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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Media Relations, Public Affairs, Messaging. 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.