It seems to me that we are at a crossroads with the social media release and the decisions and actions that we make now, especially in a government context, will have important consequences in the coming years. This is not unexpected in the early phases of the development of any emergent media, however, it does mean we should be paying attention to what transpires and engaging where we have either an obligation or believe that we can add some perspective to the issue.

Let me begin by saying that I think that the idea of a social media news release is a terrific one. Kudos to Tom Foremski for initiating the concept with his influential post and to Todd Defren for actually sitting down and producing the alpha version. Similarly, the work of Chris Heuer and co. in this space is exemplary.

Should we adopt it in government? My answer is an unequivocal yes. Who will it benefit? Are there tangible benefits? As a rough indication – and I assume my experience is fairly standard – in the period after a press release, I may typically get calls/emails from the following (in addition to journalists):

• Parliamentary staffers
• researchers, academics and students
• vendors and industry groups
• NGOs and non-profits
• other governments
• the general public

Anything that makes it easier for all of these people to discover, access and re-use the information that we publish has to be considered as beneficial. Our responsibility as communicators to improve the way we promulgate government information is both a key professional obligation and a fundamental support for the democratic process.

Government news is not ‘pitched’ to journalists (at least not in New Zealand). It is the definitive statement of a department/agencies position on a given topic at a specific time. It is of interest to more than just the media, and should be made available in a format that reflects this wide range of potentially interested parties. Importantly, this format should not exclude anyone.

This is the reason that I am so excited by the prospect of microfomatting the SMR. The semantic markup benefits all users, whether people or machines and makes the information more discoverable, more usable and more re-usable.

Unfortunately, hRelease (the proposed microformat) hasn’t made it to draft yet and the real world examples of the SMR have not delivered quality markup.

While I welcome all the effort to get this off the ground, it is both perplexing and frustrating to see much of this effort going into the style and not the substance of the format. Edelman’s StoryCrafter is a good example (and I pick them because, more than any other organization, they have the resources and the intelligence to deal to this): their SMRs are woefully inadequate in terms of the markup. Escher-like recursions of nested tables, font tags and other deprecated markup. Completely at odds with the first principle of the SMR: democratize the access.

Does this matter? If you are in government then you are probably required by law to publish your information in an accessible format. Most jurisdictions have some form of mandated web standards.

Additionally it seems to me that, as government communicators, we have an obligation to advise our agencies about the most effective way to take advantage of technological developments for communications. As public affairs practitioners, we represent the interests of all those people who want to know what their government is spending their tax dollars on. And as professionals we want to embrace new techniques and best practice to enhance the services we deliver. Understanding social media seems to be pretty important across all of these facets of our job.

Now, while the SMR is still in its infancy, is the time to engage and support the original principle. Get involved in the process, ensure that your peers are aware of these developments and of their implications for their agencies. Government communicators have something to add to this conversation: make sure your voice gets heard.

Technorati Tags: social media, SMR, hRelease, microformats, government, public servants.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Media Relations, Stakeholders, Public Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.