For two days earlier this week I was at the Online Social Networking conference in Sydney, the highlight of which was a terrific presentation by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum.
Seb’s presentation, with the rather meandering title, A brief introduction to web 2.0 for government and non-profits: a perspective from the cultural sector included a case study on how to use some simple web 2.0 tools to deliver public value.
Using search, collabularies and folksonomies and analytics, Seb and his team were able to not only reorganize content on the website to make it more discoverable to a wider range of visitors, but have begun to feed data back to the museum that informs how they exhibit in the bricks & mortar building.
One of the examples he uses in the presentation perfectly captures this process. The Powerhouse has a locomotive in one of the foyers. Extremely popular with visitors, it is not even in the top 10 items searched for on the website. The honour for the most searched item on the site belongs to a frock, which – until this data had been mined – had never been exhibited.
In his book, Creating Public Value, Mark Moore writes that the task of public sector marketers (and he makes no distinction between marketing and strategic communications) is to:
find out what features of governmental performance are judged to be relevant and important by those who pay for the organization’s product: namely, the citizens and their political representatives.
pp. 186-187. My emphasis.
As I noted in the post on Search and Govt 2.0, the amount of information on government websites is multiplying at a rate that is fast outstripping our ability to map it in any meaningful way using traditional navigation models. And, as Seb pointed out, this is the realm of the long tail; at the Powerhouse, 95% of all available objects were viewed at least once in the first ten weeks, and the most popular was only viewed 28,000 times.
By surfacing what is relevant to the Powerhouse’s online visitors, Seb’s team have done more than design a better web experience. Using that information to design exhibits that appeal to it’s physical visitors, and thereby increasing revenues as well as customer satisfaction, they have delivered on the organization’s strategic plan PDF [70 KB].
It’s true that this case study represents something of the best of all possible worlds; both the website and the physical organization are essentially object repositories, and this isomorphism lends itself to a relatively straightforward value chain.
However, the lessons learned at the Powerhouse can be readily translated across the Tasman and are equally applicable to service delivery and policy agencies here in New Zealand.
My presentation at the conference was on the Principles of public sector social media, it is an s5.
