This has been motivated partly by the belief that we won’t be able to effectively adapt to the changing external environment without articulating a sound business case to senior managers – in a language that they relate to and respect. The second consideration has been the desire to promote the communications function as a strategic, rather than tactical or reactive, one.

Late last year the Arthur W. Page society issued a report on the evolution of corporate communications, The Authentic Enterprise [PDF 421 KB], that zeroes in on exactly these issues. And while it is written for the private sector, it has any number of valuable insights for public sector communicators.

The report is divided into two parts. The first looks at the changing environment for corporate communications, citing three factors as being central to the challenges for businesses:

• the emergence of a new digital information commons;
• the reality of a global economy; and
• the appearance and empowerment of myriad new stakeholders.
  The Authentic Enterprise, p.6

The second part of the report looks at the evolving profession. In order to succeed and thrive in this new environment, the authors suggest that the communications practitioner will need to develop not only new skills, but a new approach to the role. Including the advice that:

We must shift from changing perceptions to changing realities. In a world of radical transparency, 21^st century communications functions must lead in shaping behavior – inside and out – to make the company’s values a reality. (p.16)

Their point about shaping behaviour is a signal one. How do we, as communicators, shape those desired behaviours? I would argue that it is through a change process. Clearly articulating the future state (as well as, in the language of the report, the enduring values that will power the transformation), engaging with our publics through the change to monitor and evaluate progress and to fine-tune tactics, and continuing to cultivate support in the wider authorizing environment for the change.

In this scenario, what quickly becomes apparent is that in order for us to manage the change while still effectively discharging our accountabilites, we must have engaged and empowered staff. They are the most critical of all our publics.

This is borne out in the second part of the report where 31 CEOs were surveyed about their perceptions and expectations of communications chiefs. Emerging strongly from this section is the view that internal communications are now regarded by the CEO as, if not more important than, at least on par with external communications.

The weight of the job between external and internal communications has shifted. And I think internal communications is just more important than it ever used to be. (p. 42)

Before, PR was mostly generating stories, but today a big part of the job is enlisting your own employees and associates to buy into and help drive the strategy of the company. (p. 47, my emphasis)

In the public sector, this translates to driving employee engagement and communicating the values of the Code of Conduct. It also reinforces the notion that, in terms of introducing social media into out communications planning, we should be implementing it for internal audiences first.

In fact, this view gives rise to the best quote in the paper, one that senior public sector managers should cut out and paste on to their office walls:

It is in the corporation’s best interests to empower more and more of its workforce with new collaborative tools, training, know-how – and trust – so they can responsibly and strategically interact with the external world. (p. 29)

If you don’t trust your staff to act responsibly, you will quickly find yourself with a disengaged workforce and, as a result, fundamentally incapable of responding to the challenges that the authors identify in the report.

This is a valuable report for anyone interested in understanding how we might conceive a strategic approach to the changes in the operating environment of the public management system. For public sector communicators, however, I would rate it as essential reading.

Photo: krystal.pritchett

It is tempting to look at the rise of social media and assume that government is singularly unprepared to meet the challenges that the (socially) connected workplace have delivered to us. And if you restrict your field of vision to the technology, there is a good case to be made.

However, viewed in the context of the ongoing evolution of the public management system, here in New Zealand anyway where I believe we have a good record of evolving and developing in response to these environmental pressures, it is a much more tractable problem. It is the speed of that adaption that is the central issue.

The wave

As the Pew report points out, (online) social networking is not some novel behaviour that, along with rounded corners and reflective logos, arrived with Web 2.0. Usenet, bulletin boards and discussion lists provided media for this sort of activity as soon as people started connecting computers to each other. What has changed for organizations is the volume of participation.

As it has become increasingly painless to network online – you no longer require any real technical know-how, just an email address and some self-belief in the significance of your opinions – more of us are doing it. It is inevitable that this trend would extend to public sector employees, particularly the digital natives.

To give you a (purely anecdotal) picture of the change, in 2006 I had roughly four of five agency queries about social media, for that year. From late 2007 to today, I am averaging about one a week.

The strategy gap

The problem, as such, is not that public sector organizations are not adapting to the change; the fact that there is so much interest in understanding social media is a good indication they are. The problem is the rate at which they are adapting, and the consequences of that lag.

Government agencies naturally have a long-term strategic view; this is driven by statutory as well as practical considerations. The Statement of Intent looks forward three years, as do business plans and budgets. How many of you, given the chance, would have written social media into your business plans in 2005/06?

The tension we are all experiencing now, between the early adopters in agencies who expect to be able to use these networks as a matter of course and management struggling to understand and adapt to the shadow workplace, is an expression of the conflict between a shifting strategic perspective and tactical imperatives.

Managers are trying to adapt their strategy within a set of, in the immediate term, unforgiving constraints – like, for example, the Public Records Act and other accountability structures, and simultaneously manage the demands of tactical and operational contingencies that are reactions to, in most cases, ‘guerilla’ implementations that begin their cycle outside the corporate framework.

Let me give you an example (if you are still reading after that last paragraph, you have earned it): managers in Agency X discover that an enthusiastic employee has set up a Facebook group for the staff. They are now using it to communicate with each other across the geographically dispersed organization, to share knowledge and to build social and professional relationships.

Tactically, it is providing some value. Strategically, it is a nightmare. Why? There is no defined purpose, no exit strategy and, from a risk management point of view, they couldn’t have picked a worse application. It is, putting it quite conservatively, a crisis waiting to happen…

On the other hand, what this requires of managers is a rethinking of their strategic approach. They need to begin planning immediately to migrate the behaviour (which, to be clear, is both inevitable and desirable) to a medium, or possibly media, that is consistent with the security, legislative and cultural norms of the public sector. But, even with complete management support and the requisite funding (ie., in a perfect world) that won’t happen in a hurry. That’s your strategy gap in action.

And this sort of thing is not restricted to a few agencies, it is happening all over the public sector.

Change management

Public sector managers should all be conversant and comfortable with change. To narrow the strategy gap, what needs to happen is for senior managers to recognize that social media are a symptom of a wider cultural change, and to begin revising their strategies accordingly. Agencies should begin to consult, communicate and involve staff in the process now, because if the gap widens too much, our people will —literally— leave us behind.

As I noted at the outset, this doesn’t require any specialized management knowledge or technical skill; it is just another expression of the (hopefully commonplace) need to constantly manage change. What it does require, however, is a sense of urgency, a willingness to engage and a focus that is on people, rather than technology.

Photo: iMorpheus

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.

As I suggested some time ago, in a post on blogging as a public servant:

If people within your organization are blogging (and you really should know who they are), talk to them about their blogs, the scope of their involvement in other social media and try to get a feeling for how they see the boundaries to their self-expression.

The other critical point that I should have added, is that if they do touch –even only occasionally– on work-related issues, then subscribe to their feed and read their blogs. For god’s sake, make sure you are aware of what they are posting…

Mind you, this is not an invitation to crack down on what public servants are doing in their own time (and with their own bandwidth). A good counter example is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which has recently issued a blogging policy that is, frankly, a little draconian. The key point to note:

Any CBC employee who wants to start a personal blog which “clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada” now requires their supervisor’s permission.
Inside CBC: the official blog

Should we expect that public servants should get their managers permission before they start blogging if they intend identifying themselves as an employee of a government department? In a word, no. From a blogger’s perspective, I would always disclose to my manager that I blog, and that from time to time I blog about my agency’s business. That is just common courtesy.

Would I expect that someone that reports to me would seek my permission before launching a personal blog that overlaps with their professional interest? Again, no. I would expect that they would discuss the matter with me and, if at any time they felt that they were ‘close to the line’ with a particular post, seek advice about the wisdom of posting it. That is both courteous and smart.

The Code

The principles that guide the behaviour of public servants are laid out in the Code of Conduct. The relevant principle is trustworthiness, specifically:

avoid any activities, work or non-work, that may harm the reputation of our organization or of the State Services.

[...] We must use judgement when exercising our personal democratic rights or voicing professional concerns. We must be careful that we act lawfully, and that we do not misuse official or personal information we have acquired through our work. We must always be careful that our actions do not compromise our organization or our Minister.

It’s the bit about using our judgement that is of particular relevance when you consider the intersection of blogging and your corporate media policy. Public servants are paid to exercise their judgement. To suggest that we are incapable of doing it when we are blogging is as ludicrous as suggesting that we should not be allowed to give presentations in public.

Spokesperson vs Blogger

For those of you that are blogging about work, this does not put you in the position of being an official spokesperson. Yes, it is conceivable that a journalist could cut and paste part of one of your posts into an article — just as they could misquote you when you front your powerpoint deck at a conference. But they won’t be able to introduce your view with the words ‘a spokesperson for the agency said…’

Does that matter? Yes and no. Blogging about something that your agency is involved in is fraught anyway. You had better assume that, at some point, you will be misinterpreted and quoted out of context, because to blithely ignore that possibility is poor judgement.

One point worth noting: publishing a disclaimer on your about page should be seen more as a convention than any sort of iron clad protection against dropping yourself and your agency into the proverbial.

Conclusion

Social media are part of the reality of our professional lives. The best way to ‘manage’ it in your organization is to understand it. Read your colleagues’ blogs, join their networks and start to participate in their conversations. Above all, encourage them to exercise their judgement and help build a culture of engagement rather than one of fear and distrust.

It is only a matter of time before a couple of paragraphs on blogging start to make their way into agency policies (media or some other). It would be a good idea if that policy was written from a position of understanding, rather than a scrambled rush to deal with some new perceived threat to the integrity of your external relations.

As a guide, you can always refer to some private sector corporate blogging guidelines, IBM’s are good; but the bottom line for New Zealand public servants should always be the Code of Conduct.

Photo: nib.ipernity.com

If you haven’t used del.icio.us before, this video will provide you with a pretty good introduction to what should be a standard tool for a public sector communicator.

Other uses for del.icio.us

Aside from sharing bookmarks with your colleagues, there are a couple of other ways to use this service that might be of some benefit.

Media clippings

Still photocopying or clipping media articles and storing them in a filing cabinet somewhere? Why? Save them all to a social bookmarking site and, apart from saving yourself hours of drudgery, you will have an online database of clippings that can not only be tagged, making it a far more efficient system that you are likely to have in place now, but can be syndicated via RSS or exported to HTML and backed up.

Another advantage of these services is that, now the mainstream media is all online, you can bookmark video. But I would recommend that if you want to start saving video from the local news sites, you upload your own copies to YouTube; the concept of persistent URLs seems to be anathema to the local broadcasters.

Links for media releases

Part of the social media release template is a specific del.icio.us page featuring links to related material. This is particularly useful in the public sector where we have to be careful about linking to commercial web pages. Rather than host a list of links on your agency site, you can store these links in del.icio.us and point people to that page. As an example, you can see the e-government links for Google.

Reference database

I found this ingenious use of del.icio.us via delineator, a tranche of Parliamentary Questions relating to specific topics saved by kiwimp.

Unfortunately, this highlights one of the problems with this method. All of the bookmarks in kiwimp’s account point to the old Clerk of the House site and there doesn’t appear to be a sufficient level of detail in the redirect table to the new Parliament site, so every link painstakingly saved, tagged and annotated by kiwimp is broken.

Still, a brilliant idea. You could easily save, for example, all the legislation relevant to your agency and use tags to categorize it to increase it’s discoverability and usability. Or all your PQs, Minister’s media releases and speeches, videos, whatever.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are an invaluable tool for public relations professionals, whether working in the public or private sectors. The ability to save and tag countless web pages and share them with others that follow the same interests cannot be underestimated.

Similarly, seeing what other people are saving under tags you are interested in supports your ability to track issues and follow conversations that you might otherwise miss.

More experienced users of del.icio.us may want to have watch this Jon Udell screencast for a more detailed look at the power of social bookmarking.

Written by David C. Wyld, a Professor of Management and Director of the Strategic e-Commerce/e-Government Initiative at Southeastern Louisiana University, it is a comprehensive (if scholarly) introduction to:

the phenomenon of blogging in the context of the larger revolutionary forces at play in the development—or redevelopment— of a second generation Internet.
p6.

For me, however, I found the experience of reading the document to be something of an anti-climax. I had downloaded it with high expectations, but as I read through it these expectations were steadily deflated by (principally) two factors.

First and foremost, despite the impressive bibliography at the back of the report – as you would expect for an academic work, Professor Wyld doesn’t actually seem to have read any of the blogs that are written by, for want of a better word, bureaucrats (and no, I wasn’t expecting a citation).

His focus is almost entirely on the use of blogs by elected officials. There is a case study on the military’s use of a strategic blog, but otherwise we see examples of congressional, gubernatorial, mayoral and civic leaders who blog. Which in itself is fine, but it is not exactly representative of the public sector, is it?

The second aspect of the report that annoyed me was the fact that, while the research was impressive enough, it was just that, research. It may be unfair to criticize an academic for doing his job, but if you are going to publish a document that includes ‘Tips for Blogging by Public Sector Executives,’ then you would be well advised to rack up some experience blogging.

There is nothing in here about the relational aspects of blogging. There is lots of references to blogging as a tool for engagement, for getting in touch with your constituents, etc., but no real understanding of how that is supposed to happen. Link love, commenting on other blogs and furthering the discussion: the actual mechanics of engagement.

With those quibbles aside, there is a lot of sound advice in the paper and, for that reason, I would recommend it as a starting point for your colleagues, staff and managers. If nothing else, it may help senior managers to turn their minds to the question of how we bureaucrats are going to effectively engage in the age of social media.

That is when we are not busy at the ramparts, in our rumpled suits, defending the integrity of our system of government…

The first thing that occurred to me as I began writing the post was that there isn’t much point trying to optimize your pages for search engine spiders unless they are also optimized for all the other User agents, ie., web browsers, handheld devices, screen readers, content aggregators and syndicators etc. In short, SEO is a subset of a wider field of optimization, and an understanding of web standards, particularly HTML, should precede that conversation.

This got me thinking about the level of understanding of HTML among public relations/affairs professionals. After all, it is our job to advise our employers or clients on how to best communicate using the various channels that use the Internet, so surely we should have at least a basic understanding of these media?

Maybe not. Two things happened this week that left me thinking that perhaps this is a naive or overly simplistic view…

First, I was in an agency presentation where a web development company were pitching to redevelop one of our websites. At one point, they showed us a slide where all the acronyms on the page were highlighted (this being a government site, they reasoned, you would want people to be able to understand the acronyms: fair point). However, when I asked how they intended to do this, they said with some javascript. I asked why they wouldn’t just use the acronym element? And, honestly, they just stared blankly at me. They had no idea what I was talking about.

Here is a hint. If you are presenting yourself as a subject matter expert, at least cover the basics.

Then a couple of days later, I saw that another social media release had been put out, and judging by the case study, it was a success. Which is great. However, if you view the source of the release, you will see that the quality of the HTML is, well, quite poor. Invalid, no doctype, full of deprecated markup and meaningless classes.

Why does this matter? The release looks fine in most browsers and none of the other bloggers of media seem to be complaining about the quality (or lack thereof) of the HTML.

It matters because if you are a practitioner of public affairs/relations and you are working in the online space, how can you claim to be a professional if you don’t understand the basic language of the medium? Would you employ a builder that couldn’t read the architect’s drawings?

It matters because valid, semantic markup is accessible to both people and machines. It is optimised for search engines, for browsers and for people, irrespective of how they choose to access or repurpose that information. That is presumably what the author of the case study was aiming for when he said:

So we opted to make the announcement as an SMR, optimizing it’s format for maximum success.
Geoff Livingstone

I don’t want to be overly critical, because I think that it is terrific that people are experimenting with the social media release. Indeed, compared to some of the earlier SMRs that I have looked at, this one is a marked improvement. What I do find amazing is that so much of what communicators are trying to achieve on the Internet is done without consideration of the standards that support this medium.

So, if we are going to have a microformatted social media release, hRelease, then we can start by issuing releases that are valid (x)HTML. Validation is not an end in itself, but it is a pretty good indicator of a disciplined approach, and if we want to be considered professionals, isn’t that something we should all aim for?

Conclusion

If you are going to specialize in online communications or public relations (in the public or private sectors), then you owe it to yourself, you agency and your clients to – as a minimum – be familiar with the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 specifications. The HTML 4.01 spec was published eight years ago: have you read it? Do you think you should?

This was brought home to me at the Crisis Communications workshop we held in March when it emerged that the most effective way of getting information to rural communities during the Canberra bushfires was town hall meetings.

That’s right. Cellphone towers burned down. The heat was causing electricity mains to arc, cutting the power so it was a case of driving out to the communities and having a meeting in the town hall, RSL club or the local pub to let people know what was happening.

And it is not just in a crisis that this sort of channel is effective in a stakeholder relations programme. Getting in front of people, letting them see the way that you handle questions is invaluable. Social media are great in that they allow participation that is not dependent upon geography, but who wouldn’t prefer sitting down in front of a real live human being?

The reality is that it is most likely to be a mix of the channels that works best for your communications, so you would be well advised to factor social media into your strategy, where it is appropriate — and where you understand how to effectively deploy it.

This was all prompted when a colleague received an (unsolicited) email from Coca Cola New Zealand inviting her to participate in a stakeholder forum:

This is your opportunity to ask George Adams, Managing Director, CC-Amatil (NZ & Fiji) Ltd and team questions about things that matter to you. You might want to know what our company is doing about health, environmental, community or business issues in New Zealand. You can let us know about things that have an impact on you, your family, your community or your environment.

What interested me about this event was a) the fact that they were spamming people to invite them to their forum, and b) that there is to be an online forum opened after the event to facilitate discussion.

Once you get over the faux pas of spamming people that you would like, or think you would like, to attend your forum (and I will come back to this) it seems like a pretty good idea. Have senior management front to people (at Te Papa, no less) at a time when the industry is feeling the squeeze from nutritionists, health officials and consumer groups.

It is also a good idea to have people sign up for the website (if I keep calling it an online forum, I will just confuse myself). You get to harvest their details – so you don’t have to spam them next time – and you can capture any qualitative data.

I think they missed an opportunity by not opening the website before the event. It would have been a great way to take the temperature, to provide good input for what will be important to the people who do attend and, more importantly, really demonstrates a willingness to engage. It would have also allowed people to see exactly what level of engagement was on offer.

Opening the website after the forum is certainly the safer option. Less flammable. But it leads me to believe that it won’t be as interesting as it could be. It promises a forum where you can share your thoughts with others, which is vague enough to invite disappointment. I hope I’m wrong.

Combined with the spam approach, it leaves me feeling that they haven’t quite grasped the mechanics of enagement in the age of social media. But perhaps I am being overly cynical?

Anyway, there has been quite a lot of comment, but I think Allan Jenkin’s summed it up best, in his rather colourfully titled post, Tim O’Reilly can eat my ethical shorts:

I make ethical judgements about what I write, and about what I allow others to write on my blog, every damned day. I think I do pretty good. My “badge,” in other words, is Desirable Roasted Coffee. Read it… if you think I am ethical, keep reading. If you think I am unethical, don’t read it.. and let me know. I don’t need a badge to proclaim my honesty. If I did, you’d have every right to be skeptical.

As public sector communicators, we already have a code: it governs not just the way we blog, but every facet of the way that we work (and to a limited extent, the way we conduct ourselves out of the office as well). But in this age of the increasing proliferation of social media, it is not a bad idea to think about some of the issues raised by O’Reilly’s proposal.

When I posted the principles for public sector social media, I touched on the notion of acceptable comment, but I wasn’t nearly as prescriptive as O’Reilly. The reason for this is that, much like Allan Jenkins, I believe that public sector communicators are acutely aware of their ethical responsibilities and this sort of thing does not need to be spelled out. [Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a good piece on why this sort of prescriptivism will not succeed in the private sector either. Robert Scoble also has some pretty good points from a bloggers perspective.]

What does it mean for us in the public sector? Certainly, we are not immune to ugly blogging, and indeed given our profile are probably more at risk to elements of this.

It means being particularly vigilant when we do launch social media: 9-5 just won’t make the cut, you need to moderate after hours and on weekends to maintain (or develop) your credibility and to ensure that the space is one that is ethically pristine.

It means that we link out cautiously and develop relationships that reflect the integrity of our endeavour – and we do this by engaging before we launch and remaining sedulously active thereafter.

And finally it means that by modelling the behaviour that we would like to see in the social media we participate in, we contribute to making our online society a more inclusive, welcoming and enjoyable space for everyone. Just like the rest our job, really.

I can see why Tim O’Reilly wants a code of conduct for bloggers. I just don’t agree that we need one, and I certainly don’t think that an attempt to regulate people’s behaviour on the Internet is either feasible or necessarily desirable.

While in Australia this week, I came across a pretty good example of a social media application that seemed to successfully deliver on these objectives, in terms of using an innovative approach to target a specific audience, inviting their participation, and engaging with them.

Pimp our Ads was a competition run by the New South Wales government’s Roads and Traffic Authority. The competition was explained on the website this way:

PIMP OUR ADS is an online competition open to NSW residents aged 16 to 30 years to design road safety posters aimed at younger drivers. All the tools you need to design a great road safety poster are provided on the website - participants select from a gallery of images, fonts, colours and graphics.

Entries can be about anything to do with road safety, such as speeding, drink driving, pedestrian behaviour and driver fatigue.

When I first came across the project, via this negative story in the Sydney Morning Herald, I was prepared to be underwhelmed or dismissive of the project. But once I found the competition website (the SMH published the wrong URL), I was impressed.

The social marketers at the RTA have taken the concept of user generated content (also called ‘consumer generated content’) and built a campaign that is more than just crowdsourcing, it actually engages the target demographic: young males 16-25 (those most at risk on the roads).

Essentially, people visit the site, use the preselected tools to create a poster and save it to a gallery. Visitors to the site can vote on the posters, or email them to friends. The top 10 most popular posters were included in the final round of judging, and the top entries won prizes ranging from a car to laptops and MP3 players.

This is a clever application at several levels. It includes a viral marketing element, it engages the target group by getting them to think hard about messages relevant to them (and their networks), and the rating function leverages behaviours from social networks.

The idea could have been extended in one important way: allowing comments on the entries would have made for a much richer experience – and captured some useful qualitative insights into the responses to the entries that the rating system alone could not.

A couple of other minor points. The website is all Flash, which probably seemed like a ‘cool idea’ but is really hopelessly dated, unnecessary and inaccessible. A cleaner, more user-friendly site could have been achieved with simple HTML and some artfully applied AJAX.

Using the .com domain also struck me as a poor choice. Undoubtedly, the decision was made because the government domain (in this case, .gov.au) is perceived as a ‘turn-off’ to youth. My take would be that the concept and the prizes would be more than sufficient to drive traffic to the site (heh), and by not using the government domain the RTA missed an opportunity to build the reputation of this namespace. It may also be related to the sponsors logos on the bottom of the site…

In any event, it looks to be a successful campaign and one that, from the New Zealand perspective, is an interesting case study of deploying social media tools in the public sector.