I’ve mentioned James Watson’s new book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, elsewhere, but I thought this passage would appeal to public sector types:

“… Watson notes that many intellectual conflicts in science play themselves out as contests over the control of physical space. Salaries are important, but space is even more important, since it’s a publicly visible sign of your standing and power: “Always buy adjacent property that comes up for sale”; “Be prepared to resign over inadequate space”; “In the Darwinian world of an academic department, if you don’t create such crises, limited resources will surely go to gutsier colleagues.” (Harvard Magazine)

I’m not sure if the battle for space is really the fiercest in the bureaucratic jungle:  budget cuts, tax cuts and increasing emphasis on management efficiency have moved a lot of the hard work to the accountant’s shanty.

Still,  everyone reporting to a supervisor will tell you that space and appearances matter to some executives.

John Bell has some th0ughts on the components to use in developing a business case for social media.  Unfortunately, it speaks more to marketing and communications audiences than hard-nosed corporate types, but it is very useful.

Jeremiah offers some advice on speaking to senior execs, in their own language.

Kate and  Dave Fleet (among others) were pushing me to develop something online to build out the idea of a business case that doesn’t just focus on communications and marketing fundamentals. It’s something I’m thinking about over the holidays.

Do you want an informative hour long discussion on the details of launching a government blog? Joe Thornley of ProPr and ThornleyFallis was kind enough to record the Third Tuesday session last month, where I was the A in a lengthy Q &A session on the steps and strategy needed to launch a social media campaign for a government organization. Ian Ketcheson was the moderator that led me down the garden path.

I find you always sound more important if someone else filters your words and extracts the soundbites, as Joe did:

“I’d been spending four years slamming my head against a wall bringing up social media and building some sort of conversation within a much larger department. And I think everyone who’s worked in a bureaucracy realizes at some point or another that there are institutional barriers to social media - fairly strong ones. But what I realized coming into a smaller organization like the Privacy Commissioner … if you enter an organization that has at least one or two people who recognize the benefits of social media, if you build a strong business case … something that drives along a business case model that identifies risk and how you will mitigate risk, you can convince … people to try something new…”

If you every had an urge to hear my voice, Joe has also posted an mp3  of a substantial part of the discussion.

And here I thought the federal governments of Canada and Belgium had problems. What about government communicators that have to reach out to distinct minority communities? From the World Bank’s Private Sector Development blog:

“It is well known that out of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, only a tiny percentage is represented on the web. Perhaps less intuitive are the factors that preclude multilingual digitization of content.  They range from the problems of recognition of minority languages, the lack of local language computing capacity, through the plethora of internet governing bodies involved in encryption projects, to the lack of interface between linguistic and IT expertise …

As the president of the African Academy of Languages noted, isn’t it ironic that Africa, home to an incredible linguistic diversity, is still conventionally categorized into English, Spanish, French or Portuguese speaking - the languages of the colonizers?”

Finally, some direction for government communicators trying to sell and implement social media solutions in their organization.

Josh Bernoff has explained Forrester’s P.O.S.T method to creating a social strategy. A simple approach that begins with organizational objectives and goals, and reinforces that approach with solid research from a reputable firm.

Just the tools you need to convince a reluctant management team.

I’ve been to several seminars and conferences lately, where I’ve had a chance to discuss the implementation of social media by government institutions with social media “experts” (myself included) as well as several very interested and energized civil servants.

My thoughts about the issue seem to be coalescing around two distinct points:

• Communicators need to learn math and how to develop an effective business case if they want to defeat naysayers in the IT, marketing and legal departments
• Until that happens, Civil Sevant 2.0 will still be reliant on motivated and iconoclastic individuals using social engineering skills and process hacks to get their new tools and tactics into play.