I’ve been chatting to quite a range of folk grappling with the issue of what to do – on a shoestring – in the digital space with their Department in this brave and uncertain new world. It’s fair to say that digital plans in government right now have to take account of three realities:

1. There’s no money left, so to speak. An exaggeration of course, but all round central government at least, there’s appetite to do things at low or no cost – not just do ‘more for less’. Perhaps more than I predicted, the squeeze is accelerating senior leaders’ appetites to make strategic bets on digital channels as a solution now, instead of the mañana approach which has tended to prevail in recent years.
2. Like most leadership transitions in big organisations, there’s a change curve being followed, with the sense of pace and excitement in the early days, whilst still there, now being overtaken by the process of reviewing, reorganising and strategising, before the full weight of delivery really kicks in. It’s a crazy busy time in some parts of government, but still an uncertain, wait-and-see game in others.
3. Perhaps most seriously, communications and marketing especially as a discipline are out of favour politically. The freeze on advertising and marketing spend is as much mood music about the tone and purpose of communications under the Coalition as it is a way to save actual money.

Here are three ideas I would be looking at:

Build links with online communities

Everyone know Netmums, of course. But there’s a big wide world out there from The Student Room and Moneysupermarket to Pistonheads and Shooting People; The Poultry Keeper to Runners Forum – plus a thousand hyperlocal and hyperniche blogs some with suprisingly influential readerships.

Members feel ownership of these spaces, so it’s not good enough just to buy ads or spam a discussion thread (though buying a few ads might be a nice way of showing support). If your team feels comfortable moving away from broadcast messages and branded campaigns, working directly with online communities offers a way to talk directly with a highly-targeted audience and build a two-way relationship with them. That sounds like a cliche but it can really work, with discussions and links in these spaces living on longer than any PR agency retainer would have done.

Start to map out the forums and communities in your arena using good old search tools, Twitter lists and Facebook groups. Put out feelers to the admins and moderators, pay some visits their offices if they have them and buy some coffees. Find opportunities to work together so when something comes up, you can phone a friend. Will Perrin reports some good stuff from HM Treasury along these lines, supporting the Budget last week.

Help colleagues learn to tell their stories

A key element of achieving a more authentic tone in communications is giving voice to members of staff to tell their stories, within the constraint of remaining a cohesive organisation. DFID, UKTI and the FCO do it with their bloggers, fast-growing startups like Huddle do it on Twitter or like Abel and Cole on their blog. The Auckland Theatre Company’s Posterous blog lets interested audiences into a virtual green room to learn more about the company.

In times of austerity, encouraging staff to tell their own stories is paradoxically thrifty: it develops and extends their skills, it increases their engagement with their work, it helps them build new partnerships with people who can help on the outside, it helps the organisation make links between different areas of work, and become more comfortable collaborating with others. And of course, it presents a human, open account of what the organisation does to the outside world. Which in turn becomes more appreciative of what an ambassador, a policy official, a faststreamer or – gasp – a press officer, actually do.

Set up something simple with Posterous or Tumblr, or something a bit cleverer with WordPress.com. Recruit half a dozen varied interested amateurs to get involved, and expose them to how other bloggers think, write and respond. Help them film things on their phones or take pictures when the words aren’t coming easily, and channel their posts through someone in Comms who has the gift of common sense.

Put together a listening strategy

This is also a good time to develop a plan for how monitoring and feedback will be gathered and used – the scale of response to the Programme for Government and Spending Challenge suggest that Britons in their thousands are potentially willing to contribute their ideas to the Coalition.

But it goes without saying that there’s no point inviting comments unless you can review them properly, and even then, it’s better to be able to point to a timescale and process for responding in a way which makes the exercise worthwhile for all concerned. So it’s good to see the Spending Challenge team setting out that they will monitor blogs, social networks and WikiLeaks (excitingly), and provide some indication of how ideas will be filtered. But to save yourself time and pain later, put together a short listening strategy now, setting out:

• The organisation’s goals in reaching out to new/different/larger audiences online
• The key principles that will guide online discussion and listening (openness about scope, any constraints on debate, moderation policy, commitment to review feedback and so on)
• Some of the channels and tools that the organisation will use to listen to its audiences, how these will be listened to and by whom across the organisation
• How listening will be followed up by the people who can do something about the feedback, and what help is available to those team

This isn’t just another notorious Twitter strategy (fine as that was). By thinking some of these challenges through now, Ministers and policy officials will get better advice not just on what tools to use, but on how to make digital engagement something sustainable and credible in the coming years.

Photo credit: Here’s the thing…

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2. How to work with online communities
3. Building on the Barcamp buzz

So, a week into a new kind of government, what does the outlook for digital look like?

In terms of public sector IT at least, it looks broadly as through the principles and plans outlined by the Conservatives over the last six months are being brought into effect, with added emphasis on civil liberties.

Looking at the speeches, publications and campaign style of the Conservatives – and in particular Francis Maude (Cabinet Office, focus on efficiency & IT strategy), Jeremy Hunt (DCMS, dot com entrepreneur), George Osborne (Chancellor and open source fan) and Grant Shapps (digitally-engaged MP) – there seem to be three big ideas about the role and potential of the internet:

• Transparency: the internet as a publishing medium for government spending and Parliamentary expenses, to unleash ‘armchair auditors’ on government and politics to rebuild trust and promote consumer choice, e.g. publishing all government spending over £25k;
• Collaborative individualism: the internet as a decentralised network enabling individuals to come together as civil society to support their communities both altruistically and as an alternative mode of service provision to traditional state-run models, e.g. Wikipedia, the open source movement, involving the public in a ‘public reading stage’ of new Bills in Parliament;
• Efficiency: the internet as a lower-cost approach to delivering government IT programmes effectively including through smaller and more modular approaches, e.g. hosting health records via Google or Microsoft, increasing procurement from SMEs, and prohibiting the signing of very large (>£100m) IT contracts.

But what does that mean for jobbing webbies in the public sector? (n.b. of which I am no longer one, but more on that on a future occasion) Here are my predictions:

1. Government IT will become more agile. Big IT is in a weak position right now, with unhappy customers having to work around the straightjacket of long-term contracts, and a Treasury review of all big contracts signed since the start of the year. There are serious and repeated suggestions of a government skunkworks as part of a more radical rethink of the recently published Government IT strategy. Sure, big desktop contracts and the planned gCloud are not likely to go away soon, but underneath their feet, there will be a strong expectation from the centre of government that digital should move fast, be cheap and learn from its own (small) mistakes. Likelihood of happening: 60%.
2. Departments will begin to involve civil society in delivery, as well as policy. The ‘post bureaucratic age’ concept is a provocative label for a concept with much broader agreement: that addressing the deficit demands a slightly smaller State, and that this can be achieved in part through the enabling power of technology to convene individuals and civil society groups to help deliver public policy outcomes. Though rejecting the notion of a post-bureaucratic age, a great man once summed up the challenge to the role of government in terms of the need to become a collaborative state, working more closely with the civil society organisations – the Netmums and Horses Mouths – that the internet has made possible:
   

   The collaborative state still requires leaders and enablers, doers and thinkers. It still requires public services but services with boundaries porous to external ideas… The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.

   The Office for Civil Society in the Cabinet Office, and the fact that the first summit of civil society social entrepreneurs took place within a week of taking office, imply that this is going to be high priority, even if the shape of the programme is in its infancy. The challenge for still-bureaucratic government will be how to re-engineer procurement, commissioning and communications to support this kind of voluntarism, in place of traditional command-and-control. Likelihood of happening (in some areas, at least): 95%.

3. We’ll see less enthusiasm for social media and digital engagement for its own sake amongst ministers. The last couple of years saw an explosion in the interest of politicians across the spectrum in using innovative technology to been seen to consult and to raise their own profiles online, frequently (but with honourable exceptions) managed by a member of their staff. The new political masters will be fewer in number (BIS seems to have shed three ministers, for example), more focussed and less keen on tools like Twitter, for example. Where tools deliver practical value – like Grant Shapps’ famous email list to 10,000 of his constituents, or short pieces to camera which extend the reach of a speech – they’ll be used. Likelihood of happening: 50% (politicians remain, after all, personalities in public life)
4. By contrast, we’ll see a lot more online policy engagement and idea generation. Today’s Coalition Programme announcement (itself intended to be a commentable document, I understand) ended with a clear commitment from the Prime Minister to involve the public directly in shaping the new Freedom Bill, as well as establishing a new Public Reading stage for Bills in Parliament before they become law. Administrative government has always been keen on the process of consultation; but it seems as though political government may be willing to make a firm commitment to take the wisdom of online crowds on board (and there’s still the prospect of the £1m prize for a suitable online platform which makes it possible, maybe). Likelihood of happening: 95%
   
5. Power will shift in central government at least from Communications & Marketing teams, back to Policy and the front line. There is always talk from politicians about reducing the cost of marketing, but with a public plan to reduce the COI budget to its 1997 level (£163m down from £391m) that’s starting to look like it might happen; the previous government had already committed to a 25% cut in marketing spending across the board [PDF], albeit on a leisurely timescale. Government comms teams have seen these threats come and go over the years, but this time it looks serious, with money (and influence) moving back to policy teams delivering the major programmes of the new administration and a disinclination to be seen to be ‘spinning’. Whether smart, targetted digital marketing helps save the credibility of government marketing as a whole in a post-TV advertising era will be an interesting story to follow in the coming years. Likelihood of happening: 80%.
6. There will be renewed interest in how digital can save money by enabling new forms of internal collaboration. Thoughtful people have long argued that the real potential of social media in the public sector is in internal collaboration within and between public bodies. As CIOs and Finance Directors look to reduce travel expenses and improve staff productivity, expect to see more interest in tools like Huddle and Basecamp to support remote working beyond the GSI and on e-learning packages to deliver training. If smart folk can make the case internally for the productivity benefits of LinkedIn or Twitter, expect to see more strategic use of social media tools too. Likelihood of happening: 70%.
7. The rise of the open data movement will accelerate. Commitment to opening up government data has already been publicly affirmed, but expect to see a shift in emphasis from the potential benefits of open data to expose poor performance and motivate improvements in public services, towards the two other pillars: transparency in spending and lobbying; and perhaps especially the potential commercial benefits in providing the material for new enterprises and civil society groups (watch out for the the promised syndication of Directgov content in the next month or so). Likelihood of happening: 100%.
8. The rethinking of government structures and programmes will introduce new opportunities for lightweight and social digital approaches. It’s a truism that a new government will have new priorities and – even though most central government departments escaped without too much immediate reorganisation – that it will inevitably set up new organisations with a sense of mission and desire to do things differently: the Office for Civil Society and Office for Budgetary Responsibility seem like two such examples. New organisations and teams tend to be more open to creative approaches, and supportive of pilots of lightweight digital tools to help them engage staff with the new mission and create a strong public profile. Likelihood of happening: 80%.
9. There will be a renewed focus on digital skills. For all the talk of Government 2.0 and 3.0, there’s some bug fixing of 1.0 still to do to meet the needs of users who aren’t upgrading anytime soon. Use of email, search optimisation and strategy, accessibility, basic digital marketing, mobile integration and usability will all emerge as the drivers of more productive and efficient IT – without which more ambitious ideas such as personalisation or engagement will struggle. Government digital teams have suffered from outsourcing over the last decade or more, but look out for a renewed interest in the skills and activities really needed to optimise digital tools. Likelihood of happening: 70%.
10. The number of contractors and consultants working on public sector digital projects will grow. What? This is a more speculative prediction, but with pay and recruitment freezes imminent or already in place in many organisations, as people leave teams they will leave skills gaps which need to be plugged, if not by management consultants, then by freelance and contract staff with lower overheads or based outside the organisation – hopefully with a clearer mandate to coach and mentor civil servants to help transfer knowledge in key areas.  Likelihood of happening: 50%.

It’s worth keeping our feet on the ground here. There was a nice piece in the Guardian earlier this week by Mark Davies, former Special Advisor to Jack Straw:

When the change took place that brought forth the Lib-Con coalition, all that happened in my own department was that six ministers and two special advisers left the office, and new ones arrived. The other 90,000 civil servants remained. Any minister or adviser who wants to be effective needs to work with that in mind, and recognise that progress will only be achieved by harnessing the departmental machine.

It will be fascinating to watch things unfold over the next few months.

Photo credit: Number10Gov on Flickr

Related posts:

1. Unpacking the world of digital in government
2. Building on the Barcamp buzz
3. What should the Director of Digital Engagement do?

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science, and I’ve taken the pledge to write about a female heroine of science or technology.

My everyday heroine is Marilyn Booth, a civil servant, working in Science & Society policy in a central government department not a million miles from my own. To my knowledge, Marilyn’s not discovered any new elements, won many Nobel prizes or authored many W3C specifications (though I could be wrong). But she’s at the forefront of a revolution that should and must happen if government is to start engaging online in any meaningful way.

Marilyn tweets, about her work and her life. She retweets eminent scientists and stakeholders, including the minister and the department’s official channels, and has built up a 600-strong following. She runs a Facebook group, helping promote the work of her team, long after its original intended purpose was concluded. She sets up stakeholder events in Second Life that would terrify me, logistics alone. She uses low cost web tools like Eventbrite to manage events, saving taxpayers thousands of pounds a time. The bottom line is, she has her ear to the ground, knows her stakeholder audience well, thinks laterally and courageously about how to use the new tools, and won’t be thwarted by the limitations of corporate IT.

It’s great for government departments to set up social media channels and talk to their audiences in new ways. It’s even better when ministers and senior officials take the plunge personally. And it’s critically important that people in my kind of role walk the talk.

But we’ll only change the way government works when bureaucrats deep in the bowels of policy departments take the step of using them regularly and for professional purposes. When they know who’s influential and interesting beyond the formal steering group, and informally involve them in solving public policy problems in the open. Soon, that won’t be the difficult and at times brave step that it is today. For now, three cheers for the Marilyns showing us the way.

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Shortly after the forthcoming General Election, I’ll be leaving the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Tomorrow will mark my second anniversary of working at BIS, and its predecessor, DIUS. It’s been a fantastic couple of years, which has introduced me to some phenomenally talented and creative people in and around government. I’ve been privileged to have the time, space and trust to experiment with how a policymaking department might use social technologies, though I’m conscious we’ve barely scratched the surface.

But it’s time for a change. I have virtually no idea what I’ll do next. I appreciate that this is, in the words of a long-time colleague, insane. For those curious: my departure is at my own behest, is on good terms, and isn’t a result of civil service cuts, linked to my own use of social media or in any way politically-motivated (I’d be happy to serve pretty much any government).

I’m optimistic that it’s a good time to be a general purpose webby. There are exciting opportunities for digital engagement around government, and lots of clever folk drumming up new ones. It would be interesting to step back into the private sector world of digital marketing, or the fast-developing world of digital campaigning in the third sector, and learn more about how things are done there. Or maybe it’s time to go back to my roots as a market researcher. In PR and digital, there are some smart young agencies and startups doing exciting things. And I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur manqué, so perhaps this is the moment to listen to Lord Sugar, take the plunge and turn some of those crazy tools and techniques into grown up products and services myself.

If you have a project or venture you’d like to discuss with me, I’ll be all ears for the next couple of months – I’m hoping not to rush into anything too quickly. You can contact me via this blog, DM me on Twitter, or contact me via LinkedIn.

Thanks all for your support over the last couple of years. I’m looking forward to whatever comes next.

Photo credit: Kisforkate

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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?

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2. The Coalition: what now for digital?
3. Defining the roles within digital engagement

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.

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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.

No related posts.

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. Your starter for ten

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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