I attended a session from the Gov2.0 Camp around Using Social media for Outreach. Here are the notes.

Educate – Frame the conversation – Deliberate on the issues – Identify shared priorities – Refine conversation – Bring back conversation - Act

Gov2.0 Camp March 27, 2009

Questions people want to get out of the session:

• How can we use web 2.0 tools effectively?
• Twitter strategy for outreach
• Using social media to create awareness
• How do you define success? (Google moderator)
• How to engage public in a meaningful way
• How do we use social media to gain trust in the customer base
• Connecting communities – promote collaboration
• Building online audience and drive to 1:1 relationships
• Media think tank outreach
• Communication to senior leaders on why they need to be involved in the social media
• Metrics, privacy issues, how do you know the impact
• Sharing best practices
• Security issues, guidelines on what to say and what not to say
• How we filter what will help us and what’s jus t the noise
• Inform the public on what we do
• Want to make sure that the vocal people do not drown out the conversation –by having topical blogs to drive the conversation
• Capitalize greater government transparency through social media
• Bridge cultures using social technology
• Elaborate and leverage the network
• Want to get beyond the numbers when measure success. How are we going to action the information to help set priority and utilize the information in a meaningful way
• How to overcome management resistance
• How to engage in the public through technology in the time of crises

What is meaningful participation? Meaningful is in the eye of the beholder, start with the mission and define the right mix that help you as an organization.

• Recommend a book written in 1965 by Ellul: Propaganda – How you skew information, depending on your purpose and how you are trying to influence. How unity and action need to work together.
• You can use social tool to establish relationship with people with 1:1 levels
• How do you start? Begin with a dialogue, keep it rolling by user generated content

o Make sure you know what people want to do

o How will you make it successful? Credibility

- It’s important to include what the citizens think (comments) as meaningful metrics

- One of the success measure is to see that their audience / comments self moderate

• People have to have a mechanism to know that their comments will make a difference

• Need to be responsible for managing the outcome, take ation and communicate that to the public
• Recommend to use Metafilter and Dailypost, which has a 24 hour delay to monitor the comments
• Set expectations to your audience has to understand that not every comments has to be responded to
• Social media Showing a face from the inside of the agency can express more government transparency
• America Speaks is hiring. Check out www.Americaspeaks.org/jobs

First comes SharePoint,

SharePoint! A Microsoft product you either hate or love. Microsoft states,
Your organization can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes.
I partially agree with that statement. I think SharePoint can be a great tool for document repository. As for collaboration, it works for a small team with minimal documents. When used appropriately, SharePoint is also useful for content management. There are powerful features of SharePoint; the problem is that it is not intuitive. You almost have to be a SharePoint expert to appreciate all the SharePoint capabilities. Oftentimes documents are buried under multiple folders. It is difficult to get a dashboard view of the projects and documents housed in SharePoint. Bottom line, SharePoint is not the Holy Grail.

Then comes wiki …

Now we’re talking collaboration. Wikis are designed from the start for participation. Wiki is defined as a web based social collaboration tool that allows anyone to edit and contribute content. Wiki allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Usually, editing a wiki space is just a matter of clicking the edit button on any page top or section header, much simpler than track changes in Word.doc or editing via SharePoint.
Wikis provide a platform for people to work together, build knowledge, and make connections. Like anything, wiki has its limitations also. Although we are now seeing more plug-ins for open source wikis to enhance features. Currently, there is no way of directly embed PowerPoint slides into the wiki. A way around it is embed PowerPoint slide into Slideshare, then embed Slideshare in the wiki. Same thing with videos, it needs to be embedded via YouTube. Doable, but could be better. Click here to see some great ways companies can use wikis.
Overall, wiki is a great tool for open collaboration while SharePoint is a great tool for document repository.