Andrea Di MaioOver the last year or so I have had several conversations with some Gartner clients as well colleagues about how government organizations should address social media, which have shown apparently divergent viewpoints.
One school of thought suggests that the use of social media should be carefully planned and controlled by government, and that having a sufficiently compelling purpose is strong enough a guarantee that communities will be sustainable and thrive.
Another school of thought says that – in the case of government – no planning is really possible or useful until when you have figured out what exists already. This means that, even if a government organization identifies a compelling purpose, it still needs to look for existing or emerging communities and assess whether to join them, complement them or do something different.
My colleague Anthony Bradley has recently posted about “Piloting Social Media Creates More Risks Than It Mitigates”, where he rightly points out that:
You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community. Why would you only go after a small subset of a target audience when mass adoption is a critical success factor? You will handicap success from the start.
I cannot but agree more with this. But my contention, and the reason why – unlike Anthony – I do like the term “pilot” is that for a government organization is very easy to believe its online presence is relevant just because it has a strong and recognized brand. But what is a compelling purpose for a government organization, may not be so for its target audience. So, before venturing into creating one’s own community, it is imperative to identify whether external communities already exist, possibly join them (as a group of individuals and not as a government organization) and “pilot” participation there.
Is this community valuable to our goals? Can we influence its behaviors? Is it able to generate knowledge that we could not aggregate on a government-branded community? Is there any indication that it can generate public value for our agency? These are some of the questions that employees who experiment with these communities should answer, before doing any planning for a government-driven community.
Over a year ago I published a research note (How Government Can Use Social Networks – access to clients only) that seems to be applicable to most of the cases I have seen, where people are struggling either with finding the compelling purpose to launch a community or with making sure it will be compelling to others and not just to them.
The note suggests a framework called SOCIAL to empower employees to
- Seek communities that are relevant for their job and purpose,
- For communities that seem interesting, Observe their behaviors;
- For communities that seem promising, Complement their content with public information where deemed fit;
- For communities that seem valuable, Involve in deeper discussions (with appropriate disclaimer).
- Up to this point, participation has been at the employee level. It is now time to Assess whether this community can have an enterprise value. If not, it will remain as an individual tool or be discontinued. If yes, then
- Leverage it as an enterprise one
This is the kind of process that government organizations should go through before considering the development of their own external social networks. Seeking, observing, complementing and involving is exactly what I mean by “piloting”. If the outcome of such a process is not satisfactory and the organization still believes it has a strongly compelling purpose, then it can well develop its own presence. However, if such a compelling purpose is difficult to find or to socialize, doing nothing and letting employees pilot new emerging communities is a perfectly legitimate option.
As I’ve said in a recent post, the path to success is from the bottom up, and from the outside in.
Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: government 2.0, social media
6 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention Government Must Pilot Somebody Else’s Community Before Building Its Own -- Topsy.com November 6, 2009 at 1:55 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Brian Ahier and Andrea DiMaio, molly. molly said: Mixed reaction here, but it is topical: Govt Must Pilot Somebody Else's Community Before… http://bit.ly/4mfS40 #gov20 via @AndreaDiMaio [...]
2 Justin C. Houk November 6, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I very much agree with your points on this. I have seen many officials make the fatal mistake of thinking ‘if we build it they will come’ while ignoring, undervaluing, or outright competing with significant community building efforts that are well established and loved by members.
The fundamental shift that I think you are calling out here is that we as individuals working in government need to identify as a part of the community and contribute in much the same way as anyone would. The idea that that you can ‘pilot’ a community gets more outmoded on a daily basis. Some public segments are moving faster than government at adopting social tools for community building and may be much more effective at it.
3 maricela morales November 6, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Thanks for blogging on this.
Having been at this game for a while supporting projects under regulated environments, but also working on social and healthcare services, I have found out that this is not so black and white.
First, pilot doesn’t mean only a sector of an organization. I know of companies with tens of thousands of employees who have piloted E 2.0 initiatives across all the company. I also believe that organizational dynamics tremendously impact a project and those dynamics are so varied between entities that it is like DNA fingerprinting. Thus, piloting someone elses anything might not reflect the “people and processes” challenges a given entity or organization might follow.
Finally, but more importantly, people are really busy and don’t participate just because. We focus on what we call Solution Value and work hard at what would motivate people to participate since most do not want to collaborate or contribute just because (we even created a list of why people collaborate). I fear that pretending this is a black and white subject falls under the same hype that I see at the enterprise side of the business that one solution fits all. When it comes to trying to achieve specific outcomes it is imperative to see if that outcome’s value is greater than the effort to get there as well as great enough to engage key stakeholders.
4 Anthony Bradley November 8, 2009 at 2:11 am
My point is that often, under the guise of a “pilot” the organization (government or otherwise) often does not employ the rigor to really identify and achieve “solution value” (which I like as a term) or truly explore and deliver a “what’s in it for the community participants” experience. You can call it a pilot if you like as long as it is real whether the solution is in your own social environment or a third party’s. Also, if you go at it for real and it spans the entire organization, how exactly is it a pilot?
5 Andrea Di Maio November 8, 2009 at 2:34 am
@Justin: You hit the nail on the head. I can see few cases where government organuizations can lead on social media
@maricela. Agreed, this is not at all black and white, and I also appreciate that for organizations that provide consulting or products for collaboration solutions the idea that government clients should be “piloting” outside before spending any dollar is sort of unwelcome. However the examples you seem to allude to are Enterprise 2.0 while what I am talking about is Government 2.0. My contention is that before establishing externally-facing social media, most government organizations need to spend time figiring out the value from somebody else’s solution. There will always be cases where – after doing so – the outcome is the establishment of an externally-facing enterprise solution, but assuming this can be planned upfront, without going through something like the SOCIAL franework, is not accurate. As to your point about people being busy, I always advise clients that if they do not have time to make an effort to understand what is already available out there, they’d better do nothing.
@Anthony. I also like the term “solution value” but would also argue that the term “solution” has many nuances. Joining an external community and leveraging it for enterprise purposes can be indeed a solution. As you know from previous conversations on our respective blogs, I believe that government organizations cannot articulate a fully fledged business case for a specific solution until when they’ve gone through some form of intelligence work – such as the one suggested by the SOCIAL framework – that justifies the need and space for them to establish a community they run and drive.
6 Balancing the Risks of Open Government December 6, 2009 at 2:27 pm
[...] red lines are those where governments have to let go, have to empower their employees to act as connection agents with external communities. By its nature, this looks like the riskiest part, although – I would argue – is also the most [...]