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?

First of all, I’ve been really enthused by the interest so far in this short series of posts. Its always gratifying to see some evidence that people are actually taking notice of what I write. But in this case its particularly helpful – I’m throwing out some ideas and really relying on feedback to improve the model so that it can be of use to others.

So, onto approach three, reflect.

When I was kicking these ideas around eighteen months or so ago there was much less awareness of social media in government than there is now. Consequently there was understandable nervousness about active participation. I was trying to identify low risk options that would demonstrate the value of social media to officials.

Reflect in this particular instance means acknowledgement. A step on from simply listening, it means identifying network(s), activities/conversations or communities of interest, then raising their profile by giving them recognition. I guess a good example would be the number of times that Netmums has been mentioned by and across government in the last year or so.

Its not necessarily about granting legitimacy but simply demonstrating that government is taking notice and listening. Government is able to demonstrate that it is ‘switched on’ to wider public opinion. Hopefully this action can encourage future debate and response from people by the acknowledgement that their views will be recognised.

Of course there are some potential drawbacks to this approach:

• Its not active engagement in debate
• Activists may not appreciate being associated with government
• Can unwittingly give legitimacy to groups that government wouldn’t wish to confer it on

On the other hand it can help to create a positive environment with activists / groups for future engagement and/or collaboration.

Importantly, this approach needs to be careful to give balanced recognition to parties with different or opposing views.

There is no real cost over and above the listening approach but the key here is that acknowledgement requires better embedding of using listening tools with policymakers – those who might advise ministers or draft speaking notes, letters etc. It won’t work if it isn’t close to the people developing the thinking about a particular issue.

So I promised in my post last week to set out the six approaches to using social media tools that I developed during my work on the GCN social media review, The first is – do nothing.

Despite all the innovation and good examples of use of social media tools in large organisations over the last year or so, investing in is still a tricky decision for many. In government, budgets and headcount allocations are tight and shrinking. The return on investment of social media is largely unproven. Many large organisations are naturally risk averse.

So it would be a legitimate tactic at this point in time for an organisation to do nothing.

This isn’t necessarily a strategy of avoidance, ignorance or even procrastination. But it is a short term position and not sustainable in the longer term.

While the skills remain relatively rare and the investment in time and people to embed the skills high, its natural to take a back seat and watch others innovate so that you can learn from their relative successes and failures. As more and more good examples of using social media tools for business are evaluated and shared, a consensus on good practice will develop and organisations will become more comfortable with the idea of investing in this area.

Meanwhile, you avoid the pain of early adoption.

On the downside, user adoption of the conversational opportunities afforded by social media is much faster than for the early web. They may well expect to be able to engage with you before you are ready for it. There’s also the risk of being left behind by the speed of others’ innovation.

Doing nothing costs nothing in monetary terms but the opportunity costs could be high if the strategy is sustained for too long and you have to play catch-up.

The title of this post refers to a piece of work I did as part of the GCN social media review about a a year and a half ago. Unfortunately it never got into the final document (and in fact it was cruelly taken from me and remodelled without attribution. But that’s another story….).

I’ve been revisiting it recently for all sorts of reasons and thought it would be worth posting up here, partly because of the conversations that have been going on recently about deploying social media tools in government (Emma’s musings about creating social media toolkits in particular), partly because I think its still relevant, and partly because – although I in no way claim the content of this work is original (it’s not) – its a distillation of my thoughts at the time that I thought may be useful to someone now.

This model is an attempt to 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, neither does it necessarily describe a roadmap that must be followed from early stage adoption through to embedding organisationally. It is based on wide reading, observation and practice but – primarily – mainly – my personal opinion.

It really just sets out options, six in total. My concern at the time of writing was that government is good at the first or the last – either do nothing or do everything. Of course, this loses sight of the opportunities that the other options might present. So I’ll deal with each option separately – and I’m grateful for any thoughts or criticisms. After all, this has been knocking around in my head for a long while as a concept without sharing it widely and i’d welcome ideas on how to improve it.

So, the six options to the modelfall under three overarching principles: observation – interaction – initiation.

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

In the next few posts, I’ll set out what I mean by each of these options (ooh, what a tease).