Recently, I had a bad experience with Transperth, so I blogged about my experience. I was wondering how Transperth should respond, when I found I was invited to contribute to the Office of eGovernments’s updating of the Guidelines for State Government Websites and the second item on the agenda was Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.. I realised guidelines are not the complete solutions, There needs to be a encompassing strategy in any agency before guidelines are employed.

The internet is now a major communication channel. In the last two government departments I worked, more people where getting information from their websites than all other communications channels combined.

While the web has given government agencies a inexpensive channel to communicate their message. The internet and particularly social media have also given others an equal inexpensive and effective channel to communicate their alternative message. It is far easier to communicate online, for example, with my bad experience with Transperth, I told 5 people offline and over 100 people online about my experience. Significantly the research (Corporate Social Responsibility Survey 07) shows that people are more than twice as likely to trust a friend than a corporate website.

If you look at results of the Demographic Profiling of Victorian Government Website Visitors 2007 it shows close to 30% of all internet visitors to Victorian Government websites read blogs and 10% contribute to blogs. That is a large number of customers who are capable of providing or listening to alternative views about you. That does not include the over 2.2 million FaceBook members or users of other social networking sites or services.

If the 30% of your website visitors that are blog readers is not enough, social media has an impact well beyond that. Do a Google search on Transperth the results are interesting, the Transperth site is the first result the second is Transperth Dumb Rider System which is critical of Transperth, as are two more of the top ten results. This is because Google appears to be biased towards social media sites, in ranking the results it returns. As a large number of visitors arrive at your site through Google, the appearance of critical web pages highly in search results has damaged your reputation in the eyes of clients even before they arrive at your site.

The issues as I see them with the rise of social media and it’s impact on government agencies to communicate their message are:

• The number of alternative voices and a good proportion of your clients are willing to listen.
• People are more likely to trust other people, particularly ones they have pre-exisiting relationships with than your website or other communication channel.
• Even if you web based clients do not use social media, they results of others using social media can have an effect on your relationship with them.

Evolution of Security is the blog of the Transportation Security Administration and the most popular Government blog I have seen, with most recent posts averaging over a 100 comments.

One of the most interesting differences between this and most Government blogs, is the effort that has been made to put a human face on the the TSA. The closest most people get to the TSA is brief conversations with faceless personnel at security checks in airports. So the TSA has made a serious attempt to show the human side of the TSA, all the contributors to the blog have their first name and a bio on the blog. It works, a large number of comments begin, hi name.

The blog has been so successful that one of the regular authors, Bob has moved from his regular job at Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport to be a full time blogger at TSA headquarters.

So why has the Evolution of Security been so successful in such a short time, it was only launched in January this year. I believe it is a combination of factors, airport security affects a large number of Americans and therefore a large number of people are interested in the subject matter, a well developed and executed a social media strategy which include putting human face on the TSA and this human interaction has lead people to constantly return and regularly comment.

The lesson for anybody about to create a government blog or other social media, make it with real people and let them interact, you will have the public interacting in return.

• I knew how it worked;
• in my opinion the best blogging software out there;
• a local install gave us more configuration and contro options.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, a typical IT territorial dispute. No local server was available, so the WordPress.com alternative was used. At the time I thought it was far from the perfect solution, but it was the best available at the time.

A year down the track and I now realised that WordPress.com was the best solution. I provide technical advice, a little help but I am not involve in the running the blog, like I would of done with a local install. Instead, the people who wanted the blog, set it up, own it and regularly contribute to it. And to me that makes the blog a success, not whether we have the best set up, the best configuration or control.

AGIMO consultation blog discussion paper

So the first item I want to highlight is not making use of web 2.0 technology. It is a formal discussion paper about using a blog as a consultation tool, requiring formal written responses. That is the limit of technology, distribute a discussion paper as a PDF and allowing responses by email.

I am just cynical but using a pre-web consultation process on a project that would of been a great test case for a consultation blog, just seems old fashioned and excessively conservative. Has AGIMO not heard of iterative development.