So your organization is dabbling a bit in social media, but you’re not sure how effective it is.  You have someone updating things (or maybe you don’t), but there is no solid plan in place. Re-Think can help your organization get the most value out of your investment in social media.

Social Media Research

• Social Media Monitoring: We will monitor social media, including blogs, twitter, facebook, message boards and more to identify relevant conversations. The monitoring can include looking for discussions about your organization and your brands. It can also include monitoring discussion on topics of interest or relevance to your organization. This can be done as a one-time report or on a regular basis (e.g. weekly or monthly reports).

• Influencer Analysis: We can identify and profile the people and organizations in social media that are the most influential in your field.

• Comparative Analysis: How are organizations similar to yours using social media? We will research and highlight the best practices and examples in your field.

Social Media Planning

• Social Media Strategy: Your organization is interested in using social media, but you’re not sure where to start or what to do.  Re-Think can help you to identify your objectives for using social media and then determine which types of social media are best suited to those goals.

• Social Media Policies and Guidelines: Social media moves in real time and you need to be able to trust the employees who are managing your social media account to act appropriately. The best way to do that is to choose the right person and arm them with a strong set of policies and guidelines to guide their decision making.

• Social Media Workshops: Do you and your colleagues want to learn more about a specific aspect of social media? Whether it is using twitter, managing a facebook page, measuring your performance, or running a blog, we can put together a hands-on workshop for your team. We’ll teach you the best practices, give some examples, and do some practical exercises.

Social Media Implementation

• Community Building: Let us help you build a community around your brand or your cause. We’ll help you identify stakeholders and influencers and implement social media campaigns and tactics that will keep them engaged.

• Ghost Writing: Do you have a lot of content and messages to share, but no time to share it? Do you want to keep your stakeholders up to date on important developments on issues of importance to them and to your organization? Let Re-Think help you craft and publish content that will keep everyone informed. Need it in English and French? Not a problem.  We can either work with your translators or provide fully bilingual content for you.

• Social Media Account Management: Do you need someone to coordinate your blog? To send your tweets and respond to questions? Do you need someone to manage your facebook page? Using an agreed upon social media strategy and guidelines and processes, we can manage your social media accounts for you.

Social Media Measurement

• Performance Measurement Framework: Organizations aren’t always sure how to measure the performance of their social media activities. Re-Think can help you identify appropriate measures and metrics to track based on your social media objectives. We can also help you determine which tools to use to track those metrics and help you set targets.

• Performance Reporting: Re-Think can also help you with your social media performance reporting. We can create regular monthly or quarterly reports for you on your social media progress. Or we can help you develop compelling presentations for senior management on the impact that social media is having for your organization.

All of these services are available on a fixed priced or an hourly basis. You can buy just one of the services or buy a package of multiple services. Please contact us for more information on how we can help your organization make an impact with social media.

Years ago, I read a book called Governing by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector by Stephen Goldsmith and William D. Eggers. All of my clients were reading it and talking about its implications for the future of governance and service delivery within government. I witnessed some public sector organizations as they put some of the concepts into practice, but there always seemed to be something missing. Even if it was more networked, governance was always difficult. People were set in their ways and dug in their heels.

Last night, I took the book out again and dusted it off. I thought there might be some relevant concepts I could borrow for a project I’m working on right now. I flipped through it and then stopped at the conclusion:

A complicated world, where individuals face highly complex, individualized problems, necessitates a new approach to delivering public services but also provides the necessary tools for the solution. Networked approaches produce both abundant opportunities for substantial improvements in public services and serious management challenges. We found many talented and innovative leaders who put together networks that produce enormous value. These capable public servants, the new face of the public sector, provide important lessons others would be wise to follow as, increasingly, democratic governance will mean relying on networks to enhance the quality of life for citizens around the world.

While there are some passing references to collaboration software and things of that kind in the book, things like social media, Web 2.0, and Government 2.0 were not part of most people’s vocabulary when this book came out in 2004. Experts like Tim O’Reilly were just starting to talk about Web 2.0 around that time and it certainly wasn’t a mainstream concept understood by those who were involved in governing.

Now that Government 2.0 is working its way into the mainstream, I think Governing by Network is worth dusting off again. We now have the tools to make those concepts into reality and the public is ready for it too. I also know that as smart, innovative and motivated leaders like Martha, Laura, Angelina, Tanya and so many of their colleagues work their way through and up the public service, those networks that Goldsmith and Eggers were talking about have a better chance of becoming reality.

I look forward to continuing to be a part of that shift, both on the inside (as a consultant to government) and on the outside (as a citizen, business owner, advocate, and volunteer).

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) were beginning to participate in social media activities, but did not have a framework in place to guide their staff. Re-Think was engaged to define how social media should be used by CIHR and to outline the specific protocols and procedures for beginning a new social media initiative.

In order to determine how CIHR should be using social media, we first conducted external and internal environmental scans. The external environmental scan involved an analysis of the use of social media by CIHR stakeholders and the identification of key influencers in social media in the area of health research. It also involved a social media monitoring exercise which reviewed and analyzed recent mentions of CIHR in social media (negative, positive and neutral). The internal environmental scan involved an assessment of CIHR’s current use of social media, by reviewing its current social media properties and identifying strengths and weaknesses. It also included a series of interviews with internal stakeholders to define who their stakeholders are, how they currently engage them, how they are using social media at the moment, and what social media business requirements or opportunities they anticipate in the future.

Using the information from the environmental scans, we developed a Web 2.0 framework for CIHR that identified how social media should be used by CIHR and included a detailed set of protocols and procedures for initiating, managing and measuring the success of a social media project or initiative at CIHR. We also identified a number of possible pilot projects for CIHR to test the new procedures and protcols while leveraging social media on key stakeholder engagement requirements.

Contact us to find out how your organization can use social media to create high value relationships with your stakeholders.

Here is what we learned at Gov 2.0 LA: It’s about the people.Yes. Social media is about the people.

That’s the easy part.

The more difficult part is figuring out which people on which topics in which way and who gets to decide how the game is played. Each government department and program has a mandate, a target audience, and certain objectives it is trying to meet. But in the social media world, you don’t get to define your community or to direct the conversation. For government, that is scary.

It may be scary, but it isn’t new. There have always been conversations about government that it doesn’t control. There have always been people criticizing its policies, its programs and its procedures. They did it through the media, letters to the editor, by contacting their elected officials, by venting to their friends or screaming from the rooftops.

The difference now, with social media, is that the government is starting to open some doors that may provide people with the opportunity to engage the bureaucracy directly and to comment on their own home turf. I say *may* and I say it cautiously because what I’ve seen from government so far via social media is mostly one way communications followed by “talk to the hand”.

That is an unacceptable approach to social media. Social media is not social if it involves one way communications. Social media is not social if it involves the towers of power spewing one-liners onto the Internet, but not listening to the reaction and certainly not responding to the questions. But will people forgive the government? At Gov 2.0 LA, some attendees thought that if the government is honest with people about being a relative social media newbie that the public may give it a break…for a bit…while it gets its feet wet and figures out how to interact.

But this is not a free pass forever. The government has to get out there and try to be social. It may require taking new risks, it may require new policies, it may require creating new types of positions (community managers maybe, but at least people with a mix of government public relations training and social media savvy), it may require inviting the public to criticize the government publicly on its own turf (like the EPA) or another friendly moderated turf (as U.S. Government officials and politicians have been invited to speak with women at blogher.com), but it has to happen. People will make mistakes. That is inevitable. But it is an awful lot better than the much bigger mistake of being an anti-social participant in social media.

There is a lot of work to be done on that front, but I do think it is possible. What worries me more is that the current approach we are taking to social media may create a situation similar to the fragmented Web experience that existed prior to Government On-Line (I’m dating myself) and that still exists to some extent today. I worry that once the government says “we are here and we are listening” that people will not know where to direct their comments, which may result in them being directed to the wrong place. Will each bureaucrat participating in social media on behalf of the government have not only the responsibility of engaging their own community on their own issues, but also have to act as a broker, directing people and their comments to the right place? Will people expect a no wrong door approach to social media or will they take the time to figure out where to direct their comments?

I was encouraged to learn about some services like GovLuv and SeeClickFix being developed to act as a broker and try to direct feedback and concerns to the right place. I hope that these will pick up and take off in Canada too. Many Canadians are engaged and ready to talk to the government. Now we just need to ensure that the door is open because opening those doors will not only meet people’s expectations of how you’re supposed to act in social media, but it may also provide a cure for voter apathy and sense of powerlessness among Canadians. This may be what is required to mobilize youth, women, and other underrepresented communities and get them interested in politics and in government.

To read some of the great insights coming out of Gov 2.0 LA, check out:

• Gov 2.0: A Message from Hollywood to the Beltway
• Hollywood Fusion: Gov 2.0 Camp LA
  
• Video Captures the Energy, Message of Gov20LA
• At Gov 2.0 LA with Alex Howard (@digiphile)

Re-Think was engaged by Canada Business to develop a strategy and detailed plan for migrating 14 separate Web sites and 11 different Web products into one integrated Web site. This project involved a significant transformation of the way the government of Canada, along with its provincial and territorial partners, delivers information and services to Canadian entrepreneurs and SMEs. Re-Think was also engaged to provide project management and strategic transformation advice during the implementation.

I’ve had the opportunity recently to both participate in and follow a number of government departments that are dabbling in social media. The question that invariably comes from those who have been in government for a while is:

So who approves your tweets?

…or some other similar question.

The bureaucracy and its communications machine has traditionally been a fortress. While politicians and political aides get to take risks here and there and are sometimes unceremoniously shown the door for their mistakes, bureaucrats are both kept from and protected from ever being able to say or do something that may embarrass the government. Bureaucrats who want to communicate with the public need to go through layers and layers of approvals.

But does that work in the social media world?

Not so much. If a tweet, a blog post, a facebook update, a LinkedIn connection or otherwise had to be approved by senior staff in three different branches and possibly multiple departments before it saw the light of day, it wouldn’t be very social, would it?

But still people ask: who approves that?

I think the solution to ensuring that the use of social media in government remains agile is to consider it service delivery, not communications. When front line staff, whether in-person, by e-mail or on the phones, are dealing with the public, they are governed by their training and a set of guidelines that sets out what they can and cannot do. They are expected to use that training and those guidelines to the best of their ability to provide the highest quality of service possible.

I think that in the vast majority of cases, social media should be treated the same way. Sure, it is a communications channel, but it is a channel that is used to serve the public. To put information in their hands when they need it. To respond to their questions. To meet them where they are. To interact. To connect.

That won’t happen in the fortress of government communications. But in the world of government service delivery, perhaps it has a fighting chance.

The Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy (OSB) engaged Re-Think to develop detailed metadata schemas to support key Internet and Intranet Web products.This included re-rewriting the descriptions for all of its Internet content and developing a hierarchical categorization for issues documents on its Intranet.

Indian and Northern Affairs Canada engaged Re-Think to review both its current content management solution and the new departmental standard content management solution and conduct a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the portal should migrate to the departmental standard or keep its own custom system.

The Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy (OSB) wanted to use its Intranet site more effectively to improve its internal communications. However, the architecture of the Intranet did not effectively facilitate employees’ access to the information and tools that they need to be effective in their jobs. It also did not facilitate internal communications within the organization. In order to improve usefulness of the Intranet site. OSB engaged Re-Think Strategic Consulting to lead the development of a usable and highly effective information architecture. This involved defining how the content on the Intranet should be organized and how users will navigate through the site to access the content.

Re-Think conducted an examination of context (assessment of the organization’s business goals and available resources for the management of the Intranet), clients (needs, behaviour, characteristics), and content (scope, organization, and quality of the content). Findings in these three areas were drawn from background documents, a review of the Intranet site, and interviews with stakeholders in all regions and networks.

Re-Think used the findings related to context, clients and content to develop a strategy for the information architecture, to develop a detailed information architecture specification (including layout, navigation and site structure), and an implementation plan.

Contact us to learn more about improving your Intranet.

Many people think that designing a Web site is a point in time activity. Sure, content may be added over time, but it gets added to the same Web site structure, same design, same labels. But if your organizational priorities have changed, if your clients needs are shifting, or if your content has grown or changed, then your Web site needs to change to reflect that too.

- What are clients looking for and not finding on your Web site?
- What search terms bring clients to your site?
- What messages do you need to push to your stakeholders?
- Which sections of your Web site have grown the most in the past year?
- Which content is visited most often? Least often?
- Which links are used on the home page? Which ones are not?
- Are you creating content that is of no value to your clients?

To answer these questions and more, you should have a defined research framework in place to guide your site. Contact us to learn more about developing and implementing a research framework for your Web site.