Thompson wants to examine the view that the relationship between the media and the public sphere is damaged and that this is contributing to declining levels of trust in public institutions. He does this, perversely but perhaps understandably, by looking at a public media institution, the BBC.

Quoting Tony Blair, Thompson wonders whether the British media’s ferocity is a contributing factor:

It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.
Blair’s speech to Reuters

I am sure few public sector communicators were surprised by these comments. We all have our moments with the media. As we should. Democracy thrives on scrutiny. I wouldn’t want to live and work in a society where the media didn’t –or couldn’t– look critically at the government. As Thompson says:

One of the tasks of a free press is to uncover public malfeasance. The media is right to be alert to it and to pursue and investigate any evidence that it is taking place.

He is also right when he notes later that it is under this sort of intense scrutiny that a politician (and it applies equally to institutions) is in the best position to build trust and confidence in their performance:

[...] it’s in the big and sometimes tough interviews that you really build credibility and public confidence.

Quality

However, the underlying assumption here is the quality of the journalism. And this is the issue that, for me, seems to be central to any understanding of the role of the media in the trust people have in their public institutions.

Firstly, rigorous scrutiny should always be part of an open and objective inquiry. Shrinking media ownership (and newsrooms) has meant, to this avid news consumer, a move away from studied, investigative and local stories to the production of content that is more readily syndicatable to the other parts of the media franchise. What translates in all markets? Scandal, crime and, occassionally, human interest pieces with quirky angles.

Thompson is right about the tough interviews building credibility, but how often do we actually see those sorts of exchanges? Perhaps the British media are chock full of that sort of content but in the antipodes it is a much rarer occurrence. When he talks about the BBC’s commitment to make more space for ideas about policy and policy choices just reinforces the dearth of that sort of programming here.

Influence

Secondly, trust in public institutions, and indeed in the mainstream media, is now not just dependent upon the same. The democratization of the means of publishing content has seen a flourishing of commentary and critique (much of it well informed) about the way the news is reported, packaged and delivered to us. In fact, many people now trust blogs more than conventional media as a reliable source of information.

With the increasing accessibility of alternative commentary and criticism, people are becoming more literate readers/interpreters of news and what Thompson disingenuously disparages as scepticism (the ET argument is truly specious), for me, epitomizes this profound shift away from reliance upon a single, authoritative ‘medium of record.’

Trust

How does this affect trust in public institutions? As I noted above, the media are critical to a healthy democracy; it does not follow, however, that they are necessarily the dominant part of the trust equation. This is a function of a more complex relationship with our publics, one that is primarily the result of direct experience. As I said last year, trust is:

the fundamental social and political legitimacy that we have to keep earning every day.
Online reputation management

Part of that process is media relations. A small part. Most of the work is in successfully dealing with the multitude of engagement opportunities that your organization has every day, online and off.

Closing thoughts

At 18 pages (I had to print it out, there is no way I can read 6,000 words on screen), and given he is a broadcaster, you would hope that it would be written for the ear not the eye. Alas, no. There are no concessions for the ear, nor use of rhetoric; no repetition or stories, indeed nothing as fundamental as a key message. It is both abstract and prolix. Don’t ever write a speech like this; nothing will diminish trust in government more than subjecting an audience to this sort of ordeal.

There is one other egregious error. Thompson posts the transcript to the blog with this introduction:

The full text of my speech is below and I’d be interested to know what you think about it.

That may be so, but despite 34 people (as of this post going up) sharing their thoughts, Thompson himself is absent from the conversation. If you are trying to build trust, then perhaps it might be worth your while engaging with the audience whose thoughts you are professing an interest in hearing.

Photo: SeenyaRita

What I found interesting about his first post (he has posted two more on the topic with the fourth to come) Reputation: where the personal and the participatory meet up was that the discussion (so far) is limited to individuals; the implications of what online reputations mean for organizations doesn’t feature. So I thought I might explore some of those implications, particularly as they relate to government agencies.

Before I get to the 3-step approach to a reputation management, it might be worth pausing to consider what exactly we mean by an agency reputation. I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with the definition Andy derives from the symposium, at least not in a public sector context:

reputation can be seen as a market in which people invest in reputation, store it, exchange it, and expend it as necessary for other goods.

My take on it is that reputation is a product of the degree of trust that your publics have in your agency. It is not an end in itself — and it is certainly not something that we are in a position to trade. Public sector agencies have public monies and public authority ceded to them by the citizens of the state. The extent to which we effectively manage that money and authority determines the level of trust that the citizens have in their public institutions; reputation is one expression of that degree of trust.

Other expressions of trust may be, for example, the willingness to comply with taxation policies, to engage in public consultations or elections or to participate in the census. None of which, in a functioning democracy, you would want to see compromised…

The 3 Steps

A public sector communicator’s job consists in part as being the curator of their agency’s trust. While their fellow managers have responsibility for the effective discharge of the public’s money and authority, the communicator is responsible for ensuring that this is transparent to that authorizing public.

Within this framework, what then can a public sector communicator do to effectively manage their agency’s online reputation?

Online/offline

Any consideration of an agency’s online reputation must first acknowledge that, no matter how much work you do in cyberspace, most of the transactions that impact upon your reputation will still take place offline. For that reason, you might want to focus your attentions on your internal communications. If you can engage your staff and have them embrace the vision of your agency (and the values of the public service), then you have a solid foundation on which to build your management strategy.

Online, all the time

Your online presence is, for all intents and purposes, ubiquitous. No matter how many people you have in the field, at the counter or behind the wheel, the simple fact of the matter is that your web sites are available 24/7 to anyone, anywhere. Or they should be.

And, as more and more people use their phones and other portable devices to access the Internet, the smart money would be on those agencies that make a strategic investment in exceeding these customers’ expectations.

Not busy, engaged

Social media offer real opportunities, if deployed intelligently, for an agency to engage with it’s publics in ways that are both convenient, transparent and, increasingly, expected by younger citizens who are only just forming their own impressions of what it is like to deal with government agencies.

Conclusion

Ultimately, any and all of these tactics are only ever going to assist you to manage the outputs of your online reputation, not the outcomes. These are contingent upon the nature of the many and complex interactions that your publics have with your agency. However, while you can’t control the outcomes, you are obliged to do your best to manage those elements within your control.

Trust in government is an indicator of a lot more than reputation. It is not just a measure of credibility or a record of successful transactions (the TradeMe model) but is the fundamental social and political legitimacy that we have to keep earning every day.

Photo: sonicbloom

Like Dave, what I found most interesting (and that was a tough call given the amount of dubious and unethical practice this guy was self-servingly touting) was his –and by extension– his firms’ attitude toward moderating comments. The heading gives you a pretty good idea of their contorted approach to the concept of integrity:

Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.
Dan Ackerman Greenberg

You have to respect their self-styled lack of fear in deleting criticism, don’t you? I certainly admire his courage for sharing his venal, duplicitous professional practices with us.

Of course, this is not an isolated instance. It seems the growth in influence of social media is accompanied by an increasing willingness to try and control the message using a lamentably old media mindset, albeit assisted by some very clever technology.

Another blogger details how the San Francisco Chronicle uses software to continue to display deleted comments to the people who posted them, leaving them completely unaware that their views have been hidden from everyone else that visits the site. Subsequent commenters to the post then reveal that other sites are using similar techniques.

All of this has led to the obvious Web 2.0-type social media solution: a forum for people to post their comments that have been censored by moderators on other sites. don’tcensorme.com claims that

Your right to free speech online is at the mercy of website moderators. There are no checks in place for moderators online. This site aims to change that and put the balance of power back in your hands.

I don’t think freedom of speech is really at risk here; it seems more a case of an inept attempt at reputation management by suppressing critical comment. The important lesson to takeaway is that, no matter how devious or cunning you are, your perfidy will be exposed and your reputation will be forever linked (and cached) to the evidence.

For public sector communicators there is more at stake. Agencies cannot afford to risk their reputations like this; we should openly suffer the slings and arrows and attempt to build our reputation by engaging with substantive criticism, rather than deleting dissent:

Fairness: social media is about reciprocity, if you are going to engage and invite comment then accept the good with the bad. Post a very clear comments policy and stick to it. Don’t delete comments because they are critical of your agency or policies.
Principles of public sector social media.

Ultimately, private sector organizations that are exposed behaving unethically will answer to their customers or the market. Government agencies endure; our job is to build trust, not to gamble with it.

Photo: spacesuitcatalyst.

It strikes me as being analogous to saying to someone who approaches you for advice about a specific topic you advertise your expertise in, yeah, I can provide you with advice; but you can’t rely on what I tell you.

Obviously, this sort of stance is even more problematic when you consider that people who approach government agencies for advice don’t –as a rule (of law)– have any other options. If, for example, they need definitive advice about licensing a motor vehicle they have to go to LTNZ.

It is for this reason I argued that the fourth principle for public sector social media should be trust:

do not disclaim the content on the blog/wiki/podcast etc. If you are engaging your publics through these media they should be able to expect a straightforward exchange of ideas and information. If your Legal team intend on vetting every post, the venture is doomed.

Of course, the default position for government websites is to disclaim everything on their sites, often to a point that strains both credulity and, in this one case that I feel compelled to share, logic:

Nothing contained on this website is, nor should be relied on as, a promise or representation about past or future events.

This, to my mind, is so nonsensical it borders on being a zen koan. Let’s pause to think about this for a minute. Nothing on this website is, or can be relied upon as, a formal statement of the facts about past events (paraphrasing from the OED). This presumably includes the advice and the policy that is, mysteriously, published on the site in spite of it’s apparent lack of relation to reality…

The point that I am belabouring here is that, if you are launching a social media project, you would be well advised to avoid this sort of pseudo-prophylaxis. In any event, and I haven’t taken legal advice on this but the comments are open, I doubt whether the standard disclaimers you see on blogs would protect you from the law. What they will protect you from is the sort of trust with your publics that leads to engaged communication.

What you should be disclaiming is the comments or edits contributed by those publics, as they are not the intellectual property of your agency. But for all the other content, if you publish it then own it.

There are two reasons for this. One, it means that visitors to your site will be reassured that the content in the government namespace is authoritative and that your agency stands behind it. That builds trust in government.

The second reason is that the staff who are contributing content to your agency blog/wiki/podcast etc., will be a little more cautious about what they post if it is considered to be definitive. And, in terms of your online reputation management strategy, that is no bad thing.

Photo: prozaciswack.

Some background. PageRank is the patented algorithm that Google uses to determine where your page sits on the return page of a search query. This means that a high page rank is, potentially, a very lucrative commodity:

It can be an effective and viable marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of quality and relevant sites to drive traffic and increase a webmaster’s link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned webmasters that if they are or were discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring PageRank and reputation, their links will be devalued (ignored in the calculation of other pages’ PageRanks).
Wikipedia.

As Darren and many others found out this week, Google’s warning went from a bark to a bite. It seems there was a PageRank update and Google decided to penalize those who were selling links.

Fair enough, you say. In the same week that saw research released showing 7 out of 10 American’s experience search engine fatigue, who doesn’t want to see link farms torched?

Incidentally, the reality of search engine fatigue for the average user is not to be underestimated:

More than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking – either “always,” “usually” or “sometimes.”
search engine land.

However, as Mashable pointed out with their wonderfully titled post, Three Clicks to Spam: Google’s Hypocritical Link Selling Policy, it is a little rich for Google to take the high road when they are turning record profits doing exactly this. AdWords anyone?

Now, in terms of reputation management, antagonizing high profile bloggers by threatening their income is probably not the smartest move for any organization — unless you are Google. Third quarter earnings of $4.23billion and a virtual monopoly on search apparently mean you can pretty much ignore the whole thing.

That’s right. Despite the fact they run dozens of corporate blogs, Google just toughed this one out. Not a peep. Both the Official Google Blog and the Webmaster Central Blog studiously ignored the issue. There may have been official comment through another channel, but I couldn’t find it (search engine fatigue, alas).

Darren finished the week with nice post capturing the lessons that he learned, but despite him getting his page rank back, for me the story was a more cautionary tale.

Google is the 800lb gorilla and, despite their vaunted motto, the extent to which we rely on search – and on linking strategies, means that you would hope for a slightly more transparent and engaged approach from them in these circumstances.

Perhaps more terrifying though, is the other finding from the fatigue research; 78 percent of all survey-takers wished Google could read their minds. Apparently the respondents are unaware that they can already do this…

The data-mining tool, WikiScanner, which compiles and mashes up information that has always been available, matches IP addresses with the edits stored in the history pages in Wikipedia. The result? Well, let’s just say that for some organizations, it has been a little embarrassing…

Some of the first organizations to get outed for whitewashing their articles were Diebold and Wal-Mart. Of course, it wasn’t long before public sector organizations were also being exposed: in this case, the FBI and CIA.

The question you are all asking now is, what about my agency? Well, preliminary investigations revealed that, yes, some diligent New Zealand public servants had been editing their agency’s Wikipedia page.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this practice, per se. Given that Wikipedia is such a heavily used resource, (according to this Pew survey, Wikipedia has become the number 1 external site visited after Google’s search page, receiving over half of its traffic from the search engine), if your agency does have a page then you want to make sure that it is correct. What you don’t want to be doing is spinning or misrepresenting the truth.

The other thing you really don’t want to be doing –particularly from your work machine– is editing the page of your Minister (or anyone else in Parliament, for that matter).

Now, none of this is in the same class as Exxon Mobil editing the Exxon Valdez oil spill page, which is nothing short of breathtaking in its audacity and, given the transparency of Wikipedia, idiotic in its execution.

It does, however, remind us all that reputation management on the Internet is a very different discipline. Google never forgets, and neither does Wikipedia. Every edit on this mammoth site is preserved for posterity. And, unless you are using a proxy, each and every of those edits is traceable back to the organization that made them.

If you are going to effectively manage your agency’s reputation in this space, remember that, as a public servant, you are held to a higher standard. Make sure you have a thorough understanding of how social media work, and the principles you should be observing when you interact with them.

Update: 24/8/07

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on Australian public servants editing Wikipedia, that really highlights the pitfalls of not understanding the social media you are interacting with.

At the time the company launched their services were confined to asking companies to take down the offensive material but, it seems they have (in true Web 2.0 fashion) expanded their service offerings.

In order to protect you from your earlier indiscretions, RD are now in the business of

hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive, Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of search-engine results.
Forbes Magazine

Um, isn’t this just spamdexing?

So, you are foolish enough to publish something indiscreet or, according to Ars Technica, you are one of the 40% of bloggers that published damaging information about your organization on your blog, and then you panic and think, ‘what do I do?’ You call these spammers and they game the search engines to fill their pages with bogus content to bury your indiscretions. It’s like Gresham’s Law.

This service, called MyEdge, is described as “labour intensive” and fees start at US$10,000. So, it doesn’t really look like an option for us public service bloggers who have, as Che Tibby describes it, a hot-heated morning with too much coffee.

It does, however, raise a couple of interesting questions about the practice of online reputation management. The dubious ethics of MyEdge aside, all of us (or certainly our organizations) are constantly building our online profiles. Every page published, article, photo or video posted is indexed and stored – possibly forever. What are we doing about that? Che and Colin McKay have some pretty good suggestions for public servants, but what about the way public sector communicators curate their agencies’ reputations?

How many of our agencies actually practice even a rudimentary form of search engine optimisation? Or have a social media strategy that actively manages online content to effectively curate that reputation?

I don’t have any easy answers, but it seems to me that public sector communicators cannot afford to assume that this space is solely the province of private sector marketers and is of no consequence to them or their organizations.

Photo: PartsnPieces

So I have developed a couple of arguments that I wheel out — to wildly varying effect. The first I ran through recently, and it is one that appeals to those managers that like to deal in statistics. Painting them a picture of the numbers of people using social media generally helps them to visualize the enormity of the change and, with any luck, will help you to focus their attention on the need to adapt to these changes.

There are two others that I also fall back on. The first is inspired by Charles Darwin and the second by very large primates.

Darwinism

Today, New Zealanders – both here and offshore – can choose to receive all of their mass media content via the Internet. They can listen to Radio New Zealand streamed live to anywhere in the world, access newspapers via their websites or, even better, via RSS feeds to their desktops or personalised home pages, watch TV shows (including downloading torrents of programmes that are not scheduled to appear on NZ TV for months, if at all).

Not only is it possible to access all of this content via the Internet, but in almost every case, you can access it when you want to. In other words, you don’t have to listen to Mediawatch on Sunday morning, you can download the podcast and listen to it on the train home on Monday evening. You don’t need to wait for the DomPost to land on your driveway to read the latest breaking news and you certainly don’t have to wait for distributors to determine when you can watch the latest Batman film.

Now, faced with these realities, how long do you think it will be before everybody (or at least those people with access to broadband) just give up on the old model entirely? It is already extinct, it is just that the body still seems warm to the touch…

That is natural selection at work.

The 800lb Gorilla

Ask most comms people who they think is the largest media player in New Zealand and you will get a variety of answers. Fairfax. Independent News & Media. News Corporation. CanWest. Yet, apart from Murdoch’s News Corp, none of these companies is in the same financial league as Google: and Google is currently significantly more profitable than News Corp.

And it is not just the financial weight of Google (although you would be naive to ignore it), when you also consider that all of the content that the other media players produce can be served up through Google search – complete with their advertising, you begin to see how important understanding Google is. Understanding how it works, in terms of SEO and more importantly, in terms of reputation management.

Conclusion

These aren’t intended as knockout arguments, rather they are designed to start people thinking about the changes to the media landscape and how that will affect their business. As communications professionals, it is up to us to ensure that senior managers are briefed on what this will mean for our organisations and how we can take advantage of these changes or mitigate against some of the risks.

Whatever course of action we decide on, one thing is clear: complacency is not an option.

These posts are both well worth reading, as are the comments (and the follow up post from Adam) because they spell out a number of the issues that are relevant to communicators in this social media age – and because it might just help you land a better job.

I agree with pretty much everything Adam and Joshua have to say on the matter. I think that your online presence is an integral part of your professional reputation, and you had better treat it as such, ie., with discretion. But I am not necessarily convinced that your blog, or your social media profile in general, is ever going to replace your CV. Not in the public sector, and not in the next short while anyway.

Why not? I can think of a couple of reasons. One, unless you follow Rohit Bhargava’s lead and include a social media bio on your blog, there simply won’t be enough supporting information there. Your blog will enhance your CV, but it won’t replace it (unless your CV is online, but I tried that with a couple of senior managers across the public service, and they were either perplexed or dismissive of the concept — all of them wanted a hard copy).

Senior managers could also regard a potential employee’s blog as a risk to manage, rather than an example of their initiative. They may be worried that the blogger will (inadvertently) drop their organization in it, or that the blog is a time sink that will divert their attention from what they are hired to do.

These, particularly the latter, are valid concerns.

So how do you balance your increasing presence on the ‘net with the traditional demands of recruitment, all in the age of Google? First up, if you have a blog that intersects with your professional life (even tangentially), tell your prospective employer. If it is about your cat, don’t bother them, but if there is a remote possibility that you may post about something that could be perceived as being related to your job, then you should disclose this.

If you have a Myspace page, make sure it is not the first thing that comes up when you google your name: that would just be embarrassing. You are much better off setting up a LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page if you want to appear professional.

Having said that, I provide links to this blog and the other I have contributed to, as well as to my del.icio.us page because I think that this stuff is integral to what I want to do.

Photo: N!(K

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?