I was invited by the Ark Group to present at their Web 2.0 for Business seminar on how the State Library was using Web 2.0 applications. The presentation before mine was from the Office of Crime Prevention, which is part of the WA Police Department on their use of Facebook for School Leavers week. They have been using Facebook since 2005 to promote their stay safe and look after your mates messages as well their events. All very low key and well target, that is why most people over 21 knew nothing about them but from all accounts very effective.

Unfortunately, the school leavers site is undergoing major revision and the facebook presence for 2009 has not been launched. So like me you will have to check back in September or October.

The one question I would ask what happens when you find:

• a blog post critical about the agency or one of its’ policies,
• a series of critical blog posts, with a number of comments supporting the authors view,
• a facebook group, critical about the agency or one of it’s policies, or
• a social networking site which is solely about your agency, and most of the content critical?

And would your action be different if was brought to your attention by:

• a junior staff member,
• senior management,
• the minister, or
• traditional media like the doyen of current affairs shows Today, Tonight?

These scenarios are what all could happen to your agency in the near future. If you need some examples do a Google Blog Search on your agency and have a look at the results. The results for TransPerth Complaint returns a dozen results. 12 hours in a WA Emergency Department is the fourth great article by the same author on the inner workings of a Perth hospital over at Perth Norg. Over 7000 Western Australians have joined the Facebook group Perth people who love Day Light Saving. And to pick on TransPerth again there is Dumb Rider.

How should your agency react in these situations and what can be done to reduce the risk, should be enough to get any Government Department thinking about a Social Media Strategy.

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.