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Online community engagement for the public sector
On Monday I presented at a Public Sector Marketing conference down in Canberra. There was a great crowd and some good speakers, I was happy to see quite a few local government people there. The hot topic that seemed to flow through most presentations was the use of social media in the public sector. That made it interesting for me to get up at the end of the day to talk about Community Engagement Online. I found that many people were interested in how to persuede senior management of the need to use social media tools to engage with the community - so I dropped some of my tips into the talk. The idea of presenting experiments in social media as “trials” became the word of the conference. Matt Crozier reminded me that trialing something for a couple of months would not provide enough feedback to show if something was successful or not - which I agree with. A few of us discussed that using the idea of a “trial” was not something that needed an end date, but perhaps rather a “review” date. And if nothing disasterous happens then it would continue, and many of us had found that our trials usually continued to exist as parts of our sites and indeed did not come to an end (in fact often management will forget it was ever a trial if they like it or hear nothing bad about it!).
As no one had gotten into any hardcore technical detail, I talked a bit about tools and technology - with RSS being the must have for any new sites. If people coming to your site and want to keep updated and find no way to subscribe to your information then you may loose that visitor forever. RSS opens you up to a multitude of subscription options since many applications allow you to pull in updates via RSS, whether it be a simple feedburner email subscription, or automatically posting tweets to twitter.
The slides don’t show the whole story but highlight the key points of my presentation, take a look: Community Engagement Online slides.
