Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

The BC’s government’s Apps for Climate Action contest highlights why open data initiatives are the best kind of government program: empowering people to take action.

In March, the Government of British Columbia launched the Apps for Climate Action contest challenging developers to use government data to create applications (or apps) that “raise awareness of climate change and inspire action to reduce carbon pollution”. It’s the “Inspire action” part I love because governments spend way too much time and money trying to “raise people’s awareness” of what they’re doing and/or trying to get people to take some action the government wants them to take. Through open data initiatives governments give people the information they need to take action they choose.

The BC contest is the first government open data initiative I’ve heard of focused on a particular topic instead of focusing on simply releasing as much data as possible. I like this because it will lead to the creation of lots of apps focused on the very important climate change issue and still make more data freely available to be used however people want to. You don’t have to be in the contest to use the data and you don’t have to make a climate change app – unless you want a shot at the prizes.

The BC contest is modeled on Washington, DC’s Apps for Democracy contest that “yielded 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days – a $2,300,000 value to the city at a cost of $50,000” according to the website. See all the apps created here.

I’ll be watching to see what creative climate action apps folks dream up.

Tags: goverment, Open Data
Posted in Government, Open Data, open | No Comments »

I attended another informative Case Study Jam Ottawa 3 last night and, as promised, brought along my trusty recorder to share it with you. This time we got to learn with:

Dan Blouin about how National Defence is using social media to attract new recruits – CS Jam site blurb: “Of course, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops for public servants interested in introducing social media tactics and tools. Sometimes, communications ideals come head-to-head with a risk-averse culture and very legitimate concerns about privacy and discretion. Can the military embrace social media or will loose twits sink ships? Join National Defence media analyst Dan Blouin as he ponders this important (and cheekily-worded, if we may say so) question.”

Theresa Woolridge and Jennifer Jager from Public Safety Canada about how they used social media in their Get Prepared campaign. CS Jam site blurb: “Notwithstanding the warnings REM’s been giving us since back in the ’80s (editor’s note, I’m freakin’ old), it seems not everyone in this country is prepared in case of the end of world. Or, you know, some far more realistic disaster. The folks at Public Safety Canada, clearly seeing that club-friendly pop-music wasn’t getting the job done, took a more proactive approach and launched the Get Prepared campaign – complete with outreach to mommy bloggers. Theresa Woolridge and Jennifer Jager will tell us how they did it.”

Constable Nathan Hoedeman about how the Ottawa police (well, him actually) are beginning to use social media to engage the public around community policing – CS Jam site blurb: "How the Ottawa Police Community outreach is about a lot more than walking the beat for the police these days. Constable Nathan Hoedeman, the officer in charge of Ottawa’s Somerset Community Police Centre, is not only using social tools to reach out to his community, he’s also bringing in volunteers to help get the message out. Constable Hoedeman will share his story and give you a chance to help shape the future of his online outreach efforts.” (Nathan said up front that he was there more to ask questions than to present as he’s just beginning to use social media.)

Click the titles above to play the audio and if anything you hear sparks some thoughts please leave a comment!

Tags: Case studies, Case Study Jam Ottawa, CSJam, National Defence, Ottawa Police, Public Safety
Posted in Case studies, Events, Government, Learning Event | No Comments »

I attended an event put on by Google last Wednesday titled Leading the Conversation with Canadians Online which was all about Google selling its wares to the federal government (and don’t get me wrong: I love what they’re selling). I have posted a complete summary of the event on Google Docs so want to focus here on two analytics tools that Google mentioned at the event: Google Analytics and Google Insights for Search. And I’ll admit up front that I’m just beginning to explore both tools so this post is mostly about getting lots of people to experiment and share.

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool that gives you a wealth of metrics that could fill up many more posts. Right now I’ll focus on its ability to tell you who’s coming to your site and from where. This includes breaking down traffic sources by search engine, keywords, referring sites (Web sites that sent people to yours), direct traffic (people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or typed your site URL into their browser), and your Google AdWords campaigns (if you’re running any), among other sources. The results are all presented in easy to read graphs.

At the Google event they showed a graph that clearly showed what number of people visiting a particular site had “converted” by taking the action the Web site was designed to help them take (i.e. buying a product, downloading a white paper) or, if they didn’t convert, exactly where they dropped off in the journey from the homepage.

Google Insights for Search lets you compare search volume patterns for specific keywords across regions, categories (i.e. arts, business, health, sports and many more). That’s about all I know about it for now. You can get more from this post touching Google Insights by the always insightful (pardon the pun), Mike Kujawski of the Centre for Excellence in Public Sector Marketing.

I’ll post more as I play more with the tools and please do the same.

Posted in Google, Government | No Comments »

Here’s the agenda for this morning’s meeting on how federal government departments can use YouTube, put on by none other than Google:

Leading the Conversation
With Canadians Online

Using Google and YouTube to Develop a Digital Dialogue With Canadians

Learn how to control your message with Canadians online and drive interest and support for your
government program by leveraging the power of Google and YouTube advertising products and services. Please join us at our invitation-only event in Ottawa on February 3, 2010.

Our event agenda will include the following presentations:

–

Understanding how Canadians Research Government Information and Programs Online:
Learn from Google’s proprietary research study results and data trends

–

Keys to Success in the Obama Online Marketing Juggernaut:
A keynote presentation from Rich Mintz, VP, Strategy, Blue State Digital

–

Controlling and Monitoring Your Message Online Using Google Search and Analytics:
Discover best practices on how to best use these Google tools to target your message

–

Start an Ongoing Dialogue With Your Constituents Using YouTube and Google Display Advertising:
Hear case studies and learn how to use these tools to drive awareness and response

Tags: Canada, Google, Government, YouTube
Posted in Google, Government, YouTube | 1 Comment »

Sometimes I sound like a broken record when I talk about the need to measure government social media efforts. This isn’t social media’s fault. Long before there was social media, upper management – in government and the private sector -  was ignoring good advice from communications staff and blasting out messages with little justification beyond, well, blasting out messages.

In the old days communicators didn’t have much to combat this because it was hard to measure communications success. So, since it was hard to measure it was hard to argue that communications programs should be linked to business strategy and have measurable objectives flowing from that strategy. But social media changed that. They offer metrics that are easier to get and way more meaningful. For example, the number of blogs posts about your product, written by people who care about it enough to write, means a lot more than a TV commercial seen by lots of people that may or may not care.

But one of the main reasons why measurement is so important in government is that to measure something exactly you have to know exactly what your objective is. With business that’s easy: sell more stuff. But with government it’s not always so clear. Objectives like “raising awareness” with the “general public” get used a lot but some inquiry quickly reveals how little these really mean – and how difficult they are to measure.

The more specific your target audience and objective the easier it is to measure your success – or lack of it. You want move from vague objectives to specific ones like “increasing the number of tweets or re-tweets by Canadians 18-24, that mention our department’s program X, from the current one per year to five per month over the next year”.

So here are three key reasons why you should never stop pushing your government organisation to measure their social media communications efforts:

1) Because to measure exactly you must define your objective exactly.

2) Because it’s public money and communication spending, like all spending, must be justified even more than in the private sector.

3) Because social media efforts can be easily measured so there’s no excuse not to.

Have you got any other reasons?

Posted in Government, Measurement | 2 Comments »

With all the hype about Twitter I thought I’d check on what federal government departments and agencies are actually doing with it. My first stop, as always, was the Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki set up by Mike Kujawski of the Centre for Excellence in Public Sector Marketing.

It lists a handful of departments and agencies on Twitter including the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS).

A quick look at the Centre’s Twitter homepage indicates they’ve started off on the right foot. Their Tweets are aimed at providing value to their target audience – not just blasting out their own messages.

They tweet about things like free Webinar’s they’re offering of interest to their audience and, most importantly, they retweet things of interest from other organisations. The retweets are the real value because, by doing so, they’re playing a role that grows in importance everyday as the volume of information swells on the net: that of curator. Curators provide great value to their target audience by doing two key things:

1) understanding their target audience’s needs

2) sifting through the mass of information to find things relevant to their audience and sharing it.

Curation takes times and resources and that’s why it’s valuable.

It will be interesting to scale the Centre’s Twitter success over the next few months by one of the key measures: retweets of their stuff.

Posted in Government, Twitter, gov | No Comments »

On May 1st, Public Safety Canada issued a social media press release (SMPR) titled, Multi-Media Release: Public Safety Minister Launches Emergency Preparedness Week 2009.

There are a number of good things about the release.

1) Doing it at all. They’re cutting edge when it comes to the Canadian federal government.

2) The release has text, audio, video and lots of relevant links.

3)  The video is hosted on YouTube and right-clicking it gives you the Copy Embed HTML option that lets you embed it on your blog or website.

3) The release has links letting people easily share the content on most major social networking sites.

4) It has links showing how many people have flagged the release on Digg and a link to automatically search for mentions of the release on the popular blog search engine, Technorati.

5) It uses snap shots preview popups that give you a quick look at the site where links lead so you can decide if you want to go click and go there.

Things they could improve:

1) ensure the audio quote matches the text quote. The audio quote for the Minister is different from the text quote. They should match exactly.

2) make sure that when you click the English or French links at the top of the page to switch between languages that’s what happens. Now it takes you to the homepage of the company PSC paid to issue the release, MarketWire, not the version of the release in the other official language. 

3) make the links to the audio clips more visible and more relevant. Right now they just say, Click for Audio File. Making the link name more relevant like Click for Audio File of Minister Van Loan quote, would make Google give it more weight and could increase the release’s search engine rankings.

4) change the name of the link that launches a Technorati search of the release, now called “Technorati’s on this release”. That just sounds like they don’t know what Technorati is.

All in all though, a great effort.

Thanks to Mike Kujawski for blogging about this client success!

Posted in Government, Social media press relase | No Comments »

What is an "anti-pattern" you ask? That’s what I said and what got me listening when Aaron Kim from IBM took the stage at yet another Government 2.0 event I attended in Ottawa on Friday. Kim’s presentation was called Enterprise Web 2.0 and Anti-Patterns – a preview of the presentation he is scheduled to give during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco that runs from March 30 to April 4 (Twitter @w2e). (The full title is Enterprise Web 2.0 Anti-Patterns, ROI and Metrics).

Good ol’ Wikipedia says that in software engineering, "an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a design pattern that appears obvious but is ineffective or far from optimal in practice."

Kim used the definition to talk about how organizations often respond to new things like social media technologies and behaviours. He said that many organizations get excited about the new thing and rush to use it. What follows is a period of disillusionment when the new thing doesn’t meet often lofty expectations. Lastly, there is a maturation period where organizations really begin to understand what works and what doesn’t and how the new thing can or can’t help them meet their organizational objectives.

Kim mentioned that many of the popular books on social media and the collaborative economy use the same success story examples. But he pointed out that there are far more stories of failure because of businesses going down the social media antipattern garden path.

I was hanging on Kim’s every word because it resonated with one of my own mantras: businesses must have strategies and objectives and use social media, or any other tools, as part of a comprehensive plan to fulfill the strategy and meet the objectives. They shouldn’t just jump on the bandwagon – social media or otherwise.

Using the anti-pattern definition, they need to pick the social media "design pattern" that fits their objectives. So even though a particular social media tool may be super popular and an excellent technological and social tool – businesses have to understand both their objectives and the tool to be able to decide if the tool is right for them at that time. Kim said that companies should get out there and try new things and fail fast and often.

The ones who fail by doing what Kim suggests will succeed faster. The ones who don’t won’t.

Posted in Government, Social media, Strategy | No Comments »

That’s right. Canada’s most risk averse organization is taking a risk. The Canada Revenue Agency is running a YouTube video contest inviting Canadians to submit anti-underground economy videos and, from what I’ve seen so far, they’re doing some things very right. Firstly, the press release on the CRA site has a link to a contest promo – on YouTube – and, secondly, it’s good and hip. Very much like one of my favourite videos about net neutrality by the group Save The Internet. The contest started January 19 and ends May 1st and shows 6 videos submitted so far. I just watched two of them  – and they get you thinking.

Well done CRA.

6

Posted in Government, Video, YouTube | No Comments »

Washington, DC is doing it.  And since Tuesday’s election, anything DC does has got to be cool  – and this is. The city has released a bunch of its data and created a contest to challenge developers to use it to mashup useful apps. It’s called Apps for Democracy and the press release blurb say it all,

“The District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), in collaboration with iStrategyLabs, today announced the launch of the Apps for Democracy – “An Innovation Contest” for visualizing DC’s public data. The intention of this competition is to reward technology developers with cash prizes and public recognition for creating applications that are useful for the DC government and the citizens, visitors and businesses of Washington, DC.”

And the first app that was developed again shows the growing power of mobile: a location aware iPhone app giving local crime report info wherever you are in DC (must be that American obsession with crime?).

How are you collaborating with your clients and serving their desire for mobility? 

Thanks to Mike Kujawski for the heads up on this one.

Posted in Government, Mobile | 3 Comments »