Recently, I was in a meeting of government communicators at the leading edge. The discussion was informed, and mature; the examples innovative and and impactful. Though the group had diverse backgrounds in Press Offices and Strategic Marketing, they were all in agreement that digital, and social media in particular, was the way of the future.

This happens a lot. For people looking to do more for less, digital offers a more cost-effective delivery channel. For people looking to reach younger or more mobile audiences, it offers new and engaging channels. For people looking to innovate, it offers exciting tools and techniques. All of this is possible, and I’d argue, desirable. But if we’re going to make it happen on the scale people envisage, we need to translate that enthusiasm into a deliverable configuration of people, suppliers and skills. And to do that, we need to unpack what digital means in the context of government.

Brian Hoadley kicked this off for me with a great post unpacking two contrasting approaches to social media: as a one-off campaign tool vs an enduring set of communities. In my mind, it’s also the difference between the digital marketing approach to social media, compared to the digital engagement or channel management approaches.

So here’s my attempt to do a bit more unpacking (click to expand, or download the PDF version):

I came up with eight groupings of professional disciplines within the digital realm, within which are a total of 47 activity areas – each of which is a justifiable professional specialism in itself:

Digital Marketing

- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing (SMS & Apps)
- Online display advertising
- PPC search
- Paid partnerships
- Social media campaign strategy (short term)

Online PR

- Social media news
- Influencer mapping & blogger outreach
- Earned (non paid-for) partnerships
- Social media monitoring
- Offline PR integration (including traditional media)

Digital Engagement

- Community management
- Social reporting
- Digital mentoring & internal guidance
- Social media engagement strategy (long term)

Digital Project Management

- IT project management
- CMS strategy & procurement
- Hosting strategy & procurement
- Agency briefing & management
- Wireframing & visual design
- Resilience & Disaster Recovery planning
- IT security and information assurance
- User Acceptance Testing

Digital Publishing

- Content strategy & commissioning (including social media)
- Web copywriting
- Publisher training & QA
- Multimedia commissioning/production/editing
- Online brand guidelines

Digital Channel Management

- Corporate channel management (i.e. core website)
- Web analytics
- Social media channel management (e.g. corporate Facebook, Twitter)
- Accessibility
- User Experience research/design
- Archiving and link management
- Microsite integration and branding
- Legal compliance with privacy, data protection, copyright regulation
- SEO
- Horizon-scanning (e.g. tools, trends, technologies)

Digital Government

- Website convergence
- Directgov franchise management
- Business Link theme management
- Workforce channel management
- Freedom of Information & Parliamentary Question responses
- Channel/efficiency strategy
- Cost, quality & usage reporting

Open Data

- Linked Data publishing (e.g. RDFa)
- Data visualisation
- API creation & consumption

What does this tell us? I think there are a few noble truths there:

• Digital needs go-betweens: just look at the overlaps. In a day’s work, webbies find themselves in discussions with IT, PR and digital agencies, lawyers, photographers, data geeks, half-trained web publishers and vocal online communities.
• It’s not just a technical or communications discipline: the old cliché of webbies being from IT, or more controversially being just a branch of Marketing, doesn’t bear out. It’s obvious from the scope of the work mapped out there that there will be tensions with people who see the aspects of digital that relate to Marketing, but can’t relate to the IT project management aspects; or who can relate to copywriting, but not user experience analysis or channel strategy.
• It’s demands a diverse team: the most important conclusion from this thought experiment is that government digital work is now such a vast, diverse and yet professionally specialised field, that we need to rethink who does digital. Either we radically scale up the late 1990s concept of a ‘web team’ from a primarily publishing operation to some much more sophisticated (you could easily see a Head of… each of the groupings above within much bigger digital operations). Or, someone needs to do a whole lot more engagement with people elsewhere in the organisation who work in parallel fields (IT service operations, offline marketing, training, internal comms, statistics etc) to help them become professional specialists in some of these fields themselves (of course, there are external agencies that offer many of these services, but they still need intelligent clients to work with).

So perhaps that’s the biggest challenge for government in using digital more effectively to listen, discuss, inform and deliver. Somehow, we need to find ways to increase skills and capacity across this enormous field.

How on earth are we going to achieve that?

Related posts:

1. London Summit: digital engagement done right
2. Defining the roles within digital engagement
3. The pieces of the digital engagement puzzle

Yesterday at work, we hosted the first meeting of intranet club, bringing together intranet managers from 12 central government departments for a show and tell about design decisions, technologies, user involvement and project management. It was a fascinating couple of hours, with a group of people who rarely get together in that way, aside from via costly benchmarking forums.

It was Chatham House rules, so I won’t share the discussion here, but I will share the format, nay the Rules of Intranet Club:

1. You do talk about Intranet Club. Intranet managers are to be found in different departments in different organisations. Get the word out through various networks to track them down.

2. Only 8 intranets to a Club. OK, we broke that one, but it was our first time. 8 intranets x 15 minutes each would work really well, I think.

3. One intranet at a time. Presenters take turns to show and talk about 3 screenshots each (sent in advance) of their intranet:

• The homepage
• A page or feature that they’re proud of, or which works well
• A page or feature which is causing them trouble

4. Shirts and shoes mandatory. Trousers/skirts too, please.

5. Intranet Club goes on as long as needs to (or 2 hours, whichever is the shorter). There’s only so much we can all take.

6. If this is your first time at Intranet Club, you have to present. It’s not a keynote presentation, it’s a seminar all the participants take part in.

7. When someone goes limp, it’s over. Frankly, that’s just good practice in corporate meetings.

Thanks to all the Departments who came and shared – I hope you all found it as insightful as we did.

Related posts:

1. How much is too much?

I was never a born project manager. I didn’t have the organisational skills, the discipline or indeed a sufficient dislike of my colleagues to want to inflict upon them the highlight reports, gantt charts and benefits realisation plans needed for Proper Projects. But in my fairly brief stint as formal Project Manager, I did have one knack, and that was getting on quite well with developers. I can only think that the reason for this was that I can relate to the work they do, have an idea of what is easy and what is hard, and respect the elegance of the craft – because I dabble in code myself.

My ears pricked up when Alistair pointed me to Mercedes Bunz of The Guardian asking: ‘Will journalists of the future need to know how to code?’:

Up until now, as a journalist you worked with information, researching facts and figures which then you passed on to the reader. However, in a digital world there are more platforms you can use to convey that information – think of maps or mobile applications, augmented reality. And to be able to do that you will have know how to code.

I think it’s an interesting thesis, even if the scenario of journalists learning Python to develop their own Google-esque apps is pretty hardcore. But I don’t think it just applies to journalists – almost regardless of your role, I think it’s worth learning a bit of code, especially if your academic training has been in hand-wavy social sciences like me.

1. It helps you think about how everyday processes work: there’s nothing like building your own applications to make you think  logically about how people behave online, and the hidden sophistication of seemingly simple systems like cash machines or website subscription services.
2. It’s good for your attention to detail and organisational skills: you can be sloppy about how you capitalise words or use punctuation in the real world, but the world of code makes you a more organised, consistent person (n.b. those who know me will laugh at this hubris)
3. It gives you an insight into why websites work the way they do, and why they break: as a webbie or even just a web user, coding for yourself helps you understand the anatomy of websites, the technologies which come together to deliver them, and gives you some explanations for why they’re ‘being a bit funny today’.
4. It lets you translate ideas into prototypes: talk is cheap, but if you can turn it into a prototype, you’re already a step ahead – and you can refine your thinking as you build it and get feedback on something tangible, rather than just a brainwave.
5. It opens up a new world of lifehacks you can build for yourself: whether it’s a way to backup your Twitter account or a to-do list application that actually reflects how you work, being able to write bits of code to save yourself time is neat.
6. It’s a social* thing: fifteen years ago, I was getting little applications on computer magazine cover disks, and receiving letters back from all over the world via the school register. Now, when I release code I get feedback instantly, along with help, suggestions and improvements, and feel part of something energetic and positive. (n.b. I say ’social’, but not necessarily family friendly. I’m still squaring that circle
7. It’s creative and relaxing: I don’t actually get paid to code, so for me there’s something relaxing and challenging in sitting down of an evening to make a new tool or improve something.
8. It’s good for the career: maybe a bit obvious, but even a small amount of coding capability (real; not just puffed-up for CV purposes) helps you do your job, and get noticed for doing it, generally without antagonising your colleagues. Frankly, bosses like clever bits of digital innovation: it’s worked for me in pretty much every job I’ve ever had, particularly the non-digital ones.

It’s worth putting two caveats on that list of benefits:

1. Know your limits: the old cliche ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ is a double-edged sword when it comes to coding. If you believe it, then you’ll never start learning anything. But if you ignore it, you’ll find yourself in dangerous territory (exposed to hackers, losing friends’ data, costing yourself money etc). Strike a balance between the courage to learn, and the humility to ask for help or say you don’t know.
2. It’s a long way to the summit: ‘coding’ as I’m describing it here is a shorthand for knowledge of a whole range of technologies – all of which are changing over time – which you’ll find you want to develop at least some familiarity with. Of course, you can do some things with just a little practice and knowledge, but unless you focus very narrowly, I don’t think you ever reach a plateau of knowledge – there’s always an infinite amount more to know and potentially keep up with. You’ll be learning forever.

I hear the other side of it, of course: do what you’re good at, and leave the heavy lifting to the professionals, like you would car maintenance or central heating. I think that view gets too much unthinking acceptance, for the reasons above and more. Be proud to be a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, I say.

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In a previous life, I once wrote:

Fundamentally, evaluation should be about measuring performance objectively in order to make improvements:

• measuring: involves a process for collecting, recording and sharing data, perhaps from a number of sources, or of different types
• performance: how successful the activity has been, which means how well it met its objectives, budget and timeframe – including unintended outcomes or side-effects
• objectively: trying to overcome natural personal and psychological inclinations to look on the bright side, remember ‘peaks’ or anecdotes,and try to consider every aspect of the activity fairly and in proportion
• in order to make improvements: not just evaluating for its own sake, but with the aim of making it better in future, through refining techniques or developing individuals

Source: Connecting with Communities: a good practice guide to outreach, CLG (2006)

I still think there’s something in that definition, and it came to mind when someone challenged me to write an intro to web analytics – a field awash with data and trends where it’s more important than anywhere to ask yourself: why?

So why analyse?

Before you analyse, ask yourself two questions: What is my site for? and What do I want to achieve by analysing? The answer to the first question will help you work out what kind of measures are worth paying attention to; the latter will help you be clear on what the numbers really mean for you. It’s important, because analytics can help you do all kinds of things:

To track progress towards a goal. Web analytics can help you benchmark and track trends over time to see how your site is performing: if the purpose of your website is to sell things, how well are you doing that? If it’s to build a community, are people coming back? If it’s to build an easy-to-use web app, do people get beyond the front page? It’s an obvious point, but not all goals are the same, so Good for one site is Bad for another.

To compare approaches.Web analytics are all about comparisons. Analytics can help you see if site A or site B send you more traffic; whether a particular piece of link text works better or worse than the one you tried last month, and whether people are more interested in your blog posts on Kerry Katona or Kefalonia.

To assess the value of what you’re doing. Return on investment is a dirty phrase, but the bottom line is that analytics can give you some of the raw materials for a story about what you achieve for the effort and money you invest in your site. But it’s the story and the insight into why people visit and what they do when whey come that’s really interesting.

To kill failure. Some sites or sections or campaigns flop for one reason or another. Analytics can tell you which ones they are, so you can try something else instead.

What do analytics look like?

Broadly-defined, I’d say there are four main kinds of analytics:

1. Server side: these are based on the big log files stored by the server your website is hosted on, which adds a line each time a web browser requests something from it. It stores information about the machine address, the page or image requested, and what the requesting machine’s operating system and web browser is, all in a line something like:
   123.123.123.123 - - [26/Apr/2000:00:23:48 -0400] "GET /pics/wpaper.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 6248 "http://www.jafsoft.com/asctortf/" "Mozilla/4.05 (Macintosh; I; PPC)"
2. Client-side: these are stats collected using a service like Google Analytics or SpeedTrap, which uses a bit of javascript code in each page of a website to detect information about the page itself and the visitor’s machine. The tools are often able to provide quite a bit of detail – even sometimes providing ‘heat maps’ showing which parts of the page are most clicked on – but don’t record anything if the machine visiting the site has javascript turned off (and a few percent still do).
3. Trackers & counters: particularly on the social web, you’ll find lots of services which track how many times something has been played, favourited, commented on or clicked through to. From comments on YouTube videos, views of a Flickr photo to clicks on a shortened bit.ly link from Twitter, all of these provide help to answer the ‘how many?’ question
4. Panels & data-crunchers: some services can tell you how popular your site is without even asking you. Well, they claim to. Tools like Alexa track the websites visited by people who install a certain toolbar, or are paid to be members of a certain panel, while services like Hitwise use data from internet service providers to track which websites are visited by their customers – and fascinatingly, what the demographic and consumer profile is of those people. Whether these numbers mean anything depends a lot on the profile of their sample, and whether they reflect visitors to your site – if you’re a big consumer site, there’s a chance they will. At the very least, they’ll give you some comparisons in terms of rank order and traffic volumes for some of those kinds of sites.

What to look for

Trends: the absolute number of visitors or pages is usually less interesting than the trend over time. Are more people coming than last month? Are weekends always low, or is it something we did? Trends help you establish whether a change or campaign consistently has a positive or negative effect.

Journeys: when people come to your site, they move about. It’s a common fallacy to assume people visit the homepage, click on an item from the main menu, then an item from that page, then the next page, and then view your detailed page. But analytics often show the reality of people who land from a search engine deep within your site, unaware of your homepage. The journey tools within Google Analytics can help you spot where people give up and go elsewhere, so you can take action to make the journey smoother and keep the traffic (if that’s what your site’s about).

High & low stories: the high and low points can tell you some interesting stories in themselves – what made a particular blog post twice as popular as the norm? And was it bad timing or bad content maybe that made that other post sink like a stone?

Surprises: analytics are full of surprises, like the geographic origin of visitors (plenty of UK consumers read US sites, and vice versa), or the screen resolutions on which people are reading your site. Have a large cohort of iPhone readers browsing your site on a 320×480 screen? Consider tweaking your stylesheet.

What to look at

Hits v Pages v Visits v Uniques. A hit is request for a single part of a web page, like an image or a stylesheet – so isn’t a great measure, as a page with lots of pictures and associated files can have a lot of hits for very few actual people visiting. Pages is a better measure, more comparable to measures used in traditional media given the correlation with the number of times an advert is displayed, for example. A visit gets closer to the concept of ‘how many real people visited the website’, looking at the number of times someone came along to the site and viewed a set of pages in a single session. Finally, ‘unique visitors’ tries to de-duplicate visits from the same person or machine, to give a cleaner measure of the number of different people who came to the site. I generally find unique visitors the most valuable number, as it gives me a sense of the real human audience for the content.

Time on page. By seeing how long it takes, on average, for someone to move from page to page within your site, analytics work out the average time spent on each page and on the site as a whole per visit. It’s an interesting measure which can give you an indication of whether you content is properly being properly read or just skimmed. If your aim is engagement and your time-on-page is just a few seconds on average, there may be a problem – a longer time-on-page is generally thought better for most sites.

Bounces. A special case for visits are so called ‘bounces’ where a visitor visits only a single page on your site. Perhaps they come to the home page, realise you’re not for them, and click back to the Google search results. Or perhaps they land on the in-depth article they were looking for, and need to look no further. A lower bounce rate is generally thought better.

Conversions. Some of the more complex functionality in Google Analytics lets you define goals and ‘funnels’ to analyse how people move through your site towards a defined sales objective – maybe downloading a document, completing a multi-page form or clicking the ‘buy’ button.  Non-transactional government sites often don’t look as hard at this measure, but that’s not to say they shouldn’t. A lot of websites are created simply to look good or get lots of readers, but establishing some more stretching objectives like getting visitors to sign up to a newsletter, subscribe to an RSS feed or complete a form to join a ’supporters’ scheme is more likely to show the value of the web longer-term in mobilising support and engagement from otherwise passing trade.

Referrers. Blimey, where did all those people come from? Referrer information tells you which site the visitor was on when they clicked on a link to your site. Looking at the list of sites which refer traffic to you can often open your eyes to unexpected organisations or individuals who found your content interesting and chose to link to you. ‘Direct entry’ generally means someone typed your URL in themselves or, in these days of desktop Twitter clients like TweetDeck, that they came to your site from a source outside of their main web browser. Many referrals are likely to come from search results pages which, in these days of Google dominance, are most useful in that they give you…

Keywords that people typed into the search engine in order to find the link to your site. These give you a sense of the popularity of different phrases used to describe your content, as well as some of the most amusing and surprising insights into your analytics – at time of writing this site, for example, is on the first page of results in Google for the phrase ‘sell stuff‘.

Browser stats. In making design choices about your site, browser stats can tell you what proportion of visitors used outdated browsers (such as Internet Explorer 6) and therefore do or don’t need catering for, as well as the screen resolutions they have, which can inform what kind of layout you go for – often very useful when combatting the oft-quoted stipulation that government sites need to work for the sizable minority of visitors on 800×600 browsers. They’re a minority, but they’re not as sizable as the folks browsing your postage stamp pages at 1600×1200.

Social stats

Social media tools and platforms introduce a new dynamic. On the whole, you don’t get the richness of traditional web analytics (though some platforms such as Ning let you plug in Google Analytics code if you pay a bit extra). But on the flip side, your analytics are much more public, which introduces its own interesting dynamics of ‘popular content’ and feeds the ego.

• Views of videos, pictures or presentations are probably the most straightforward, along with click throughs of link services like bit.ly (tip: take any bit.ly link e.g. http://bit.ly/3zfftT and add /info/ in the middle to see the public stats on that link – e.g. http://bit.ly/info/3zfftT). [UPDATE: And as Robin says in the comments below, it's worth mentioning the stats built into Feedburner, which lets you track the otherwise untrackable activities of people who come to your content via your RSS feed and never actually visit the site itself]
• Comments are the next notch up, showing who has engaged with the content to the extent of responding to it, e.g. @replying to a Tweet
• Shares in the form of bookmarks on services like Delicious, Digg or StumbleUpon or re-tweets on Twitter indicate people who liked or felt inspired to spread your content to their own networks or save it for later. Ditto for starring/favouriting items.
• Embeds and responses in the form of inbound links to your site (which you can pick up by searching for link:http://blog.helpfultechnology.com on Google or Google Blogsearch or using services like BackType) are maybe the highest form of engagement, where people are moved to respond – hopefully positively – to your content.

Measuring social media stats is both easy (they’re often public, and pretty straightforward) and hard (they’re spread over lots of sites, and can overlap or tell conflicting stories). Tools like PostRank (h/t Treepixie) are emerging to help disentangle the mess, and put these stats alongside your own site’s web analytics.

What analytics don’t tell you

With so much information, it’s easy to assume that’s the whole story, but of course it isn’t. Web analytics tell you what machines think people do, not why they do it, or even who they really are. Beware of treating one-off spikes and troughs as trends or significant patterns – maybe Google just tweaked their algorithm that day, or your site went down for an hour without you noticing. It’s also hard to assess the true extent of engagement from hard stats alone, and that’s often better done from a deeper sense of what people who come to your site say in the comments and do when they send you enquiries and feedback forms. Above all, be careful of attributing cause and effect to the stories you see in the stats: use the flexibility of stats to compare alternative approaches before deciding that you’ve been doing it wrong. See what norms you can glean from tools like Alexa or Hitwise if they’re appropriate to your audience, or informally from friends and colleagues if like me you operate on a smaller scale. And remember that stats can’t tell you much about the who and why – so consider using an old-fashioned visitor survey or subscriber questionnaire (or even just a blog post asking people to tell you a bit about themselves in the comments) to understand the visitor profile of your readers and what they want when they get there. More about that in another post, I suspect.

Congratulations for getting this far – you can be sure I’ll be watching the time on page carefully to see if you read it properly

Related posts:

1. Why do people want microsites?
2. Going where the people are
3. A Load of Cobblers: my tumblog on the favourite tools I use

At some point, there always comes a new Big Cheese. Could be a new senior manager, a potential client… or even a new set of ministers. If you’re in the lucky position of having a slot in their diary to win them over to the joys of government 2.0, you want to make the most of the opportunity.

I’ve frequently failed to do this successfully, so, in the spirit of sharing – and quite possibly, therapy – I thought I’d share some of my many failures with you here. This is a guide not so much to the content of what might say, but some tips on getting the most from the format in which you could say it:

1. Don’t count on your slot: expect to get squeezed to half the allotted time, or bumped altogether. You might even get more time if they’re interested or the next meeting is canceled. On one occasion, I remember waiting for a minister to arrive, late, and hiding one slide for every minute he was delayed – I think half the presentation disappeared. Make sure you have a bunch of material from which you can tell stories selectively, rather than needing to build a grand argument slide by slide. In Powerpoint, you could have a structure which lets you jump to slides from a master page using hyperlinks. But a tool like Prezi might work better, letting you lay out your evidence and examples on a big canvas, and zoom around between them as the time allows, as Con Morris’ lovely example demonstrates.
2. Plan the space. Recce the room if you can; get there a bit early if you can’t. Think about seating positions and views, and what the dynamics of the conversation will be. Will you be dangling at the other end of a long table with people in between, or sitting sideways-on next to the Big Cheese? (better, IMHO)
3. Check where they’re at. Two minutes in, I’m making the case for social media and how the world is changing. The minister looks coldly at me and goes: “Do I look like the kind of person who need to be convinced about this stuff?”. I gulp. He’d set up Google Alerts the moment he started the job, had more than one personal website, and was a devotee of his iPhone. Somehow, I’d missed these points by failing to ask, up front, (or better still, of his office beforehand or from a bit of prior Googling) what he already knew about these issues. It’s easier to talk than ask, but the best presentations are always conversations.
4. Quick quick, slow slow: don’t force the pace. Presenting to an audience of one is a tough job: rush through and you’ll lose them; spend too long on the build up and they’ll get fidgety. Fidgety is Bad. Though opinions differ, it’s an argument for handing out paper copies at the start – they know how much there is to come, they can flick through quickly to get an overview of what you’ll show them, and by turning a page they can give you a gentle nudge to move on. But be prepared to bin your material and just have a chat if that’s what they want to do. You can always come back to a particular slide if you need to illustrate an example, but the bottom line is that this is a meeting, not a technology demo, so above all be passionate, interesting and human.
5. Stories, Strategies, Screenshots. People take in information in different ways and it’s unlikely you’ll know which best fits your Big Cheese before you sit down with them. So mix up your materials a bit to punctuate strategies with stories, bullet points with screenshots. See which ones seem to seize the attention, and emphasise those.
6. They’re human (honestly). Big Cheeses have nasty diaries out of their control, often work through lunch and have to sit through an awful lot of bad Powerpoint, day after day. They get hungry, tired, bored and, even, titilated on occasion, as do we all. Within the constraints of the room you’re in and the slot you have (and good professional manners, of course), try and empathise.
7. Watch the eyes and fingers. In the same way that it’s hard to ask questions when you’re in talking mode, it’s hard to observe when you’re in presenting mode. But if you take the time to watch your Big Cheese’s reactions and follow their attention, you’ll stand a better chance of spotting what’s interesting or bothering them, knowing when to move on when they’re bored.
8. Never trust technology. If you work with com-poo-ters you’ll know never to trust one, especially for a big presentation. Have your presentation in three places at least (on the laptop, on email/web, on a memory stick). Check out the room for wifi/sockets, and take an extension if you need it. Make sure you’ve got screenshot backups if you’re planning to demo a live internet tool. Plug the projector in and make sure it works before you need it. And for the love of God, take enough usable paper copies with you.
9. Take something for the homeboys. Big Cheeses don’t travel alone; there’s usually a note-taking, clock-watching PA, Private Secretary or three with them, and they’ll be useful to you in the future. Take some spare colour copies of the presentation to give them a break from scribbling notes, and to help them quote you accurately in the write up.
10. Tell them how they can help. An easy one to miss while you’re telling your stories and setting out your strategy – ultimately, you’re not there for a pat on the head. Near the end of the discussion, make it blindingly obvious what seemingly trivial actions your Big Cheese can take to help you turn the glorious vision you have set out into a reality.

Good luck.

Photo credit: Juliebee

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