In the world of bureaucracy, there are two ways to communicate with senior management:

• very short briefs describing novel ideas with clear benefits or costs; or
• great long reports that demonstrate that a lot of very deep thinking and extensive consultation have resulted in findings with fundamental impact.

Unfortunately, David Wyld’s The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 is looong. It’s presented as a research report and, although it has clearly defined sections on blogging by public officials, public sector executives and corporate executives, it buries all the good nuggets of information between graphs, charts and paragraph upon paragraph of descriptive text.

Which is a pity, because he’s included a number of useful case studies and checklists, like this one:

10 Tips for Blogging by
Public Sector Executives

Tip 1: Define yourself and your purpose.
Tip 2: Do it yourself!
Tip 3: Make a time commitment.
Tip 4: Be regular.
Tip 5: Be generous.
Tip 6: Have a “hard hide.”
Tip 7: Spell-check.
Tip 8: Don’t give too much information.
Tip 9: Consider multimedia.
Tip 10: Be a student of blogging.

I guess what strikes me is the information design of the report. It just smells of 1993. It’s a big hunk of text, sitting online, with no energy or interactive elements. The report’s not going to win any converts the way it’s presented.

That said, I’ve long believed that adoption of social media by large hierarchical organizations will rely on heavyweight evangelism.

Much of the traditional executive suite will not buy into the benefits of social media and community building without the approval and reassurance of the same people who put their enterprise architecture into place.

Let’s face it. Senior executives are looking for these qualities:

• suits
• shoes
• combed hair
• an awareness of how the proposed technology will affect the rest of the network
• practical experience working with enterprise applications
• some sort of graduate degree that smells of ivy
• someone who can tie the benefits of social media to key business priorities

That means the big consultancies (IBM, by the way, sponsored Wyld’s report) and enterprise providers. As an advocate for social media, you might have to wrap yourself in big blue or talk about “the guys back in Germany.”

Otherwise, the alternate strategy is to win “big consultancy street cred” by getting articles published in white shoe magazines and newsletters like Harvard Business Review, Strategy+Business, and others.

thanks, Barb, for the pointer.

From a piece by Christopher Hayes in The Nation:

“… the sublime value of bureaucracy. Not only is governance of any kind impossible without it; so too are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic. Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim. That’s why an Administration hostile to any checks and balances has sought to reconstitute the federal civil service as just another lever in its machine.

… Like teachers at a high school who watch classes of students come and go, the bureaucrats remain while the administrations change. When the current occupant of the White House leaves, his appointed hacks will leave with him, and whether or not someone actually committed to governing takes his place, the bureaucrats will be there, as always, to do their duty. (The Nation)”

There’s some comment on this piece over on Matthew Yglesias’ blog at The Atlantic.
h/t to the Fedblog

New media applications are popping up everywhere. On subway straphangers. Inside elevators. Over the dentist’s chair. Over the urinal.

Normally reserved for beer ads, dating services and condom come-ons, the bathroom has been co opted by one government agency. Mark Anderson, a manager with Workforce Safety & Insurance,  the workers’ compensation agency in North Dakota, has put in place the “Info To-Let” - a clear plastic sleeve mounted on the bathroom walls, over the urinals, and in the stalls themselves.

The sleeves are used to pass along internal communications messages, including soliciting suggestions for employee of the month and announcements about the Christmas party.

“Basically, we just try to keep employees ‘flush’ with the news of the organization so they get a ‘handle’ on everything,” Armstrong laughs …
“We just completed a survey this month, and the vast majority of respondents—89 percent—found ‘Info To-Let’ to be either highly effective, effective, or were neutral in their opinion,” he says. “Only 11 percent of employees found it to be ineffective.” (Ragan)

How do you put into place a comprehensive and radically new communications program across an entire government? An interview over at PR Conversations provides details on how the Government of Tanzania has taken steps to implement a system-wide communications process - nuts and bolts, soup to nuts.

Tanzania’s previous government communications strategy was, how should be put it, prescriptive and parental? For example, take a look at the previous media relations policy (post-1970), detailed on page 105 and beyond of the MISA Media Advocacy Toolkit.

In the late 1990s, a fundamental change in political philosophy, government leaders and institutional approach to communications enabled Tanzania to begin restructuring the government’s communications function.

Gerhard Butschi and Mindi Kasiga made a presentation about the Tanzanian initiative at the recent World Public Relations Festival in Cape Town. Their powerpoint deck is available online.

Reviewing the interview and the deck, we can winnow down an extremely complicated process into some basic steps:

• Radical change in government ideology towards communicating with the public
• Strong direction from the Head of Government
• Empowered and centralized direction for change
• Third Party, NGO and international support for program
• Communications Audit by Burson-Marsteller
• Reinvigorated communications function in every Ministry
• Heads of Communication participation in management decisions
• Institutionalized best practices through common training and professional exchanges
• Common training across communication function, involving entire communications community

Granted, it is much easier to radically remake a communications community when you only have 50-odd communicators across the 26 ministries. Still, how many other governments have documents like the “Communications Strategy for the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty” available online?

h/t to Judy Gombita

Applying new technology and social media principles to your work as a government communicator can be a very simple task. Take, for instance, the bio page. Every government department has one, and they all have several common elements:

• 3/4 head shot of the Minister or Secretary
• Four or five paragraph biography
• In the sidebar, links to photographs, video, speeches, and news releases.
• A generic email address that leads to the communications team

These pages are accessed for a variety of reasons:

• A quick career reference when someone’s being reassigned (useful for national and local reporters, as well as civil servants doing a recce on their new boss)
• An easy source for a headshot to accompany a news story (once again, national and local reporters)
• A simple printout for an organization sponsoring an event with your Minister or Secretary (any number of stakeholder groups or political associations)

The traditional bio page is designed with one goal in mind: to give the Minister or Secretary an anchor on your institutional website. A quick stop that says “look! we know you’re the boss!”

It doesn’t, however, present information in a form that is useful to potential readers. Looking for the Minister’s comments on a particular specialist topic? You’re going to have to search each speech individually. Want an action photo to accompany your story about the Secretary’s visit to your AGM? You’ll have to search for that as well.

And chances are, nothing on the site is tagged appropriately or topically.

Luckily, some people are experimenting with new approaches to presenting biographical information. Not only does Rohit Bhargava’s Social Media Bio serve up several different forms of his bio (one-liner, 100 word and full bio), but it provides serious and amusing portraits. Importantly, it links to the basic elements of his online identity:

• profiles on social networking sites like LinkedIn
• authority rankings on blog indexes and ratings sites
• white papers and other publications
• interviews on well-regarded podcasts and specialty sites

I’m not suggesting that all these components are suitable for a Minister or Secretary’s bio page. Still, there are elements that can be easily adopted:

• multiple formats of the official biography
• official portraits in a variety of poses and settings
• links to guest editorials, columns and private-life work in relevant fields
• well-designed video and photo banks - tagged, searchable and with clearly defined copyright terms

It almost goes without saying that the same principles could be easily applied to the more technical specialists in your organization. They suffer from the same dispersion of relevant and valuable information:

• academic papers isolated on proprietary Journal sites
• Data and research results distributed only at professional conferences
• past media coverage of theirs that provides a balanced view of issues
• professional associations

The biggest hurdle to implementing this new bio page is effort. It will take effort to collect the information; to verify it; to develop and apply a folksonomy relevant to organizational AND public audiences; and effort to maintain the bio page.

After all, a stale bio page is worse than a thin one.

h/t to Strategic Public Relations.

Ever heard of a national political party sponsoring a race car? Now you have.

Tony Blair has delivered the last in his “Our Nation’s Future” lectures and it has launched some debate in the British press and online. It’s easy for me, as a Canadian, to simply overlook the impact of Alastair Campbell’s message machine, the repurcussions from the Hutton Inquiry and the increasingly antagonistic media environment in the United Kingdom.

So I will, because I think Blair makes clear that the increasingly polarised relationship between politicians and the media is having a significant effect on the work of civil servants.

First, I want to point out that Blair introduces the speech on YouTube. That’s unusual - providing “b” roll as a commentator - on your own speech. The total text is available online, as is a video. But here is an important excerpt:

“…The final consequence of all of this is that it is rare today to find balance in the media. Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life’s usual grey is almost entirely absent. “Some good, some bad”; “some things going right, some going wrong”: these are concepts alien to today’s reporting. It’s a triumph or a disaster. A problem is “a crisis”. A setback is a policy “in tatters”. A criticism, “a savage attack”.

NGOs and pundits know that unless they are prepared to go over the top, they shouldn’t venture out at all. Talk to any public service leader - especially in the NHS or the field of law and order - and they will tell you not that they mind the criticism, but they become totally demoralised by the completely unbalanced nature of it.

It is becoming worse? Again, I would say, yes. In my 10 years, I’ve noticed all these elements evolve with ever greater momentum.

It used to be thought - and I include myself in this - that help was on the horizon. New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media. In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five.”

The MediaGuardian’s OrganGrinder blog provides a summary of reaction from British media.

For example, the Guardian’s leader supports my point:

“…Mr Blair’s heartfelt homily deserves a more serious response. His words will have struck a sympathetic chord, not simply among people in public life, frustrated at the way their words and deeds are mediated, but among a broad section of readers and viewers as well…”

More, but from the Times:

“… There has been a democratisation of content but this has come with a hint of the mess of postmodernism. It can lead to a collective stampede that is frequently an unattractive spectacle. The press should be more willing to admit that most politicians enter public life out of a sincere desire to improve the lives of their fellow citizens and that they often have to make decisions with less time and less information than they would wish. None of us is perfect in this respect. …”

Here’s an innovative approach to the commercialisation of government data and publications: a U.S. not-for-profit is asking consumers to order their government documents, data and video through them. Public.Resource.Org will then seed those documents online, making them available to everyone.

I don’t know if this approach will be viable around the globe. Apparently, the U.S. government does not retain copyright on its publications. In Canada, many agencies retain Crown copyright and nominally require that permission be secured before their doucments are duplicated.

 Pointer from MarginalRevolution.

The Power of Information report is in. I’m slowly reading through it, but I’ll give you some highlights from the fifteen recommendations for action by the British Government:

• coordinate the development of experimental partnerships between major departments and user-generated sites in key policy areas, including parenting advice, services for young people, and healthcare.
• departments should be strongly advised to consult the operators and users of pre-existing user-generated sites before they build their own versions.
• research the scale and role of user-generated websites in their areas, with a view to either terminating government services that are no longer required, or modifying them to complement citizen-led endeavours.
• examine the introduction of non-commercial re-use licences.
• by autumn 2007 the Cabinet Office Propriety and Ethics and Government Communications teams should together clarify how civil servants should respond to citizens seeking government advice and guidance online.

The full document is available at the Cabinet Office site.