sites belonging to a number of different orgs — e.g. Industry Canada (in several spots), the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, the Competition Bureau, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, Health Canada, NRCan, etc. Why not collect all that into a single consumers.gc.ca site. This would be a more truly citizen-centric approach to delivering web.

I’m fully aware that there are some examples of GoC web presences developed along these lines — for instance science.gc.ca, canadabusiness.gc.ca. And if memory serves, this was one of the principles driving the old Government Online (GOL) initiative. But the job was never really finished, and the topic sites that are active today coexist uneasily with organizational ones.

I also realize that what I’m suggesting would be a massive undertaking. Reorganizing the entire .gc.ca web from a collection of mostly org sites to a set of theme ones would take years of effort, not to mention impressively strong willed leadership. After all, trying to keep even a single agency site from its tendency to become organized by org chart is difficult.

Gerry McGovern says that the “essential challenge of the Web is to become customer-centric.” In government terms, our central web management challenge is to become citizen-centric. If we are going to rise to this challenge, if we truly want to become citizen-centric online, then dropping organizational sites in favour to subject sites is probably the way to go.

Posted in government, web communications | Tagged , | 7 Comments »

Putting Web at the Centre of Government

13 July 2010 by Peter

The speed with which the American federal government has been moving forward with its web agenda is nothing short of breath-taking. From open data to social media, mobile and beyond, the American government’s online presence has been transforming itself. So fast in fact that a whole industry has sprung up to watch and report on it (think NextGov, GovFresh, OhMyGov, etc.).

Many will think of the arrival of the Obama administration as the key driver of this energy. But the pieces were falling into place even before the US President’s open government directive in Jan 2009.

Back in 2008, the Federal Web Managers Council issued a challenge to the bureaucrats managing web in the US federal government — “Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government.” That whitepaper proposed six goals for the web function in the Government of the USA:

  • Establish web communications as a core government business function
  • Help the public complete top government tasks efficiently
  • Clean up irrelevant and outdated content so people can find what they need online
  • Engage the public in a dialogue to improve our customer service
  • Deliver the same answer from every service channel (web, phone, email, print, in-person, etc.)
  • Ensure underserved populations can access critical information online.

Noble goals all. And ambitious too. Yet commonsense — and key to meeting the needs of an increasingly digital society.

The Federal Web Managers recently issued an update detailing their progress in achieving this vision.  Read about it in their 2010 Progress Report.

Here in Canada, the evolution of web management in the federal government has taken a different path: a focus on policy compliance. CLF 2.0 standards came into effect in 2006, and since then many departments and agencies have poured the main part of their energies (and budgets!) for web into compliance. Which is all well and good, but hardly an ambitious achievement.

Now TBS is leading a review of CLF standards with an eye to releasing updates starting later this year. Some of the good changes that I have seen from my position mostly on the sidelines:

  • a community minded, crowdsourcing approach where those involved in web across the GoC have been encouraged to participate
  • extensive use of GCpedia, the GoC-wide wiki environment, to facilitate collaboration and participation
  • the incorporation of usability (or user experience if you prefer) as a core aspect of CLF, closing up a major pre-existing gap in the standards

But none of this changes the fundamental disconnect around web that I see in the GoC: for citizens, the web is increasingly becoming central to their interaction with government, while within the bureaucracy, web is still by and large treated as a secondary concern. It is far from being “a core government business function.”

As @resultsjunkie tweeted earlier today, we need a GoC version of this vision of putting web at the centre of government.

Posted in bureaucracy, government, web communications | Tagged , , | 6 Comments »

Canadians Report a 35% Decline in Email Received. Significant for Marketing?

6 July 2010 by Peter

Online Canadians Report a Large 35% Decline in the Amount of Email Received | Ipsos.

That’s an impressive headline. From the release:

Study author Mark Laver noted that ‘when you look at some of the new communications platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and [MSN] Messenger, that have taken off in the last few years the decline in email usage is really not that surprising, what is surprising is the size of the decline that is happening.’

One of the reasons that email usage may have declined so dramatically are emerging communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and various Instant Messengers. In fact, Facebook users send an average of 16 messages inside of that platform each week. Those using MSN Messenger or Blackberry Messenger are sending even more messages on a weekly basis.

And the takeaway:

These findings also have significant implications for those businesses that rely on email marketing for some or all of their business. These companies should be evaluating to see if social media platforms are an effective method for distributing their message.

Sounds logical, right? Email is down,  and there’s lots of people using Facebook, Twitter and various IM networks, so marketers should be considering dropping email and shifting over to social networks.

And yet. Statistics Canada recently noted that email is still the most common activity undertaken by online Canadians — at 93%, e-mail was still the most common online activity from home in 2009. This was far ahead of even “general browsing for fun or leisure,” the second most common activity reported by 78%. & using instant messaging was only reported by 45% in 2009 — which in fact represents a decline, from 50% in 2007.

Turning back to the Ipsos findings, note that these are based on email received. The question that was asked: “In an average week, how many emails do you receive (including spam)?” I think that the inclusion of spam in the question is actually very significant. My experience with spam over the last few years has been that I get far less of it. From Gmail to my ISP to my workplace email, I see very little spam these days — a far cry from a few years back when I started every day by cleaning out my inbox of the overnight clutter of unsolicited weight loss/cheap meds/penis enlargement (or worse) crap.

So I’m left wondering whether the 35% decline in email rec’d since 2008 reported by Ipsos is due to better spam filters? I’ll bet improvements in this area have had a significant impact. My theory is that while overall emails received is down, the signal to noise ratio has improved greatly. Meaning that email marketing of the legitimate kind — where people has actually signed up to receive your messages — would actually benefit from this decline of inbox clutter.

Posted in marketing, social media, web communications | Tagged , , | Comments Off

On Lurking

16 June 2010 by Peter

Yes, the blog has been quiet lately. And I’ve been getting out less. A few people have noted that my Twitter activity is down also.

So it would seem I’ve gone into lurking mode.

The reasons for this are varied, ranging from focusing on web 1.0 issues at work, to getting used to managing a team (damn it’s way harder than I’d ever imagined), to wanting to spend more time outside. And we can’t forget that it’s baseball season.

But rest assured, I am still here.

In defense of lurking: I don’t always have something useful to say about what I come across online. It takes time to come up with intelligent commentary — time that I often don’t have. I’m not so hot at instant feedback either, I tend to need to go away and think about stuff for a while to make up my mind. And in an environment where attention moves on to the next thing quickly, the imperative of the fast response often leaves me feeling like there’s little point making a post or dropping comments on something that’s a few (or more) days old. Why make the effort when everyone else has moved on to the next shiny object?

Oh and I’ll be honest — I’m easily distracted too. Instead of sitting down and banging this post out in a few concentrated minutes, it’s taken me all day (in fits and starts of course) to put together these few words.

So it all adds up to my being on the fringes a lot of the time. I know I’m not alone — think of the well-known 90-9-1 principle, a model of online communities where 90% are lurkers, 9% are somewhat active, and only 1% are fully engaged.

But wait, isn’t lurking bad? Anathema to participation, engagement, openness, etc. etc. On the contrary, I’m fine with it.

Some folks just aren’t that comfortable with active participation online — like this obviously very bright fella who attributes his lurkiness to a form of performance anxiety.

And then there’s this defense of lurking, described by a blogger at FCW:

Upon encountering the term “lurker” I felt guilty, like I was hiding behind my chair and sneaking peaks at the online entries of the greater community. Upon further research I found, in an MIT study, a defense of lurking that was better than anything I could make up. The study found that active lurkers in an online community might constitute closer to 40 percent to 50 percent of members and, while these people might not contribute directly to the online forum, they contribute by taking some of the ideas from the specific community and sharing them in the world at large. I propose we call these people “worker bees” instead of lurkers, as they take the pollen from one online community and spread it to others. (I think “worker bee” sounds much better than “lurking” also, but I don’t think I want to go too much further with a pollination analogy.)

Sounds good to me — I’m gonna use that as my excuse. Lately, I’m too busy pollinating the real world with the ideas I find online to actually participate there.


Posted in blogging, observations | Tagged | Comments Off

Government Service Delivery via Twitter – @CBSA_BWT

11 June 2010 by Peter

Canada Border Services Agency is tweeting border wait times. This tweet reports that there's no delay at the Douglas (Peace Arch) border point in Surrey BC.

Well willya lookit that. The Canada Border Services Agency has set up a Twitter account that automatically broadcasts border wait times on Twitter.

So if you are sitting in your car wondering how much longer you are going to have wait to get over the border, just hand your mobile over to your passenger and tell them to look up: http://twitter.com/cbsa_bwt

Tweets are hashtagged by the name of the border point, so searching Twitter for the appropriate hashtag for the crossing you are interested in will also turn up the info you need. Here’s an explanation of how it works from the CBSA website: http://bit.ly/dwzprs

What I like about this is that it’s a use of Twitter for service delivery rather than marketing or promotion. In my little corner of the universe, we’re conditioned to think in terms of “getting the message out” more so than providing concrete information for our citizens to use. This Twitter account fills a basic information need without any fuss.

H/t: found via tweet from Martha, who points out that the explanation of how it all works is very well done:

@mjmclean: A very strong example of a #GoC Twitter protocol page. Nice work CBSA. http://bit.ly/dwzprs #gc20 #w2p
http://twitter.com/mjmclean/status/15846259435

Posted in government, social media | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

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