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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 , |

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 , , |

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 |

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 , , , |

In-Between Spaces

28 May 2010 by Peter

Friday thought about social media, the workplace and generating ideas.

The following appeared in the comments thread on a lighthearted post about things not to say if you are trying to get your org to go social. I’ve added highlights:

I used to have relatively strong disagreements at the foundation I worked at years ago when they were pushing video-conferencing to replace face-to-face meetings. I kept thinking that the most profound insights and creativity always happened “in between” the formal sessions–during coffee breaks, over lunch, casual encounters when moving between sessions, and particularly when the formal sessions completely broke down. I’ve got a colleague in international development that spends all his time at conferences in the hallways to converse with other folks “escaping” the formal structure.

For me, Enterprise 2.0. Gov 2.0–virtually any social media channel–recreates that “in-between” space, where interactions can spontaneously occur, where the pressures of “productivity” and deadlines are released enough to see and experience things in radically different light, and therefore always fresh opportunity. Can it be measured against a cost-benefit analysis? Probably not, but for the sake of argument, what if it were possible to measure ALL the communications that took place around a given community/organization/enterprise–formal and informal–and flag the points where the greatest creativity broke through? I think it almost invariably happens first “in-between” and then enters the “formal” discussion.

And that’s what social media opens up–a rebalancing of the “in-between” spaces with the formal structures.

Just thinkin…

Props to the author. This crystallizes the feeling that I have about the value of social media at work. The importance of social media in the workplace is that in enhances that informal, in-between space for idea generation.

It goes further than merely recreating the water-cooler experience.  Social media allows ideas generated informally to be efficiently captured for future use. Too often, those water-cooler chats vanish into thin air, and the spark of an idea that might have had legs dies out invisibly. By transferring those conversations online, they get preserved for others to build on.

And it gets better — Only a few folks can gather around a water cooler, but given the endlessly linked and continuously interconnecting nature of the web, you’re no longer restricted to a small circle of face-to-face connections for sending and receiving flashes of insight. You can take it much farther afield now, over a longer period of time also.

The always-on, instantly shareable nature of social media lets people capture those flashes of insight for immediate testing and validation or correction. At a scale that was previously unavailable.

Posted in bureaucracy, collaboration, social media | Tagged , , , |

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