Category Archives: social media

Social media & change management

April 28, 2008 – 3:00 pm

Reading and responding to the comments left on the last couple of posts had me returning to a question that I have wrestled with periodically over the last year or two: how do you convince senior management of the need to begin planning for online engagement? One tactic that occurred to me is to use [...]

By Jason Ryan | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Rate your agency

April 13, 2008 – 8:10 pm

As we approach the end of the financial year, public servants (with varying degrees of apprehension) start to turn their minds to their performance reviews. And while typically this is when you demonstrate your unswerving devotion to the cause and highlight the prodigious efforts you have been making throughout the year, it is also an [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Communications, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (5)

Social media metrics

March 24, 2008 – 8:55 pm

Last week, while looking at the effectiveness of microformatting government media releases, the vexed issue of metrics reared it’s head. Vexed, because it is an ongoing issue for communicators, public sector and otherwise, to collate and report communcations metrics; even more so for the newer social media tools.
The sense of dissatisfaction I felt with my [...]

By Jason Ryan | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Government social media release [gamma]

March 16, 2008 – 7:47 pm

Just over I year ago I posted the first government social media release, using an in-development microformat, hRelease. Since then, I have issued 7 more releases using this format (you can see them all on the e-government site). During the course of that year the markup has evolved as I worked with the hRelease working [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Web standards | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Public sector wikis

March 2, 2008 – 5:00 pm

Chris Wilson posted an interesting article on Slate last week, The Wisdom of the Chaperones, that uses some interesting data on Wikipedia and Digg contributors to look critically at the notion of the wisdom of the crowd.
Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Early adopters and the strategy gap

February 24, 2008 – 8:19 pm

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 [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Public affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (11)

Blog Open Week

February 10, 2008 – 6:08 pm

This week it is your opportunity to put the social in social media
When I started this blog, there were two primary reasons that drove me to the keyboard week in and week out and, after a period of reflection, I have decided that I haven’t been at all successful in the second. And while I [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Editorial | Tagged , , , | Comments (16)

Censoring social media

December 2, 2007 – 3:27 pm

Some of you may have seen the post a couple of weeks ago on TechCrunch that caused a fair amount of comment and controversy in the blogosphere. The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos was a spectacularly ill-advised and unintentionally revealing account of one marketer’s techniques for placing client videos in prominent spots on the [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Communications, Reputation management | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

The limits of sovereignty

November 18, 2007 – 7:44 pm

When I first posted about the principles for public sector social media, sovereignty was the first of the ten principles I discussed because, once you have decided that you need to incorporate social media into your communications plan, the next most important decision is where you host the project. The answer at the time was, [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Communications, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Social media disclaimers

November 11, 2007 – 2:56 pm

I have been wondering why it is that we are all working ourselves into early graves trying to transform government, the achievement of which will largely be driven by Internet based technologies, and yet we continue to disclaim the content we post to our websites?
It strikes me as being analogous to saying to someone who [...]

By Jason Ryan | Also posted in Reputation management | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (14)