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.

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. …”

Sometimes, it’s useful to see how your high profile media event rolls out from the viewpoint of a bystander and beneficiary.

Michael Sommermeyer over at wordy mouth posted about his experience with a social media release, Social Media Release Unwinds, and more specifically about the less than stellar reception that it received from some of the media.

As an example of an SMR, it looks pretty pretty much like the original template put forward by Todd Defren. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, as Michael says, one of the media he pitched it to didn’t necessarily appreciate it:

my implementation was too disjointed, didn’t help him understand the message, left him hunting for the story. In short, he didn’t like it.

As (public sector) communicators, we have to listen and, where necessary, adapt.

Michael’s experimental subject obviously has the tech skills, and is a journalist so pretty much constitutes the target demographic, but still found the SMR wanting. How can we fix this?

I posted here recently about the different requirements for government communicators and how the SMR, or more specifically hRelease, can support them.

Essentially, my argument is to focus on the (semantic) markup of the release, not the presentational format. The audience for government releases is not just tech-savvy media and bloggers, so it has to be discoverable and usable by all comers. For technical details, see this post on a NZ government SMR.

Michael’s release is actually a tremendous step forward in terms of its markup, and for that he should be applauded. It is not buried in nested tables, the elements are marked up semantically and it would be accessible to pretty much anyone, or anything. (A doctype and cleaning up some of the markup so that it validates would be my only quibble).

And as Michael notes in his post, there is no harm in using the more traditional format, at least as a transition strategy:

In any case, it may be more useful to sneak some of the elements of the SMNR into our usual inverted pyramid-styled press releases. A few links to relevant information mixed in with the text. A sidebar pointing to our Digg or del.icio.us tags…

That would make the release usable for the majority of the audience (including all non-media interested parties) and the improved markup would make it more discoverable, accessible and re-usable.

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

With U.S. Presidential spokesperson Tony Snow in the background because of a recurrence of cancer, his deputy, Dana Perino, has stepped up to the podium.

At 34, the former Capitol Hill aide has been thrust into what can be a harsh spotlight, but for now seems to be coping without too much squinting. While she lacks Snow’s practiced ease before the cameras, Perino projects an earnest, ever-polite demeanor, like an airline ticket agent who keeps smiling as irate customers demand to know why their flight has been canceled. …

Perino has been flooded with calls of support, including one, she says, from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who told her: “Put your big-girl panties on.”

hat/tip to FedBlog for the pointer to the WPost article.

David Jones, the Head of Communications at the Serious Fraud Office in the United Kingdom, provides some commentary on the relationship between government officials and international media. (PDF)

“I don’t know if there is a stereotypical profile in [Eastern] Europe of media practice and habit between a journalist and a government press officer. No doubt it would be a mistake for me to assume that my experience with journalists in Bosnia on a corruption case there involving the electricity power industry would be a safe model or dealing with a Polish journalist on a similar case in Warsaw. “

This is one presentation at Transparency and Media Relations as a Means of Fighting Fraud, a training seminar put on by the OLAF Anti-Fraud Communicators’ Network.

A Summary of the Seminar has also been prepared, and a quick search reveals many of the prepared speeches that were presented.

A more light hearted aspect of Mr. Jones’ work for the SFO is presented in this letter to the Editor of the Observer.

by Colin McKay

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.

Ever wondered about the relationship between public information officers (PIOs) and local news media? One university communications specialist examined the relationship between PIOs and radio, print and TV media in the Tampa Bay area, and there is a lot of personal commentary to be found in the annexed interviews with general assignment print reporters, editors, television reporters and public information officers.

“I think I’m reflecting the attitudes of our newsroom, that by and large, PIOs are fair, and they’re competent and professional, to do what they do, but we often, usually, don’t stop at the PIO and often go around the PIO to get the information we need, because it’s more efficient, mainly. You know, why do we want to hear the information through the filter of the PIO, when we can go to the mayor, city manager, police chief, investigator, and get the information directly? (Newspaper City Editor)

The commentary gets much more interesting than that. It may confirm preconceptions or prejudices about professional behaviour held by actors on either side of the divide.

“A Qualitative Analysis of Trust Issues in the Journalist / Government Communicator Relationship: An Explanatory Study” by Davina Yetter Gould. (PDF)