Facebook and the civil servants

Michael Geist had an interesting column this week on the hugely popular social networking site Facebook. He provides a bit of a history of Facebook (hard to believe it's only been open to the Internet at large since September 2006!) and some insight into how users are connecting and why it's so popular. Geist notes, "Statistics Canada estimates that there are approximately 17 million Canadian Internet users, suggesting that in the span of nine months the site has grown to the point that roughly one in 10 Canadian Internet users now has a page on the site."

Responding to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's recent statement that Facebook offers little value to public servants, Dr. Geist observes, "Is there really no benefit to having government policymakers access and participate in the hundreds of groups discussing Ontario health care issues? Would it be so bad for elected officials to actually engage with their constituents in a social network environment?"

On his blog, Dr Geist adds the following opinion: "Attempts to block such activity are not only bound to fail, but they ultimately cut off decision makers, school officials, and community leaders from their communities. The answer does not lie in banning Facebook or the other emerging social media sites, but rather in facing up to Facebook fears and learning to use these new tools to engage and educate."

We don't have access to Facebook here, either, but that's because our Agency's net-nanny filters it as a "personals and dating" site.

On defining social media

Are you still trying to wrap your head around the whole idea of social media? I found a couple of neat perspectives recently.

There was an article in the weekend Ottawa Citizen about the fall and rise of the amateur, starting with the 19th century when amateur photographer George Eastman parlayed his kitchen experiments into the Kodak conglomerate. The article describes how in the early part of the 20th century, amateurism came to be seen as synonymous with mediocrity, and to opine that in the 21st century, technology has once again empowered amateurs and imbued them with a certain authority.

This paragraph in particular explains the growing trend of the populace to trust the voice and authority of a blogger or other virtual (pardon the pun) stranger over the Internet:

Mass media have become too small for all the energy possessed by the abundance of skilled people out there. This is not a movement of elite amateurs, but rather of non-elite amateurism. The new enthusiasts are flourishing in an era when the supposed professionals -- politicians, pundits, weapons inspectors, emergency relief experts -- seem to fail us at every turn. The incompetence of these experts has not only fuelled the amateurs but has also, not coincidentally, become the amateurs' target. No wonder so many people are relying on themselves and looking to one another as sources of information, entertainment and assistance.

Duelling bloggers Robert Scoble and Stowe Boyd tackled the topic of defining social media on the weekend. Scobles opines that the best way to understand “social” media is to compare it with what came before (i.e. print media, TV, radio, etc.) and notes the main difference is the interactivity of blogs, the range of technology (i.e. audio, video and text all in the same post), and editorial control.

In response, Stowe Boyd posted an elegant diatribe on social media. He first provides four characteristics that define social media: it is not a broadcast medium (i.e. convential one-to-many communication model); it is many-to-many; it is open; it is disruptive. (In explaining the last, he says, “We, the edglings, are having a conversation amongst ourselves, now; and if CNN, CEOs, or the presidential candidates want to participate they will have to put down the megaphone and sit down at the cracker barrel to have a chat.”)

Finally, he offers first a prediction, and then a working definition of social media:

The societal phenomenon of Social Media (supported by the nuts and bolts of social media tools) has been a profound one, over the past decade. I predict that the impact in the next decade will be even more sweeping, and much more widespread. As an additional billion or two of the world's population finds its way onto the web, our only hope may be that the web finds its way into the world: that the principles of openness, transparency, diversity, and egalitarianism that engender web culture remake the world, one conversation at a time. Political parties, multinationals, the corner dress shop, your county government -- everything will be influenced by the infectious openness of the web, because the edglings will simply not settle for less.

That's another way of defining Social Media: it is the way that we are organizing ourselves to communicate, to learn, and to understand the world and our place in it. And we just won't accept any models for that that aren't intensely social: we won't put up with large organizations telling us what is right, or true, or necessary. We will now have those conversations among ourselves, here, at the edge. Social Media has released us, freed us: and we won't go back.

Social bookmarking

Another facet of the information sharing that characterizes social media is ‘social bookmarking’. Sites like del.icio.us allow people to ‘tag’ their favourite sites in much the same way you would add a site to your ‘favourites’ folder, except the bookmarks are held online and, most importantly, shared with others.

Users can ‘tag’ web pages, ideally with a descriptive category title, and file them online for future reference and sharing with others. For example, here’s a page of delicious tags for social media. Note how a certain amount of status is conferred on a link by the number of people who have tagged it.

I liked this overview on folksonomies from an article in D-Lib magazine:

Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which – when aggregated with other personal libraries – allows for rich, social networking opportunities. Why spill any ink (digital or not) in rewriting what someone else has already written about instead of just pointing at the original story and adding the merest of titles, descriptions and tags for future reference? More importantly, why not make these personal 'link playlists' available to oneself and to others from whatever browser or computer one happens to be using at the time?

Now that tagging and social bookmarking have been around for a couple of years, the next iteration is the rating and ranking of these shared bookmarks. The Wall Street Journal online ran an article last week on this phenomenon, called The Wizards of Buzz.

A couple of excerpts:

A new generation of hidden influencers is taking root online, fueled by a growing love affair among Web sites with letting users vote on their favorite submissions. These sites are the next wave in the social-networking craze -- popularized by MySpace and Facebook. Digg is one of the most prominent of these sites, which are variously labeled social bookmarking or social news. Others include Reddit.com (recently purchased by Condé Nast), Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Newsvine.com and StumbleUpon.com. Netscape relaunched last June with a similar format.

[...]

It's also giving rise to an obsessive subculture of ordinary but surprisingly influential people who, usually without pay and purely for the thrill of it, are trolling cyberspace for news and ideas to share with their network.

[...]

Most sites are based on a voting model. Members look around the Web for interesting items, such as video clips, blog entries or news articles. A member then writes a catchy description and posts it, along with a link to the material, on the site, in hopes that other members find it just as interesting and show their approval with an electronic thumbs-up vote. Items that receive enough votes rise in the rankings and appear on the front page, which can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. When an item is submitted by a popular or influential member -- one whose postings are closely followed by fellow members -- it can have a much better shot at making the front page.

Want to know more about social bookmarking? Wikipedia has an exhaustive history of the origins, as well as some advantages and disadvantages.

The "social media' press release

There’s some debate right now in the Web 2.0 world of the value of the reinvention of the news release as a “social media news release”. Click through to this example, from Web 2.0 guru PR firm Edelman, to see how the structure is different from a traditional news release: Business More Trusted Than Media and Government in Every Region of the Globe

The social media release takes all the components of the traditionally structured narrative-style news release and breaks them down to the basic building blocks: relevant facts, quotable quotes, standard boilerplate and contact information. It then adds Web 2.0 goodies like multimedia clips, links, folksonomy tags, and even a commenting feature.

Not everyone sees the need to reinvent the wheel. Microsoft’s highly respected Überblogger and social media evangelist Robert Scoble, calls the idea “lame,” initiating a lively debate on the nature and necessity of news releases, both traditional and Web 2.0, in the comment section after his post.

Why we need to adopt RSS

RSS (really simple syndication, among other definitions) is a tool that aggregates information from Web sites of your choosing and packages it for delivery to a specific subscriber. Rather than visiting Web sites looking for updates, an RSS reader bundles the information for you and delivers it to your desktop as new information becomes available. By visiting a single Web page, you can check your feeds as seldom or often as you wish, and you can see at a glance how much new information is available since the last time you checked.

RSS is particularly popular for monitoring news sites and blogs. Popular RSS feed aggregators include Bloglines, Feedburner, Google Reader and NewsGator, to name a few.

From the Web site SnapTech, seven good reasons why you should offer your content in feeds:
• RSS feeds syndicate your content and make it available to other news outlets, websites and blogs.
• By syndicating your content you can reach a much wider audience.
• Feeds are the perfect solution for time-sensitive information - like special travel packages, meeting notices or tech updates.
• RSS is a secure channel that can't be spammed.
• RSS feeds allow your subscribers to control the flow of information they receive. According to a recent study users trust marketers more when they can control the information they receive.
• RSS feeds are compiled according to the user's choices.
• RSS does not involve you in privacy issues- subscription is anonymous.

Wired magazine recently ran a feature about how the US Government is slowly adopting RSS technology on some of its Web sites. “RSS feeds are offered by agencies such as the U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more. However, many foreign governments, including England, France and New Zealand, are way ahead of those in the United States when it comes to RSS.”

The article also observes, "In fact, a small but steadily growing stream of government agencies at the local, state and national levels are also implementing RSS as a natural way to disseminate information to their constituencies. And since almost all government information is useful to somebody, those responsible for informing the public see RSS as a perfect, and inexpensive, method for ensuring that people can get the knowledge they need without a lot of work."

An excellent site called RSS in Government provides a comprehensive list of government RSS feeds not only from the US but all over the world. You can tell at a glance that the Canadian government is painfully behind in adopting this technology.

It is my opinion that RSS is so easy to implement and so key to the new way that people are using the Internet to communicate that this should be one of the first areas that we delve into social media as an Agency. Currently, there are more than a hundred disappointed people subscribing to the empty RSS feed for our department, as offered on the official Government of Canada listing of departmental feeds. At the very least, we should be using RSS to push our newsroom products, but that's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg on the ways we can use RSS to get our information out to the public.

Can you think of any other ways we could or should be using RSS?

Flogging: a lesson from Sony and WalMart

Authenticity is gold in the blogosphere, a lesson both Sony and WalMart learned the hard way.

WalMarting Across America was a blog purportedly written by two 'average joe' Americans who drove an RV across the US, parking overnight in WalMart parking lots and blogging their adventure, complete with interviews with the friendly WalMart employees and customers they met along the way. WalMart and their PR firm Edelman got badly burned when it became apparent that the WalMarting Across America blog was in fact a flog, or fake blog. The saddest part of the story is that Edelman is considered one of the PR firms who really 'get' social media, and is employer to uber-blogger Steve Rubel. Follow the technorati tags to read the whole sordid story.

Now Sony has been busted by the blogosphere for flogging, too. Via Blogging4Business, this link to Sony's fake blog All I Want For Xmas is a PSP (Sony playstation), complete with bad grammar and hipster lingo. Check out this comments thread to see what happens when the blogosphere sniffs out a flog.

(Edited to add: the same day I posted this, Sony came clean and admitted on the blog that they had been busted. However, their mea culpa only demonstrates that they still don't 'get it', because they deleted all the original text and the comments.)

The moral of this story? The blogosphere demands authenticity, and can be vicious if they feel they are being duped or deceived.