Who am I?

My title says 'Communications Manager.' That means I am responsible for the Commission's internal and external communications. The 'manager' bit means that I am interested in developing strategies for the Commission to effectively communicate and engage not just now — but well into the future...

My contact details are at the end of this presentation.

Where am I coming from?

The State Services Commission is one of three New Zealand Government central agencies (alongside Treasury and DPMC). We are the Government's lead advisor on the public management system and the State Services Commissioner, a statutory role, appoints and performance manages the chief executives of the other 34 public service departments.

Basically, we don't have much to do with service delivery, so we can spend time thinking about system-wide issues.

What am I going to talk about?

You can read the bullets...

Our external operating environment has changed tremendously in the last half decade and the rate of change is accelerating.

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 biggest media player is now Google (who don't actually create any content) and people of all ages and abilities are now creating, sharing and curating all sorts of content online.

The key point here is that these people include our colleagues – and a good number of talented people we would like to attract and retain in public sector roles...

One expression of that 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.

There are 74 members of the MFAT group. This is desirable behaviour, but from an organizational perspective it is indicative of strategic slippage – the more this behaviour resides in these external channels, the harder it is for the organization to migrate it into their applications.

Is that an issue? Agencies need to be mindful of their statutory obligations (Public Records Act, Privacy Act) as well as security issues. More importantly, they need to be able to engage their staff — and that isn't possible, or appropriate through sites like Bebo and Facebook...

And then there is the authenticity issue, this fake Police page points to a whole host of issues for government once you move out of your namespace:

• This is the key reason why sovereignty is the first of the Principles for public sector social media. And, to skip ahead to the end of the presentation, it is the one of the last areas I would ever willingly cede control over. Occassionally, a case can be made...

These four initiatives demonstrate that we have become more sophisticated in our approach to deploying social media in New Zealand government, but there is still plenty of room for us to improve.

• The Police Act wiki was part of an innovative & varied communications strategy, including essay writing and debating competitions and the old standard, town halls: 80 public meetings over 8 weeks that drew 1200 New Zealanders
  • Wiki was open for 8 days and drew 5,158 NZ visitors out of a total of 23,785 visits
  • Nevertheless, socially it was a failure – and it is important we acknowledge it as such.
• SafeAs: a very solid effort. Contained to a well defined (and interested) community and focused on very clear outcomes.
• Web Standards: only just launched, so too early to tell. Eschewed the media release for low key blogger outreach and old-fashioned town halls.
• Digital Summit: got off to a very rocky start. Attempted blogger outreach but haven't followed through with participation in the wider conversation; the result, a bubble unto itself. Interestingly, it looks like they haven't really learned the lessons for the current version of the Digital Strategy wiki.

These implementations have their own particular flaws.

• The Fuelled 4 Schools campaign looks to me to be the classic add-on; social media implemented with a very traditional marketing/advertising approach. They have free stuff to give away! Look at the people who are visiting the sites: no sense of ownership, community to any real interest. <lame />
• Sustainability is more worthy, but no less misguided. No discussions, no media uploaded. Nothing really happening: 162 people have joined, but there is nothing for them to engage around...

This is another area where it gets interesting: SSC has an official blog, In Development, that is operating for a 6 month trail while we determine how effective it is (there are defined success criteria).

Part of that trial has been releasing under a Creative Commons license, the Terms & Conditions that we developed for both contributors and commenters.

Understanding how unofficial blogs by SSC staff fit within the organization's policies and procedures is a much trickier proposition – and one that has ramifications wider than the individual agency as, typically, the public sector works much closer together than the private.

The key for us was to rely on pre-existing guidance and policy wherever possible, and to trust that our staff would exercise their judgement.

Just to be clear: blocking does not constitute a strategy, any more than putting your hands over your ears and saying "nah, nah, nah" really loudly does...

A strategy is a measured plan to move the behaviours we have seen in the previous examples into the culture of your organizations. First and foremost, this will mean trusting your staff to exercize their judgement. That doesn't mean just pushing them out there and saying "I trust you," it means providing the support & guidance they need to effectively and confidently use their judgement and make the calls:

• Have a clear policy and terms and conditions for all social media engagement (official or not)
• Provide training and feedback
• Monitor before engaging — rinse and repeat...
• Build your community inside the firewall:
  • Implement social media internally to develop understanding, capability & confidence

This notion gets bandied about quite a lot. I have addressed it in the past, but I want to state categorically here that, for public sector agencies, it is simply not the case nor should it be.

Imagine yourself standing in front of your Minister, shrugging your shoulders and saying, "but Minister, we had no control."

We are paid to be in control — that's the etymology of the word 'govern': to steer, direct or rule.

This ties in to the points I was making about your strategy: control comes from having a clear and agreed plan of action, including:

• Every social media implementation must be part of a (in most cases broader) communications strategy, that ties directly to your business objectives/agency outcomes
• Governance: ownership, terms & conditions, appropriate levels of sign-off and accountability, etc (all the "bureaucracy")
• Metrics: robust measurement and evaluation indices will allow you to fine tune the implementation, provide good data for reporting (see governance) and allow you to make informed judgements about performance.