Category Archives: Public affairs

The future of communications

For the last couple of months I have been focusing on (what I hope has been) a less technical and more strategic approach to public sector communications; with a particular emphasis on using change management as the context for understanding what social media and govt 2.0 mean for our agencies.
This has been motivated partly by [...]

Early adopters and the strategy gap

Reading through the latest Pew research paper, A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters, at the same time as talking with colleagues from a variety of government agencies over the previous week, I was reminded how the challenges that social media present to government are neither particularly new nor require especially innovative or radical management responses.
It [...]

Govt 2.0 and public value

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 [...]

Blogging and your media policy

It is almost inevitable that, right now, there are at least a couple of people in your agency running their own blogs. It is also a pretty safe bet to assume that if you open up your agency’s media policy, you won’t find anything in there about blogging. The policy will be very specific about [...]

del.icio.us and public sector PR

When I posted some alternate uses for blogs in the public sector, one of the suggestions that I floated was for a linkblog as an internal communications tool. This started me thinking about other uses for del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites, including the obvious use: as a site for storing your bookmarks…
If you haven’t [...]

IBM report on blogging and government

The IBM Center for the Business of Government has just issued a hefty report into blogging in government. The report, The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 [PDF 7.2 MB], is an excellent primer for anyone who hasn’t really been exposed to social media and is wondering what all the fuss is [...]

Public relations & HTML

In the comments thread after the post on reputation management last week, Sam Farrow made some excellent points about search engine optimisation (SEO) and public sector communications. During the course of the conversation, I realised that this was a topic that needed its own post. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Why? Because while composing that post, [...]

The town hall meeting lives

It is often all too easy (and regular readers would assume – correctly – that I have been guilty of this) to overlook traditional communications channels in favour of the newer, more ‘exciting’ social or new media.
This was brought home to me at the Crisis Communications workshop we held in March when it emerged that [...]

Blogging Code of Conduct

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere since Tim O’Reilly published his draft Blogger Code of Conduct, and – apart from the incredibly naff logo – with good reason. (On the logo, though, do you think that a sheriff’s badge is really the right sort of image that bloggers would want [...]

Pimpin’ government: social marketing & youth

One of the hardest aspects of coming to terms with the changes that social media are bringing to our working environment, particularly for public sector communicators, is exercising the sort of judgement that ensures the tools are deployed appropriately and support the overall communications and business objectives.
While in Australia this week, I came across a [...]