from the civil service to the west coast of Ireland and beyond

And finally… the end of a torturously drawn out (for you and for me) series concerning different approaches to adopting social media. Even though I had most of the thinking complete when I embarked upon this series, its taken me much longer, and its been much harder, than envisaged. If I ever hint about writing a series of posts again, please make sure that I have written them all before publishing them (or shoot me)…

If you recall, the series is based on a piece of thinking I developed during and after my work on the cabinet office review of social media in early 2007.

I set out six different approaches to using or deploying social media techniques; be that for a particular tool, channel, business need, or whole organisational approach. It is not meant to be prescriptive, but details options under three broad headings. These are:

• Observation: Do nothing or Listen
• Interaction: Reflect or Converse
• Initiation: Experiment or Embed

So, without further ado, lets finish this with ’embed’.

What do I mean by embed? I mean investing in self-hosted applications and tools to allow officials to use social media tools in a corporate environment.

The advantages of this approach are that the applications selected are owned, maintained and approved by the organisation. Any niggling IT security issues are resolved and the robustness of the service pretty much guaranteed (within reason).

On the downside, its likely that the speed of implementation and deployment of a tool will be very slow and expensive compared to using a web or third party hosted tool.

But once the hosting platform is in place it will be fairly simple to deploy multiple instances of tools on a trusted platform. It also sends message to staff that the organisation takes online engagment and collaboration seriously.

One of the big threats to this approach that I have seen is that many of the ‘enterprise’ social media platforms that often become chosen in these situations are fairly inflexible in their functionality and may only be partially fit for purpose. Investment in the platform can divert funding from what I think is more important (given the free and low cost tools available via other methods) – the education and training of staff which arguably is more crucial than the technology. Its also possible that investing in tools that are available elsewhere at low cost or for free could attract criticism.

The costs of investing in self-hosted tools are significant compared to the other models. Hosting platforms from suppliers of existing government web platforms are generally high cost and may also require complex and expensive procurement exercises.

Choosing this route will likely require significant project management and IT implementation resource on top of the resources identified in previous models.

Phew, thats it. The last one. Finished. Thoughts?

Shame on me for taking almost a month to follow up the last instalment of this short series. September was possibly the worst month for blogging I have had and I apologise for stringing you along for such a long time, really.

Anyway, this is the penultimate post on the six approach  and I’ll do my best (without promising, you notice) to finish the series as soon as possible/

So, experiment. What does that mean, and why is it a good idea?

In my mind, when I was putting together this model, it meant making use of free and/or low cost online tools to assess value of social media for engagement and, perhaps, to build the rationale for wider investment in, and deployment of, online engagement tools (so called ‘enterprise solutions’).

Government faces all sorts of barriers in trying to implement these tools on existing IT platforms, and even if it could, the speed of implementation could well be slow. By adopting best of breed hosted tools, many of the drawbacks can be mitigated. There will undoubtedly be nervousness about using hosted solutions outside the corporate firewall, but they can be positioned as pilots – testing the value of the tools and minimising exposure to mistakes or reputational hits.

Using hosted tools (such as WordPress.com) gives organisations the ability to engage and interact on a wide scale at little or no cost and test software on a hosting platform away from the primary infrastructure.

Some of the drawbacks of this option include questions about supplier reliability, the stability and scalability for new online tools, security/ownership of data,  and uptime  / availability of service could be less reliable than hosting it yourself.

If you decide to pursue this option, you will undo need some dedicated resource to set up and support , either in house or outsourced.  You need to think about building, ongoing support, moderation / facilitation, and online marketing. These are significant human resource costs.

Five down, one to go…