Civil servant 2.0
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.
December 6th, 2007 18:58
Good points Colin, especially the first one. Need to speak their language - and numbers speak volumes to them.
December 7th, 2007 13:51
It will also help when the “motivated and iconoclastic individuals” develop a couple of success stories, (or even non-disaster stories), that other Civil Servant 2.0s can point to in order to help assuage the ingrained managerial fear of the unknown.
December 8th, 2007 14:08
Nicely put, Colin. You’ve captured the essence well.
December 10th, 2007 18:20
Nicely put, Colin. Furthermore, I think we also need to find an effective way to measure these activities (and case studies of success) to convince decision makers that they are worth the time, money and change of approach.
December 18th, 2007 14:36
I’m all about measurement in this job (you have to be working with this many accountants). Our comm objectives aren’t things like “informing Canadians about…” anymore. They’re more like “increase takeup of this service by X number of people”.
Communications becomes marketing when you add numbers. The problem is, they don’t teach marketing in communications degrees. And we’re so resistant to evaluating our old objectives (because they’re not measurable) and people are for some reason resistant to having comms be linked to the success of a program, but if that’s not why we’re here, why do they pay us so much money?
December 18th, 2007 14:38
you’ve got me, Kerry. I actually took economics courses in university. This whole “communications as a separate field of education” trend has me confused.
:-p