Here is an excerpt from Tony’s speech:

“Web 2.0 tools provide additional means of interactive communications between government institutions and Canadians. These tools are the modern-day equivalents of town halls. They can be used for various purposes including recruitment, emergency communications, and service delivery. They also help provide valuable information to the public, stakeholders, and act as tools for consultations.

The Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0 is designed to provide specific guidance to public servants on the use of social media. It also includes practical advice to help departments make informed decisions about how to meet their existing legislative and policy requirements when using those tools. People all over the world are adapting to the pace of unprecedented technological change that impacts how they communicate, consult, collaborate, manage data and share information…This is about enhancing our productivity which, in turn, makes Canada more competitive in the global economy.”

Why is this a big deal?

I can tell you personally from the people I know were behind this, that this is the result of a lot of blood, sweat and tears. If you’re a public servant, please do not dismiss the effort that went into the development and subsequent release of this guideline.  It’s not perfect, it likely never will be, however I have been told that it will evolve over time. In the meantime I truly feel it represents a giant leap forward for the entire public service. There is simply no longer an excuse for not taking social media platforms seriously and thinking strategically about how best to leverage them as a public servant.  It should be noted that the guideline itself is not new. It’s based in large part on various guidelines created by departments and branches that refused to wait and took a chance by creating their own over the last few years. The latest draft has actually been sitting on GCpedia and thus has been accessible to every public servant for almost a year now. The issue however (aside from the fact that GCpedia is still an alien term to most public servants) was that most senior level public servants have been waiting for something “official” to come out. I’m saying this out of personal experience dealing with consulting clients on this topic from nearly every federal department over the last 6 years.

Will this guideline be criticized?

Of course it will. I can see a whole slew of negative comments already coming in:

• it’s too long
• it’s ambiguous
• it doesn’t tell me exactly what to do
• it’s overly polished
• it’s too restrictive

Enter Erik Qualman’s latest video, Social Media Revolution 2011 (embedded below). Finally more of a global perspective on what is going on in the digital universe, complete with some global statistics and a nice African soundtrack.  A perfect intro to the global context I always like to set forth before I speak. Thank you Erik and team!

So what is it exactly?

A collection of guidelines and best-practices surrounding the use of social media for citizen engagement.

How is it different?

It’s actually a user-friendly resource. It’s visually appealing and not merely a PDF like every other government social media policy, guideline or best practice document seems to be these days.

How can you access it?

• URL: https://extranet.gov.bc.ca/collab/some/
• Username: extragov
• Password: Engage4all (case sensitive)

Let me know what you think. Do you see every level of government eventually having a resource like this? Internal wiki’s (e.g. GCpedia, OPSmedia) are great to get the content organized collaboratively by the evangelists, however to reach people outside the fishbowl, personally I think you need efforts like this.

My latest one is posted below. Lesson#4: How to track the real-time social pulse of your city.

If you like what you see, you can stay up to date with my “Learn in 60 Seconds” YouTube playlist.

Our consulting organization CEPSM has a Twitter account (@cepsm); and so do nearly all of the consultants that work here. That being said, we all primarily use our individual Twitter accounts (e.g. @mikekujawski) to build community around our passion/business since individual accounts always beat corporate accounts when it comes to building and fostering professional relationships. So the question is, what is the point of using the CEPSM corporate account when we are all actively involved in two-way business engagement on the same topic via our individual professional accounts?

[Note: this does not really apply to large organizations, which likely have the resources to staff a full-time individual (or team) to manage the official corporate account 24/7. Also, let's assume that we all understand and follow the basic rules of social media engagement , i.e. things like ethics, conflict of interest and common sense.]

Even if we each set up two accounts in a tool like TweetDeck, and have the option of specifying which account (or both) we want each tweet to be sent from (e.g. @cepsm or @mikekujawski), we still run into problems. For example, if I tweet something that has nothing to do with business (e.g my bungee jump this weekend), then I can send it through my personal channel only. One problem with this is that filtering @cepsm tweets to “corporate only/non-personal” tweets turns the @cepsm tweet stream into a dry business-only channel. One of the most effective uses of the Twitter channel from a business perspective is to bring back the “human” element and foster non-linear conversation. Even though my personal side is not necessarily reflective of everyone at CEPSM, everyone that works here can be contributing their personal tweets into the @cepsm stream as well to form a holistic aggregate persona of the CEPSM brand. This seems like a valid solution at first, however if we start sending most of our tweets via both channels, then our audience will begin to get duplicate tweets in their monitoring streams since they likely follow @cepsm as well. In my case this is quite a big problem since 80% of my personal account tweets are 100% relevant to CEPSM (i.e. have to do with strategic marketing, digital engagement, social media, etc…).

There are 3 main approaches I see to this problem, however none of them solve it 100%.

1. Don’t have a corporate account, but rather a “Twitter List” of all corporate employees in addition to their individual accounts. RISK: No official corporate account is not good for web presence and visibility of the brand.
2. Have a corporate account in addition to individual accounts and only use it for official news releases (with a human voice at least as opposed to corporate talk). Create a Twitter.com background image that lists all personal accounts of consultants that work at CEPSM.  RISK: The two-way engagement that we all actively practice in our personal accounts is not reflected in the corporate account.
3. Have a corporate account in addition to individual accounts and send all tweets to both accounts except for tweets that have nothing to do with our industry. RISK: Some people that follow both our individual and corporate accounts will receive duplicate tweets.

What do you think, am I missing some obvious solution? Keep in mind that I am referring to organizations that do not have a dedicated resource for the company account but rather have multiple individual professional accounts. Therefore, mainly small and medium consulting firms in a specific niche industry.