Category Archives: Social media

Wikipedia and public sector edits

The blogosphere has been running hot this week with posts about a tool that allows you to track all of an organization’s edits of particular Wikipedia pages.
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 [...]

BarCamp comes to Wellington

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, BarCamp is coming to the Shaky Isles. The inaugural New Zealand BarCamp unconference is going to be held in Wellington on Saturday, September 15. The theme of the event is loosely based around the concept of Govt 2.0; loosely because it is really up to whoever shows up on the day [...]

Blogging and your media policy

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

del.icio.us and public sector PR

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

Alternate uses for public sector blogs

I posted a couple of arguments for getting a blog up as an internal communications tool some weeks ago, Business case for a blog. However, as a blog is a content management system, there are any number of other ways to turn this tool to your communications needs.
Bob Conrad at The Good, the Bad, the [...]

IBM report on blogging and government

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

Cybrarians at the gate: digital natives and the public sector

I have posted once or twice in the past about the need for government agencies to ensure that, as digital natives start to flood into the workplace, the working environment in the public sector is not too dissimilar from the networked social environment that this generation (and any other early adopters of social media) are [...]

Business case for a blog

Let’s assume that you have a new project in your agency that requires thorough and structured (internal) communications. When you are writing up your communications strategy, how do you sell senior management on the idea of a blog as one of the key channels? What arguments can you bring to bear that might persuade them [...]

Eraser Inc, Part 2

I posted about ReputationDefender in November last year, a startup whose mission was to remove potentially embarassing content from the web so that you could protect your online reputation.
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 [...]

Social media: the numbers

A lot of the (offline) feedback I have been getting about this blog has been along the lines of, “why are you so obsessed with social media?” And it is a fair question. There are plenty of other areas of public affairs that I could post about that would probably be of more interest to [...]