While I rarely like to use my blog as a dumping ground of PDF’s, this one I really wanted to share with you. It was written by Toby Fyfe and Paul Crookall on behalf of The Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC). The title of the report  is “Social Media and Public Sector Policy Dilemmas“. This is by far the most comprehensive and well written report on the subject this year. If you work for the Government, especially the Government of Canada, you need to read this.

The report was developed based on consultations with numerous stakeholders across the country and abroad. It covers among other things, access to information, security, leadership, records retention, privacy, and the need for a culture of trust. It talks a great deal about the biggest impediment to government use of social media, which I have mentioned numerous times in this blog, i.e. the “clay layer” of middle management and the hierarchical public service culture. The report also quite accurately segments public servants into zealots, collaborators and resisters (from a social media engagement perspective), which is exactly in-line with what I have experienced as a consultant for government. Most importantly however, it cites the numerous strategic and successful initiatives being launched across the country, which are now feeding into a growing list of best practices. This document should be on every senior leader’s desk.

Even though some of you may think that pointing out risks and dilemmas only slows things down, I am a firm believer that public sector organizations need to start looking at how the digital space affects the entire organization from a strategic perspective. Part of this process is risk-mitigation and understanding the cost-benefit analysis.  This is the only way we will move beyond merely playing with “shiny objects” and one-off pilot projects and actually start thinking about how the entire organization can benefit in the era of government 2.0.

About a year ago, well before the era of re-tweeting, I wrote a post entitled “Social Media Document Garage Sale” which received quite a bit of attention according to my blog stats at the time. The basic intent of the post was to provide you with download links to various white papers, presentations, reports and studies on social media that I had accumulated to date and that I could freely distribute (without violating any policies or copyrights). Another year has passed, and sure enough  my “3rd party reports” folder has once again piled up. I figure there is no point in keeping this stuff to myself so I’m providing links for you below. It’s also partly because I’m lazy and don’t want to be emailing individual reports to people when responding to questions. I’d rather point people at this blog post from now on.

I realize that the phrase “garage sale” doesn’t really capture the fact that these documents are free (it’s more of a spring cleaning), however I like comparing this to a garage sale so that I don’t have to claim responsibility if something is no good. Hopefully you find some gems, I know there are a few in there.

I have read most of these, however , some of them I merely skimmed through. Rather than providing you with my review, I’ll let you judge on your own and thus only provide you with the title and author. If, for some reason, I have made the mistake of putting something up that I shouldn’t have (e.g. something that was free for a limited time only), then by all means let me know so that I can remove it. Enjoy!

• Using Media Intelligence Tools to Drive Communications Success – CNW Group
• Social Media & Business Marketing – Mike Volpe (HubSpot)
• Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments – UK Government
• In with the Old, in with the New – Ryan Singel
• State of the Twittersphere 2009 – Hubspot
• Processing Personal Data Across Borders – Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
• Concepts and features of Government 2.0 and 3.0 – The National Information Society Agency
• The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications – Josh Gordon (SocialMediaToday)
• Twitter Success Stories – Marketing Profs
• Synchronizing Social Networks – Marketing Over Coffee
• Social Media Primer - Unknown Author
• About Face – The Advance Guard
• Blog Response Flow Chart – U.S Air Force
• How Obama did it with Digital – Marketing Profs
• Beyond Westminster Governance: Bringing Politics and Public Service into the Networked Era – Jeffrey Roy
• Networked Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work – Peter Bradwell & Richard Reeves
• The Social Pulpit: Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit – Edelman
• Reinventing Government for the 21st Century – Unknown Author
• Using the Social Web to find Work – Chris Brogan
• How Canadians’ Use of the Internet Affects Social Life and Civic Participation – Statistics Canada

I have a few more from some of my clients which I did not post up since I am unsure if they have been made public yet. When I know for sure I will put them up in a separate post. Happy printing and/or reading!

Once in a while I get sent very comprehensive reports and/or statistical documents on various applications and elements of social media. Unfortunately, even though I read all of them, I rarely get a chance to share them with others. Instead, they end up piling up in my “3rd party research” folder without getting the attention they deserve. Therefore I’ve decided to do something about it. Basically I have uploaded all of them as PDF’s to my server, and made them available to you in the form of a social media document garage sale…free of course (they are currently available to the public at no cost). I figured, why not share them with the community? Better yet, why not have the community leave comments on this specific post as to which ones were valuable to them? Here they are in absolutely no logical order (title only). All of them are from 2008 and the authors have been fully disclosed. Happy reading!

• Best Practices for Government Libraries: Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond – Marie Kaddell 
• Government 2.0: Building Communities with Web 2.0 & Social Networking – Digital Communities 
• Government & Social Media – Bev Godwin 
• Introducing Web 2.0: Wikis for Health Librarians – Eugene Barsky & Dean Giustini
• Mom Matters: Actionable Insights on the Mom Market – Parenting Magazine
• Change the World or the World will Change You: The future of collaborative government – Deloitte 
• Personal Branding for the Business Professional – Chris Brogan 
• The Blogging Revolution: Government in the age of web 2.0 -IBM
• Serious Business: Web 2.0 goes Corporate – Economist Intelligence Unit 
• The Word of Mouth Manual Volume II – Dave Balter 
• New Technologies & Government Communications: Summary – Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada 
• The Secret Guide to Social Media for Organizations – Colin McKay 

Once in a while, I still mange to across people that think the web is just a bunch of web sites like it was in the 90′s. When I show them effective use of a blog, RSS feed, or social media network of some sort, they gaze in disbelief and wonder where they’ve been the last few years. While these kind of occurrences rarely happen with people I interact with on a daily basis. It’s hard to be unbiased in my line of work and very easy to make false assumptions about what is prevalent out in society – what has and has not been fully adopted in terms of things we preach. This is why I rely so much on statistical analysis and marketing research.

Rather than preaching all the benefits of social media, I often indulge clients with the most recent stats – hard numbers and best practices they can show senior management.

I came across this study the other day, which deals with the issue of social media/content sharing adoption on the Internet. I’m curious to know, where do you fit in? Read below…

“Avenue A/Razorfish, a digital agency owned by Microsoft, surveyed 475 U.S. Internet users across all demographics in July. The study targeted “connected consumers,” those that have broadband access and spend over $200 on e-commerce purchases per year (such consumers represent about half of the overall population).

The study found that some of the most recent advances in content sharing have uneven adoption. For example, just 17 percent said they had shared bookmarks through services like the Yahoo!-owned Delicious. Even more mainstream activities such as photo sharing didn’t resonate: 59 percent said they never used sites like Flickr. A majority had never uploaded a video. About 65 percent said they never used tag clouds.

More mature Web 2.0 technologies have higher adoption: 85 percent used “most e-mailed/most popular stories” links, 60 percent personalized their home pages and nearly the same amount subscribed to RSS feeds. Blogs are regular fare: 61 percent read them on at least a weekly basis.” Read the full article here…

So there you have it, RSS and Blogs have fully hit the mainstream, while tag clouds, video content sharing, and certain aspects of social bookmarking are still far from being widely used. It makes me wonder however, whether terminology can skew the results. For example, I have many friends who have no idea what an RSS feed is, but use them all the time without knowing it (on their Google homepage for example). Others may claim to have never used a blog and yet they write on their Facebook wall everyday. Naturally the same applies for tag clouds and helping to build folksonomies. Are we getting too lost in the terminology? Personally, I think that many people couldn’t care less about the widget name or social implications of the technology they are using; they just do it.