Canuckflack

I think the statement from 10 Downing Street says it all:

“…Gordon Brown will visit the US next week, his second trip to the country as Prime Minister.

The Downing Street website will run a live microsite including images, rolling updates and a Twitter feed throughout the PM’s stay from 16 - 19 April. Log on from Wednesday to follow the PM’s activities.

Mr Brown is expected to visit Boston, the United Nations in New York and meet President Bush at the White House in Washington. His meetings will focus on the global economy and other areas of mutual bilateral interest.

Gordon Brown’s first trip to the US as PM saw him travel to Camp David in July last year.

If I was a real social media nerd, or a real politics nerd, I would ask:

• does this mean there’s a communications assistant responsible for the twitter feed?
• what sort of vetting process is there for twitter messages? On the fly?
• is the content going to concentrate on policy announcements? Any chance of side remarks about the entrees at the state dinner? Snide remarks about the little kids handing over flowers at events?
• what sort of twitter app are they going to use? Is it on a BlackBerry, Treo or other PDA?

h/t to Simon Dickson

Technorati Tags: government communications, United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, twitter, public diplomacy

Well, I’ve finished work on it. A handy little guide for exploring the world of social media and building support for social media in a large organization.

I think the advice in this 23 page guide to secretly implementing social media in organizations could be equally useful for any government employee looking to try out new technologies - I’m pretty certain on that point, since I’m a government employee in real life.

You can find the guide at this link, and please feel free to share it with your friends, colleagues and bosses.

Here’s an excerpt, from the introduction:

How do you do it? How do you bring a spirit of innovation and experimentation to the communications shop of a large organization?

I’ve worked in a large organization – the government – for the last ten years. You can find bright, creative and resourceful people around every corner, in every department.

During the course of their careers, many of these people have thought of a move that could improve their work or their environment.

From experience, we all know that small changes in process or presentation are easily won. After all, it’s just another line on an approval sheet, or a tweak on the website.

Large organizations can also be convinced to launch a large-scale overhaul of their systems – whether it’s a supply chain, assembly process or online order system.

But it’s a real pain to get them to rethink their relationship with humans outside the security fence. After all, our customer service reps seem to be doing a good job, right? That sales force really does have a handle on the needs of the community, doesn’t it?

In speaking to hundreds of workers and managers for large organizations (government and private sector), I’ve been asked the same questions, over and over:

• How do you convince your boss to even experiment with social media?
• Doesn’t it mean a lot of extra work?
• Isn’t this sort of stuff blocked by our organizational policies?

This Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organizations is meant to help you answer some of those questions.

Technorati Tags: guide to social media, instruction, dummies guide, introduction, organizations, government

Look at your kids (or your neighbour’s kids, or your brother). Are they planted on a sofa, playing a MMOG? Imagine what generations after generations of lethargic kids might look like. What effects would their health suffer?

Participaction, the Canadian health promotion campaign aimed at kids, has the answer:

Oh - and what’s the car in the promo? A Chevy Citation? An Acadian?

Technorati Tags: Participaction, health promotion, gamers, youth, Citation, Acadian

You know, a blog council is just like a big, fuzzy, comfortable blankie. In a moment of uncertainty and perhaps confusion, a blankie can be a touchstone, an easy gateway to a simpler and more secure time.

Especially if that blankie smells like your mommie, or good times in the park with all your friends.

Which explains the need for a blog council dedicated solely to the problems and achievements of large corporations entering the social media space. Some social media evangelists have jumped on the idea as too rigid or naiive, dismissing the idea that a large corporations could benefit from such an arrangement.

What they don’t seem to understand is that a “council” is an easy concept for senior executives to buy into. These people already belong to industry councils, economic councils and foreign policy councils. They understand the framework, they understand the cost structure and they understand the potential benefits.

And THIS is where our colleagues are right to question the impulse to create a council. Brian Solis moves around this idea in his post.

Councils are not created to convene coffee klatches and an excuse to fly into a new resort once a month.

THAT is called a seminar.

Councils are not pulled together to discuss common process challenges and develop best practices.

THAT is called a working group.

A council of senior executives, united in a common goal, is created to share influence. To increase the authority of council members in what can seem to be a fractured environment with little real leadership.

Even a Parent-Teacher Council dreams of expanded influence and increased authority, if only expressed through reams of volunteer lists and pizza orders.

I’m probably unnecessarily aggrandizing the influence that could be wielded by the Blog Council.

Still, the “benefits” a generic membership often include:

As I look at the children’s playground of competing cliques in social media, a council of Fortune 500 companies that happen to blog seems to be a good idea.

An idea that, if managed effectively, could influence how fundamental decisions are made about the role of blogs, podcasts, vidcasts and ephemeral communications like Twitter in regulated environments like:

Which might be of some concern to a social media universe currently obsessed with nodes rather than the network as a whole.

Or I might have taken too many poli.sci. courses in university.

Technorati Tags: Blog Council, corporate blogging

The BBC is rolling with news that cutbacks and layoffs are imminent, and significant television and radio personalities are speaking out about the impact on the hallowed institution.

The BBC is criticized for its split personality: a world class news gathering organization, and a melange of popular television and radio channels. Canada has a similar national network, albeit funded in part by commercial advertising.

In a moment of intense media scrutiny, a spokesperson can find himself fielding questions and interview requests from three different media (radio, television and internet) and five or more provinces - but all from the same network, the CBC.

Sort of like what the head of the BBC is experiencing:

“…In a particularly convenient moment of irony, BBC director general Mark Thompson notes that, after announcing the restructuring, he received 37 separate interview requests from various BBC news outlets.” (Toronto Star)

Technorati Tags: BBC, CBC, spokesperson, integrated newsroom, multi channel universe

Remember the faux news conference put on by FEMA last month to brief about the response to the California wildfires?

The Department of Homeland Security has completed an “internal investigation,” and some people have fallen under the bus.

Apparently, some poor decisions were taken in deciding to hold a news conference at short notice, then, when reporters could not make it in time, have agency communications staff substitute for reporters by lobbing questions at the Deputy Administrator.

“Much like in an airline crash or automobile accident that was reconstructed, there were several different points leading up to the press conference where, had a single decision been made differently, the event itself could have been averted,” [DHS spokesperson Russ] Knocke said Thursday (AP, via TPM)

Wow. We get a pretty clear impression of what Knocke thinks of how the news conference rolled out. All it needs is a soundtrack. And Gil Grissom.

There have been repurcussions. The man who was FEMA’s press secretary (read his Potomac Flacks profile) will be working for a public relations agency in Utah (For those of you keeping track at home, that’s Washington to Utah in three weeks). The Director of External Relations had been scheduled to take up a new job with Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That job fell through.

There’s a couple of hints in the AP story that the FEMA staffers fell victim, in part, to a predetermined PR strategy and poor communications between the press shops at FEMA and DHS:

• DHS had asked the agency to hold a press conference before the DHS Secretary and the FEMA Administrator landed in California that day; and
• FEMA’s press secretary had sent an email to his boss and the DHS official responsible for communications, asking for more time - but only 43 minutes before the scheduled start of the news conference.

In the end, the comms shop had about 75 minutes to put the news conference together. Which makes you wonder why they didn’t just allow callers on the teleconference call to ask questions.

The Director of External Relations has begun to speak up in his own defense, particularly in PRWeek. PRWatch provides some other comments from him, which unfortunately don’t sound very convincing.

And, to top it off, the FEMA Administrator seems to imply that the career civil servants could have prevented their bosses from pursuing this course of action:

“Those are career people. They should have stepped up and said something, they really should have. But their bosses said ‘Do this,’ and they did it — some reluctantly, but there’s no excuses for that,” Paulison said. He called the impact on FEMA’s credibility “devastating.” (Washington Post)

This is what happens when you try to throw a media briefing together very quickly - and execute your strategy rather strangely. Unfortunately, the execution has coloured our impression of FEMA’s attempts to get information about the California wildfires out quickly.

And that hits to the heart of effective crisis communications.

Technorati Tags: FEMA, puppet theatre, DHS

Okay, people. It’s taken four years, but I’m finally getting some work done at the office that relates to my online obsessions.

A friend of a friend of a friend … a flash presentation about social networks and privacy.

Before you complain: yes, it should have an embed link. It should be available on a sharing app. It should have links to sharing sites.

We’re the government. We’re working on it.

UPDATE: And … we did it.

Technorati Tags: privacy, identity, social networks, government communications, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut

Another international organization is hitting the beaches of Second Life. On October 26, the World Bank is releasing the latest report from the Doing Business group:

“…“Second Life, as a global community with residents from more than 100 countries, is an ideal venue to host a virtual launch of a report that compares how easy it is for people to start and operate a business in 178 economies,” Dahlia Khalifa said.

“Second Life is on the frontier of collaboration and technology. It brings people from around the world together by removing boundaries,” she added. …(news release)

It’s a noble effort and an example that the World Bank and its’ partners are looking for new ways to communicate their ideas - but Second Life has not proven its worth as a communication tool.

Earlier this year, Eric Kintz at HP argued why he still needed convincing about Second Life. Bandwidth and computing power were among the factors he identified for his reluctance to jump on the bandwagon, so to speak.

Those are very big issues for most government departments. Even OECD members have to evaluate the capacity of their network to deliver content over a service like Second Life - but also their network’s capacity to deliver that content back to their own employees.

I suspect that many organizations with outposts in Second Life (like Sweden) have set up separate networks and better equipment for their in-world representatives.

More on the event:

“…The event will be an open forum where policy makers and the public from around the world, including Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, can ask questions, challenge the findings, and contribute to a global business dialogue aimed at stimulating reforms that improve the business environment, and ultimately create more business startups, job opportunities, and economic growth.

Digital copies of the report’s overview, as well as World Bank–IFC virtual apparel and products, will be available to Second Life residents who attend the event.”

How are the clients of the World Bank - many of them living in remote corners of the internet - supposed to sign on for this report launch?

Technorati Tags: Second Life, World Bank, Doing Business, third world, international organizations, multilateral

Wow. If Simon Dickson is right, the folks at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the U.K. are about to blow government blogging right open. And maybe even corporate blogging.

Forget restricting your corporate blogging to just C-suite executives. Opening blogging to everyone? Fine for tech companies, but not very workable for CPG companies.

How do you find a balanced and reasonable voice to represent your organization? Maybe by identifying three or four strong voices spread out throughout your organization, and giving them the tools to communicate. Foreign Minister David Milband is leading the charge, just like he did at DEFRA.

“…Miliband himself is joined by Jim Murphy, his Minister for Europe who ‘wants to hear your views on how the EU is doing, and to encourage discussion through this blog’. So whilst you’re not likely to get your referendum on the European treaty / constitution, you will at least have one outlet for your support / anger. Good luck to whoever’s moderating that one.

Then there’s Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles KCMG LVO, currently Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan; and Lindsay Appleby, a First Secretary (ie relatively senior) in the Brussels office. Reporting from the front line, there’s Maria Pia Gazzella, from the Embassy in Chile. But most remarkable of all is Sarah Russell, who doesn’t even work for the FCO yet - she’s a Fast Streamer due to join in October 2007, so presumably we’ll be following her progress as she learns the ropes…” (Simon Dickson)

It’s important to remember that EVERY member of a diplomatic service is trained - extensively - in skills essential to a blogger:

• the comprehension of complex ideas and themes
• the synthesis of debates and positions, often conflicting
• the rapid creation of understandable but nuanced subject briefings
• and, most importantly for a government blogger, an acute awareness of the influence and impact of their words and writing.

Technorati Tags: government blogging, corporate blogging, diplomatic corps, diplomat

It’s not breaking news that Starbucks is leaving its location inside the Forbidden City. The decision was driven, to a large degree, by the opposition stirred up by Rui Chenggang. His persistent criticism eventually resulted in a 500,000 signature petition for the franchise to leave the UNESCO World Heritage site.

But how could Starbucks avoid stoking a growing popular unrest without undermining the popularity of the other 170-odd franchises across the country?

Make it a logical and easily understandable corporate decision: avoiding the dilution of the brand.

“There were several choices, one of which was to continue, but it would not carry the Starbucks name any more,” [Eden Woon, VP for Greater China] said. “We decided at the end that it is not our custom worldwide to have stores that have any other name, so therefore we decided the choice would be to leave.” (AP )

Really, who would want to buy Starbucks coffee that’s been co-branded as “Palace Museum” - the corporate brand planned for the other facilities in the City.

The Economist rightly points out that Rui Chenggang is no mere blogger. He’s an anchor for China Central Television. He has an international reputation, including speaking experience in Europe and across Asia.

His discussion of Starbuck’s presence in the Forbidden City was supported by other government-owned media (not really a rarity in China). Even if there was occasional criticism of his stance, particularly in more entrepreneurial Shanghai, it’s an indication that the government was at least silently supportive of the criticism.

It doesn’t hurt that Chenggang’s argument ultimately made perfect sense, even if Starbucks had existed inside the Forbidden City for nearly seven years:

“I was having lunch with an Indian person today, and I said, ‘Would you Indians allow a Starbucks to be inside the Taj Mahal?’ And he said, ‘No, of course not, we would never let that happen.’ “The Forbidden City,” Rui added, “is not an airport.”(LA Times)

Let’s leave the final word to Eden Woon, the VP from Starbucks:

“Never forget the core values and the characteristics that make your brand famous in your home country or elsewhere globally, but always be flexible to adapt to the special Chinese environment.” (China CSR)

Technorati Tags: Starbucks, Forbidden City, Chenggang, UNESCO, World Heritage Site

“… The old diplomacy was defined by a world of limited information. It was a veritable secret garden of negotiations. And secret negotiation still matters. But we live in a world where the views of a Pashtun herdsman, and the conflict he faces between illegal opium production and legal farming, holds the fate of a critical country in the balance. So the new diplomacy is public as well as private, mass as well as elite, real-time as well as deliberative. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do our business.”

- excerpt from David Miliband’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, speaking to The New Diplomacy (text on FCO site, spotty video on YouTube, and webcast on avaaz.org) Which signals a greater commitment to online communities and a frank conversation with the general public?

• a blog, or
• co-hosting your first major policy speech with an international and online activist organization?

David Miliband, the British Cabinet Minister formerly known online for his personal blog posts as DEFRA Minister, has been promoted to the post of Foreign Secretary. No new blog yet, but the signs are encouraging. In fact, Miliband’s first major policy speech was co-hosted by avaaz.org - a relatively new international and online activist organization. In addition to the vague but reassuring words in his speech about non-traditional influences on diplomacy and foreign policy priorities. the new Foreign Secretary fielded some questions submitted online by avaaz’ members.

“…At the end we handed David Miliband his own Book of Global Public Opinion, with all our members’ thousands of questions and pieces of advice, warning and encouragement. Clarion calls for an ethical foreign policy, a new global climate treaty, all-party negotiations and ending occupation in the Middle East, the protection of human rights and decisive action on poverty. I hope he’s reading it now.” (Paul Hilder, in HuffPost)

The talk is even being walked on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website. The FCO is encouraging Britons to “Have Their Say” about the speech and the FCO’s priorities. Unfortunately, the system seems to consist of an HTML form, a formal review process once submitted, and then a static compilation of comments.

The three themes under this section have links to reddit, del.icio.us and digg - but none of the other pages on the FCO site seem to have them. It’s a first step, isn’t it?

The larger question remains how Miliband’s past experience with online comment and activism will be reflected in the polices and practices developed by the FCO. Will public diplomacy really change as a result?

Or will the process be more incremental, simply as a result of institutional inertia and the greater challenge of shifting the course of a large foreign policy apparatus?

*crossposted from sosaidthe.org

Technorati Tags: Government 2.0, online activism, Miliband, FCO, public diplomacy

I’m loving the new energy awareness campaign from flickoff.ca (and flickoff.org). I saw the first mainstream ad (here) yesterday, and it’s edgy and engaging. Not quite as raw as the first ad, but more informative. In the new ad, a young woman* walks the viewer through the argument for energy reduction, and a few steps anyone can take. Meanwhile, the logo flashes for a brief split second - and it’s easy to misinterpret THAT logo.

The campaign is supported by several companies with strong youth ties, including Roots, Virgin Mobile and MuchMusic. The narrator* of the ad is Hannah Simone, the host of MuchNews and the New Music on Much Music.

In a cross promotion homerun, MuchMusic managed to get one of the Flick Off t-shirts (available from Roots) onto Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) during his recent appearance in Toronto to promote the new Harry Potter movie.

Predictably, the Ontario government’s $500,000 in support for the campaign drew criticism from the opposition parties:

“…It’s bad judgment. It’s offensive, it shouldn’t be done this way. There are lots of ways to educate kids without using language like this.” [said Conservative Party Leader John Tory]

NDP house leader Peter Kormos expressed similar views in a different way.

“That the taxpayer would spend flickin’ money on a campaign that is based on telling people to flick off just blows my flickin’ mind. Nobody has lost their flickin’ sense of humour … but the minister got burned flickin’ big-time.

“Parents are going to be flickin’ embarrassed … (They) have enough to deal with (besides) the Ministry of the Environment in a government that simply doesn’t give a flick about their children’s language.” (Windsor Star)