Change management is often most closely associated in the public sector with machinery of government changes or internal departmental restructuring. However, it can just as easily be required as a result of changes in the external environment. It could be new legislation, a crisis of some sort, or it may be – as is the case with social media – a social and cultural change.

The transformation of New Zealand’s public management system is, for example, essentially a change management programme for the State Services:

Organizational Change Management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. Organizational Change Management is characterized by a shift in behaviors and attitudes in people to adopt and embrace the future state.
Wikipedia

Public sector agencies coming to terms with the impact of social media on their staff, their policies and their external and internal engagement programmes can similarly be thought of in these terms; shifting behaviours and attitudes to this future state.

The change

According to the Wikipedia article, going by the comments on this blog and the discussions I have with most of you, it would not be unfair to characterize most of the public sector in the ‘unfreezing’ state:

It involve(s) overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing “mindset”. Defense mechanisms have to be bypassed.

One expression of this change is the various guerilla activities that are happening in the social media space. These vary from Ministry Facebook groups through to full-blown (and successful) implementations.

Another indicator that I have discussed before is the changing nature of the media landscape, and in particular the emergence of Google as the largest, most profitable and practically omnipresent player in this space.

The plan

How do we manage the change? Simple. It is about moving from the current state to a future state, in a structured, organized way.

Naturally, you will need a strategy. Essentially, this will be a plan that assists your organization take the manageable, moderated steps necessary to evolve over a period of years into a model Govt 2.0 agency.

Begin with an audit. Develop as comprehensive a picture as possible of all of the social media touchpoints in your agency. Does your agency have a Wikipedia page? A del.icio.us account? YouTube channel? Who in your agency is already blogging? Are there people already commenting and engaging in fora (even if not necessarily relevant to your business)?

Find a champion. Every change management programme needs a senior manager as a sponsor. Try and avoid the CIO for this role as it may reinforce the misconception that this is just about technology — its not, it’s about behavioural change.

Agree on the future state. Make sure that everyone from the sponsor down has a clear conception of where you are going, and the steps that you will take to get there. The reality for most public sector agencies is that this will be a modest vision…

Measure your inputs, outputs and outcomes. This will enable you to accurately report progress towards the future state and to tweak your plan accordingly.

Seize opportunities to bind the change into other organizational initiatives. Use an internal blog in concert with your employee engagement programme; launch a wiki as a knowledge base for staff inductions; podcast your staff talks. By including social media in your people and organizational development activities, you are effectively building capability for the future state.

Conclusion

Pitching the integration of social media into your agency’s internal and external engagement and communications programmes as a change management strategy won’t guarantee you traction with senior management (see the quote above about inertia and defense mechanisms). It doesn’t hurt, however, to have these conversations in a language that managers are comfortable with and connects more purposefully with the organizational goals – rather than focusing on the technology or the tools.

Photo: David Reece

I have posted before about the seismic change that social media is bringing about for the public sector. As communicators, more than most other staff, we need to be able to track the impact of this change and begin to experiment and engage in order to provide our managers with the advice they need to remain abreast of developments or, in a perfect world, capitalize on this changing environment.

Are you getting the support and the tools you need to do your job well now and to grow and develop professionally? Or are you stuck in a backwater where managers are dismissive of the impact of this change and are determined to continue to pursue a course that was first plotted in the late ’90’s?

Unsure? Here’s how you can tell.

Internet access

Do you have unrestricted access to the Internet? No blocking of social media sites?

What about the ability to download files to your local machine? Do you have a bandwidth limit that means you have to prioritize your podcasts? Or is your internet traffic one-way only?

What about the ability to FTP files to a remote server?

Do you have a configurable web browser like Firefox, or are you stuck with Internet Explorer (I call IE7 ‘the pendulum,’ because it spends most of the time hanging…)?

RSS

If you haven’t got your head around this yet, then it should be at the top of your priority list. Being able to source, process and file an enormous quantity of fresh content from news sites, blogs and search engines is a basic competency for a communicator.

Do you have access to an online feed reader or aggregator, like Google Reader, Pageflakes or Bloglines?

Or have you installed a desktop client, like the free and brilliant NetNewsWire?

Mobility

Do you have a mobile device that allows you to access the Internet? What about reading your RSS feeds on the commute to work in the morning? Can you visit your agency website in a meeting and retrieve relevant documents quickly and easily? That last one is probably unfair, as we know it is not the technology that is the problem…

Conclusion

If you found yourself nodding smugly as you read through this post then you are obviously working in the public sector somewhere, but probably not here in New Zealand. If you were running at around 50%, then you are way ahead of the curve and you should probably contact me so I can hand over responsibility for this blog.

If, on the other hand, at the end of that list you realized that your agency is in the social media equivalent of the dark ages, then you have two choices:

1. start agitating for change
2. embrace the 21st Century

The clock is ticking. What are you going to do?

Photo: J.McPherson

The sense of dissatisfaction I felt with my inability to quantify the benefits of a semantic media release and a series of discussions that I have had with colleagues over the last couple of weeks about reporting and metrics triggered some initial thoughts on this issue. There is also a heightened interest in measuring social media around the blogosphere, John Johansen’s post on social media metrics metaphors over the weekend is a good example.

The framework

In arriving at a workable solution for social media metrics the first point that occurred to me is that we shouldn’t overlook the fact that these metrics are only a small part of the picture. Ideally, what you measure and report against is your total strategy, not just the social media element(s).

The strategy would be assessed against achievement of the outputs in your Statement of Intent. The SOI provides the basic framework for the reporting, this can be further broken down into inputs, outputs and outcomes – and metrics established for each of these categories.

The mechanics of this process are self-evident. Social media inputs, for example, are relatively straightforward: time spent writing content, moderating and interacting with commenters and others, numbers of posts, pages created, or podcast episodes.

Outputs can be similarly reported as comments, subscribers, saves to del.icio.us or diggs, pingbacks, the degree to which your content goes viral (remember, we are talking about government here, so let’s not get too excited…).

Obviously, these metrics will also depend upon where you are in your social media maturity cycle. To borrow the MAIL acronym from David Jones, your inputs and outputs will vary according to whether you are monitoring, interacting or leading. You should always be analyzing…

Outcomes

Proving a causal link between a policy input and an outcome is not something that can be taken for granted. Extending that causal chain to the communications contribution to a business strategy is frequently an even more difficult and tenuous exercise.

How, then, do we approach the more demanding task of determining what outcomes can be reasonably attributed to a subset of that communications strategy, social media activities? One solution is to ensure that you build in solid evaluative criteria from the outset, and link these to the outputs in the SOI.

Measuring the impact of social media initiatives on your organization’s ability to successfully engage with its publics is unlikely to be restricted to a single input or output – it will be multi-dimensional. Ensure that you have a matrix of criteria; aggregation will present a more compelling case.

Photo: PPDIGITAL

This week saw another incremental shift as I published the first of these social media releases (SMR) with commenting enabled. Most of you will no doubt be wondering why I have buried the lead (SSC has a blog?), but I figure that there are plenty of other capable people to spread the word.

In any event, IABC has now taken up the leadership of the Social Media Release and, as I will continue to contribute a public sector perspective to the process, I thought that it might be helpful to share some observations about the the impact for SSC of issuing semantic media releases over the past 12 months.

How effective is it?

Naturally, it depends upon where you draw the bottom line: media pick-up, comments, saves to social sites, there are any number of valid approaches to the issue. In most of these cases, however, these releases would have to be judged abject failures.

Another way of making the same point: at the launch I was chatting with a journalist, and I asked him if there was any value in the SMR for him. He stared blankly back. Figuring that I was talking passed him, I tried a more practical tack. Was he finding the del.icio.us links helpful? The reply? What’s delicious?.

Now that doesn’t mean that the del.icio.us links are a waste of time. There are currently six people who have at least a passing interest in what is being bookmarked, it just so happens that none of them work in the local media…

On the other hand, a couple of hours after the portal launch SMR went out, I issued this traditional release about changes to the ICT branch. The result? See for yourself.

Is it worth the candle?

Marking up your releases semantically does impose an overhead. Is that a justified use of resource? I would argue yes. Journalists here may be slow to pick up on the new format, but with every release, you are making an investment in the future capability of the namespace.

If all government news releases were marked up using this format, the newzealand.govt.nz search tool could return search results for all news items restricted to a certain geographic area, or about specific topics, within timeframes etc. These results could in turn be parsed into news feeds for local or topic specific sites (including those outside the .govt.nz domain), thus creating far more public value than an individual agency release buried on its site.

Another point that I have made in the past is that public sector communicators can’t afford to think of metrics solely in terms of media. They are a primary audience, but we have a responsibility to ensure that these news releases are discoverable and accessible by the widest possible constituency.

Conclusion

Whether or not hRelease makes it to a draft microformat stage is really an academic issue for me. I will continue to mark up the releases as semantically as possible and to argue for others to do the same. Yes, you should cover the basics and write sharp, factual and informative news releases. The question you should also be asking yourself is, why don’t I spend at least as much time ensuring that the release is as well crafted semantically as it is grammatically. That just is the reality of communicating in the age of the Internet.

Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are the product of the dedicated minority.

In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.
Chris Wilson

Unlike Wilson, I have no problem with the flimsy veneer of democracy being peeled back from these sites, as I am not particularly interested in the ideology of social media; but the reality of maintaining Wikipedia does provide some salient lessons for public sector organizations seeking to implement these content management systems.

Resourcing

The first point that these findings suggest is that while the wiki will cost (virtually) nothing to set up, it does require dedicated resource to make it a success. This would be in the form of staff whose statements of accountability include curatorial responsibility for the content, and software that supports them in this role.

Some of the tasks that they might be entrusted with range from flagging redundancies, locking pages and migrating content into other wikis or the enterprise document management system, archiving superseded content, through to jointly managing the taxonomic structure of the site.

Without these sorts of controls, particularly over an extended period of time, you run the risk of, at best, the quality and discoverability of the content will inevitably degrade, and the worst case is that you breach the Public Records Act.

Documentation

Just because it is a social media project, doesn’t mean that you can avoid your due diligence. Terms of Reference spelling out the objectives, governance and – most importantly – your content management strategy. That’s right: what are you going to do down the track with this thing? Is it a case of just install and leave it for the next generation to deal with? Or assess after 18 months, migrate everything useful into another platform and archive the lot?

The other, perhaps equally important, benefit of documentation is that you can share it. If your agency does start experimenting with wikis, then it would helpful for your peers if as much of what you did, learned and, if necessary, bungled could be made available, so we avoid the costs of multiple agencies figuring this out for themselves.

One other point about the paperwork: in terms of selling the project to senior management, having robust documentation will get you a lot further than a Govt 2.0 elevator pitch. If that documentation includes another agency’s post-implementation review and/or final assessment of their project, you are making it as easy as practicable for them to agree.

Conclusion

Providing clarity for your organization about what the wiki will (and won’t) be used for, who will be responsible for managing it to success and how they will be supported in that role, should be a methodical and deliberate process.

If we expect to see these tools become part of the standard enterprise suite for public sector agencies in the immediate future, then we need to manage their initial implementations with particular care and attention to detail — and resist the temptation built into the utility of the product to just fire them up and hope for the best.

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

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 am not trying to lead you to an inference about the first, I remain confident that the remedy lies within my own reach.

The first reason was to learn as much about social media in the public sector – in as public and transparent a fashion – as possible. To write about it and to engage with colleagues and peers. Pretty straightforward.

The second, equally important, reason was to provide a forum for colleagues, peers, interested readers et al (you), to interact and experiment with social media. Looking back over the last year and a half, there hasn’t been too much of that. This post is an attempt to change that.

Come on out

Looking through the visitor numbers to the site I have a good idea of the ratio of readers to commenters and while it is reasonable to expect that social sites will generally have a fairly predictable breakdown of active/passive visitors (the 1% rule), for communicators I think we can and should do better.

This is your chance. Stop lurking (even if only for this one post) and come out and introduce yourself. Tell everyone a little about yourself, where you are from, your work and your interests in terms of communications, social media etc. Get social.

If you have other social media profiles, include links to them. Your blog, bookmarks, Twitter or Tumblr accounts, your online feed reader, LinkedIn profile, whatever… Anything that will help all of us connect with others who share what is after all (if you read this blog regularly) a fairly obscure interest.

If you would like to do more than introduce yourself, you are encouraged to submit your thoughts about the blog, especially if it involves suggesting directions or areas of interest for 2008.

Now, don’t be shy: start mingling.

Photo: yewenyi

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.

Disregarding the wisdom of issuing categorical imperatives for the moment, time and a little more analysis have led me to reassess my stance on the sovereignty of public sector social media initiatives. In my haste to arrive at a series of principles that would serve as a discussion guide for public sector communicators, I overlooked those instances where government agencies would be well advised to use hosted services.

The most glaringly obvious example is video sharing. It would be a waste of taxpayers’ money to try and replicate a service like YouTube in the government namespace.

The important point to note here is that the content you post to these types of sites is not beyond the control of the Crown. You are only uploading a copy that can be accessed and shared by others. In each case the content that you are ’socializing’ could, and should, remain part of the public record.

Much the same argument could be made for social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or, somewhat less strongly, photo sharing sites like Flickr.

This isn’t intended as (additional) encouragement to start creating agency YouTube channels and Flickr streams. There are still some considerations before you go into an uploading frenzy…

As an example, let’s look at a case where your agency has produced a video. You would like a wider audience than public servants, so you just create a YouTube account and away you go? Alas, no. The Government Web Standards still apply. So, once you have posted the video to YouTube, you link to a full transcript on your agency site.

In terms of sovereignty, government agency channels on hosted sites could be thought of as a little like diplomatic posts; they may be ‘offshore,’ but the same standards still apply.

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.