Social Media Document Garage Sale – Part II

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!

A Sample Government Social Media Policy

Due to the Treasury Board’s current focus on internal social media initiatives, I have recently received an influx of requests to help public servants develop external social media engagement guidelines, particularly ones to do with blogging (lots of requests for this).

Government departments need to stop waiting for an official policy to come from TBS; It won’t anytime soon. Instead, senior leadership from within each department should be implementing their own policies, ideally consistent with other departments.

There is a growing effort on part of certain “social media activists” (internal to government) to standardize these guidelines/policies. The current GCpedia (internal government wiki) has numerous pages outlining “best practices” and sample guidelines that are ready for use.

Assuming you already have a “strategy” in place and proper resources to manage your social media tool(s) of choice, the following is a simple list of 12 guidelines originally developed by IBM and adapted by me to suit the federal government.

1. Know and follow GOC’s Communication Policy Guidelines and the Value & Ethics Code
2. GOC employees are personally responsible for the content they publish on blogs, wikis or any other form of user-generated media. Be mindful that what you publish will be public for a long time—protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself—name and, when relevant, role at GOC—when you discuss GOC or GOC-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of GOC.
4. If you publish content to any website outside of GOC and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with GOC, use a disclaimer such as this: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent GOC’s positions, strategies or opinions.”
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don’t provide others with the GOC’s confidential or proprietary information. Ask permission to publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to GOC.
7. Don’t cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval. When you do make a reference, where possible link back to the source.
8. Respect your audience. Don’t use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, or engage in any conduct that would not be acceptable in GOC’s workplace. You should also show proper consideration for others’ privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory—such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging or publishing on the topic, and cite them.
10. Be aware of your association with GOC in online social networks. If you identify yourself as a GOC employee, ensure your profile and related content is consistent with how you wish to present yourself with colleagues and clients.
11. Don’t pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don’t alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
12. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective. GOC’s brand is best represented by its people and what you publish may reflect on GOC’s brand.

Common sense right? Sure, but the the tricky part is enforcement, which needs work.

Another excellent related source for you is this GoC blog proposal template developed by Douglas Bastien who is an avid public servant/blogger himself. For other public sector blogging and/or corporate blogging policies, be sure to download this great IBM report: The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0.

Who’s blogging and what the heck are they blogging about?

Ok, the latest blogging statistics are finally in. In it’s new report on The State of the Blogosphere, Technorati reveals the following breakdown of blogs topics. Note that the average amount of topics per blogger is 5.

You can overlay this data with worldwide statistics on blog usage, which Universal McCann (March 2008) found to be as follows:

• 184 million worldwide users have started a blog
• 77% of active Internet users read blogs

I found some of the demographic statistics to be particularly interesting. The most active blogging age group is 25-34 and 66% of the world’s bloggers are apparently male.

Be sure to read the full Tecnorati findings here. Is anybody else surprised at the male:female ratio?