Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish

One day, when I can retire from all this social media stuff and become comfortably rich on the conference circuit, I’ll pepper my sell-out keynote speeches with colourful metaphors like the following:

Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish.

Accept that sh*t happens
So much communication today - from the public and private sectors - is predicated on the belief that silence, rebuttal or defensive lines will be enough. It won’t, not these days. Even if it makes the issue die down for a bit in the mainstream media, in the long run it will blow up again or gnaw away at your brand corrosively to make you look foolish, dishonest or even mildly unhinged. Similarly, social media quickly exposes fabrication and humiliates those responsible, so if you have skeletons in the closet then you’re best off coming clean. Try using the tools of social media to polish turds at your peril.

Lesson #1: expect sh*t, and go equipped with the tools to deal with it.

Take responsibility for it, and for clearing it up
Scoopers accept that it’s up to them to clear up the mess, even if there’s nobody looking and even if it’s not easy. It’s not that you couldn’t just leave it - you might get away with that a few times - but eventually it will catch up with you, or you’ll find yourself in a community which is overrun with the stuff. In practical terms, that means it’s your responsibility - as customer service agent, a press officer, a policy official, whatever - to engage in the process of helping put the screw-ups right when you find them. That doesn’t necessarily mean whistleblowing (but there’s a role for that too), but it does mean being prepared to muck in yourself and recognise that you can help to fix it.

I’d love to see more public sector organisations using services like GetSatisfaction to help identify and address problems in service, harnessing the passion and ideas of our customers to help us solve the problem. Social media helps big organisations to turn frustration into solutions, and to spot the holes in customer service or policy more effectively than mystery shopping, market research or even [sharp intake of breath] classic consultation. But it means being seen to stoop and scoop, which we’re often not ready to do.

Lesson #2: own up to mistakes, and use some of the tools out there to help people help you put things right.

Do what people do in civilised society
Nobody wants to live in a world of polished turds - it makes for a more cynical, frustrated, insular community. Social media can restore some of the sense of community where we give and take, praise and criticise, and earn a reputation based on the contribution we make, not the image we try to manufacture. The civilised organisation, the collaborative state, behaves honestly in the social media ecosystem, whether that’s introducing yourself, crediting the work of others, admitting mistakes or being up front about what you’re doing and why.

Lesson #3: be nice.

I’m so gonna regret writing this when someone picks me up me in the future for polishing a turd of my own. But for now, wish me luck next week as I work with some colleagues to broach one of the hardest topics in social media: scoop, don’t polish.

Image credits (from top): Minor Prophet, Johannal, Robertotostes

Why I love social bookmarking

Sadly, I missed Jenny Bee’s session titled ‘Why I love Twitter’ at the UKGovWeb Barcamp back in January, but if I were ever to run one, I’d have to call it ‘Why I love Social Bookmarking’.

Let me count the ways:

1. It frees your favourites. I have a computer at home, and a computer at work. I find interesting websites using both machines. Previously, I had separate, messy bookmarks on each machine. Now, I have access to my favourites from wherever I am, using my toolbar buttons. (n.b. IT won’t let you install toolbar buttons at work? Set yourself up a bookmarklet instead)
2. It lets you multicode, with tags. Previously, I had folders of favourites. A website was either ‘funnies’ OR it was ‘web design inspiration’. Now it can be both, and easily searchable.
3. It lets you send interesting stuff to other people. Find something interesting, copy the URL, email it to your friend with a quick comment. So last century. Now, I just tag it as a social bookmark for:username and it will pop up in my friend’s list of bookmarks to review as and when they want, keeping their email inbox uncluttered. (In the real world, this only works with real social bookmarking geeks but I live in hope).
4. It can generate the most relevant RSS feeds you’ll ever read. My latest approach to the challenge of tracking the comments I’ve left elsewhere, is to bookmark the comments section of those posts with a specific tag. I can then pipe the RSS for that tag into my blog sidebar to bring together all the blurb I’ve been saying, whether it’s on my blog or someone else’s. At work too, we’re using a similar technique to keep track of useful content on specific subjects and pipe this into Netvibes-based dashboards as a sort of ‘Editor’s Picks’ from the web.
5. It generates content, all by itself. A list of links and short descriptions that you’ve compiled might be of interest to other people. NESTA’s research group use social bookmarking to collate and share links as a team, and then simply publish them as an email newsletter digest each fortnight. Or you can track interesting online debates and feature them on your site. Or you could just publish your interesting finds as a daily blog post (I pick up all kinds of interesting stuff from Dom that way)

And I don’t even use it the way it was intended to be used: to discover interesting things others have tagged in similar ways.

So, if you aren’t doing it already already, kick start your reflection of the web: start social bookmarking.

Blessed are the developers

This week, I took a trip down memory lane and revisited a (non-government) project I last worked on nearly five years ago. The ‘temporary‘ system I built back then is still going – amazingly – but the team wanted some changes made. Various people had dabbled in the code since 2003, most recently the organisation’s team of Romanian programmers.  The problem was, my former colleague complained, though cheap those guys didn’t really understand the project, moved onto other stuff and ended up delivering a half-upgraded system which was worse than what was there before.

Today, I had lunch with some proper government techies. This social media stuff is all very well, they said, but what about accessibility, and security, and data protection, and support? To paraphrase their argument, the dabblings of people like me trigger an avalanche of expectation which people like them are then commanded to deliver on. Frustratingly, it’s not that those guys aren’t innovating – just that the incredible stuff they’ve been developing hasn’t managed to see the light of day.

So I’m starting to think this means two things:

• If we want to be creative in how we apply technology to the problems of government, then we need to draw a line under the extent to which we outsource IT. Though they’d beat you to a pulp with one of their white papers for saying it, you’ll never get real innovation in web communication from the big outsourcers. For that, you need a guy in the corner who does this stuff out of pride, not for money and doesn’t need a spec to tell you how it should be built. It comes from leaving just enough breathing space in the day job for the in-house techies to build the stuff they think is cool, and ensuring it gets in front of the right people. It comes from the developers still working on the project their boss told them to stop working on six months ago. Like Spolsky says, we need to treat our good in-house developers like the superstars they are and recognise just how much talent we have sitting within government if only we could - dare I say - unlock it.
• Social media tools lower the barrier to entry, but only so far. Wordpress.com, TypePad, Ning and SurveyMonkey are great. They let people like me take our meagre knowledge a long way. But we have a responsibility to stop others who understand less about these tools than we do from running away with the idea that this means government webbery has fundamentally changed: it hasn’t. More than ever in a converged, transformed, empowered world, we need the enterprise CMSes, the resilient hosting and the focus on making stuff that’s accessible to everyone. A swiss army knife might save you on a camping trip, but it’s not exactly the tool of choice when you’re refitting a kitchen, and quite right too. We need to understand which of our projects are camping trips, and which are kitchen refits, and choose our tools and teams accordingly – making sure the senior decisionmakers understand the distinction too.

To a non-techie, it can feel like your grumpy developers are just being obstructive when they tell you that they can’t just deploy that blog site you wanted overnight when that guy at the conference said that you could do it yourself on Wordpress.com in half an hour. But chances are – if your techies are any good - it’s not obstructiveness at all: it’s professionalism.

Hassles and Handycams

“Let’s do some video case studies”
“How about a little montage of the Minister doing the visit?”
“We could do something on YouTube – you know, liven it up a bit”

There’s something compelling about film, which is why so many events and launches open with an uplifting compilation to a jaunty soundtrack. They set the scene, tell real people’s stories, bring events to life, make the conceptual personal.

Expectations seem to be changing. In a YouTube world, I think it’s fair to say that the assumption is now that effective government communication online will incorporate video, whether it’s formal, informal or full-blown interactive.

But it’s easier said than done.

A number of recent projects have brought me face to face with the world of video and the practicalities of making it happen:

• You need the gear to record video, or access to people who can do it for you (at a significant cost)
• You need to find a way to look after and manage any in-house gear
• You need people to project manage each shoot, getting the people lined up, the venues arranged etc
• You need release forms and briefings (speeches, bullet points, background notes, whatever)
• You need to manage the expectations of Important People who are used to being interviewed by the BBC with autocues
• You need some way to edit what you shoot
• You need a grasp of aspect ratios and codecs, video formats, frame rates and embeddable code
• You need somewhere to put it and process for getting it OK-ed
• You need rules about what you publish and how you moderate comments
• You need an answer when someone says: “So why exactly are we doing this?” and when someone says: “So how come the YouTube ‘related videos’ show a girl in a G-string?”

All of which can be done. But the hardest bit - and why I have newfound respect for graduates of media studies courses - is that you need to know how you tell a story through video. Talking heads are fine, but often dull. Proper film-makers know about finding interesting locations, putting interviewees at their ease, which bits to keep and which bits to chop, how to do intros, transitions, titles, splicing clips together, fixing the sound and colour balance, storing and converting the footage and lots more. And too often recently for me, it’s just been a cheerful civil servant with a Handycam and an Important Person wondering why the outputs aren’t a bit more polished.

The answer might be to leave this to people who know about video – just brief it out and leave it to the professionals. But I think video is becoming like typing: one day soon, the practical skills to communicate through video are going to be as normal as being able to put together a Powerpoint presentation - you don’t bring in an agency for that. In the same way that bullet point slides look dated these days, fairly soon the smart kids will be making their points with vox pops, Qik streams and mini-documentaries, and we’ll see film-making skills creep into person specifications and CVs for people in communications roles.

I think it’s worth it: the prize will be a much more engaging and authentic way of communicating.

Adventures in social consultation

Some consultations are basically dull. Some are politically-charged. Some are hurried. So when the Science and Society consultation came sauntering along, it was clear this was an opportunity too good to miss. It’s a genuine call for ideas, casting the net wide to improve the way that science is communicated, understood, taught, and recruited for. What can we do to improve trust and confidence in scientists? How can we get more high quality science broadcasting and more intelligent media coverage of science issues? How can science be taught in school in more engaging ways? Interesting stuff.

These issues are ripe for a more interactive, distributed approach enabled by social media - a truly ’social consultation’ - where the issues are conveyed in an engaging way and people can respond in whole or in part through a number of channels, whether in our space or theirs.

Inspired by the truly groundbreaking Governance of Britain site that Puffbox developed for Ministry of Justice, we pitched the idea of a ‘hub’ site to the policy team, as a focus for the debate online and a technology solution to the challenge of harnessing the activities of stakeholders in a manageable way.

Like most consultations, the full document runs to 50+ pages with 34 meaty questions. Whilst virtually everyone has an interest in some of the issues, virtually nobody is interested in all of them. So our big experiment with this project is the idea of ‘widgetising’ the consultation questions so that bloggers or website owners can easily host a debate about the few issues which interest them and their network.

Complementing this is some truly remarkable content. My phenomenal new colleague Georgia - originally in the office for a week’s work experience - stayed on for more, organising the interviewing and filming of ten eminent scientists, broadcasters and policymakers you can watch on the site talking about the consultation. We’ll be aiming to keep the blog area fresh with these personal perspectives over the summer.

There’s the second outing of a CommentPress-powered ‘commentable’ version of a document, allowing visitors to leave public comments on specific questions or paragraphs. It’s not a panacea though: the CommentPress theme out-of-the-box needs a bit of work to make it robust and accessible, and we’re hoping to smooth some of the rough edges over the next few weeks.

Tracking the wider online debate is where we’ve borrowed most liberally from the excellent work of others: bringing in Parliamentary mentions from TheyWorkForYou as originally demonstrated by TellThemWhatYouThink; a Deli.cio.us account to publicly share links on the site as pioneered by Governance of Britain; and an internally-focussed Netvibes-based dashboard to help officials keep track of online coverage.

A bit of a kitchen-sink approach? Maybe, but we’ve tried to apply some strategy to our choices:

- Yes to a Facebook group (we’ll be running events later and want to widen our network)
- No to liveblogging or streaming the launch (it was a fun event, but the online audience would be too small and frankly we’ve got more engaging content)
- Yes to Twitter, but owned by Rhys - our dynamic, hip-to-the-Flickr Press Officer - and explictly corporate, science-oriented, and low volume
- No to forums: with a comment-enabled blog, CommentPress document, widgets and Del.icio.us roll we think we’ve got more applied channels for feedback

As a result of all this, I’ve spent a lot more time in the guts of WordPress than I had done before, and it’s been a positive experience virtually all the way. Believe the hype - there’s much more to it than a blogging platform - especially when teamed with the excellent SimplePie for RSS. Creating a theme from scratch is easier than it seems, honest. We’ll put the code we’ve developed into Google Code’s repository after the project in case others can benefit from it.

With so many virtual plates spinning, we’ve undoubtedly made mistakes and missed some tricks - please do help me out by showing us where the holes are.

Still listening

Policymaking should be an ongoing conversation between government and stakeholders, not a process where government stops listening when the consultation closes.

That’s the vision behind Innovation Nation: Interactive which we’re taking the wraps off today. In a nutshell, it’s a summary version of the white paper on innovation which DIUS published in the Spring, developed using WordPress with the CommentPress theme to enable readers to post a response at chapter or paragraph level.

In terms of the technology story, it’s amazing how CommentPress transforms a plain vanilla blogging format into such a dynamic tool for analysing a text, and just how easy it is to implement. Inspired by Glyn from Open Rights Group at a TeaCamp a while back, the site was put together in less than a day (though we’ve done less fancy customisation than ORG’s impressive implementation). The project is also one of the first public outings of our sandbox server, designed to be at arm’s length from the corporate site and with greater scope to test innovative tools and approaches online. Finally, we also used the excellent MailBuild email distribution system to help alert key stakeholders and contributors to the initial consultation about the new site via a branded email.

But we hope the bigger story will be the breaking down of the classic consult/deliver dichotomy which we’re challenging policy teams to overcome. We’d love this interactive document to become a place where policymakers, stakeholders and interested citizens come together to help move a policy forward, and we’ll be doing our best to act as a bridge between commenters and the civil servants who are working hard to change things. Don’t underestimate the scale of the cultural challenge here: we’re asking seasoned, busy public servants with a familiar way of working to take extra time and effort to make engagement a continuous process - and to do so in a whole new way. Help us out: take a few minutes to look around, and give them your thoughts.

Well, I promised baby pictures

Arthur Benjamin Gray, born 16 June 2008, weigh 8lbs. And by some margin, the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

Innovating in small steps

There’s social media which constitutes a great leap forward, and then there’s social media which, while only arguably social, is still better than what went before.

It’s been quite a frantic week, partly driven by the launch of the new Work Skills command paper online which falls squarely into the second camp. When the team’s busy, and a document needs to be turned round quickly, it’s natural to take the easy route when it comes to publishing online - create a PDF and stick it on the website along with the press notice.

The brief for Work Skills was to create something more engaging, showing the progress being made on integrating the employment and skills systems across the country. A great team from DIUS, DWP, and LSC supported by design agency Bell and several video production firms managed to pull together an online document which - while by no means cutting edge - helps to tell some engaging stories through video case studies of people who have benefited from policy changes.

I dreamed about using CoverItLive, Twitter, Qik and more to cover the launch, but frankly didn’t have the manpower or rationale to justify them. We could have tried something with Google Maps and YouTube, but the simple Flash player which was built just seemed like the easier and more reliable option. I’m proud of the simple and good value site we’ve ended up with: something that focuses on the stories rather than technology, makes a real effort at accessibility, and toes the line of Transformational Government. Command Paper 1.5 maybe. A step forward for online communication of a policy document. I think it’s through this kind of everyday innovation - slightly different, slightly better that we’ll make real progress over time.

And of course, you can download the PDF if you want to

A new conversation

Hello again. Some 12 years after I started, it’s high time I got a personal site up and running again.

Digging through my old files, I was amused to see the home page message that first appeared on Steph Online, back in 1996:

As there is so much, ahem, rubbish on the Net, here I try to add as little as possible of my own. What’s here should be vaguely useful to someone, somewhere.

This time around, I’ll do my best.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a meeting discussing how to advance the digital communications community in government. I was inspired to resurrect the personal site by Simon Berry’s suggestion there that we needed to become a community of self-publishers, sharing our work and experiences (where we can) through our own channels, in the spirit of the web.

Over the coming weeks, I’d like to use this space to share some of the techniques and resources I’ve been working on both at DIUS and elsewhere. I’d like to experience properly the challenges and opportunities of blogging as a civil servant and a private citizen, as a web developer, and imminently, as a new dad.