Change Camp Ottawa – section “C” on social media in government department

Posted by Natasha D'Souza on May 16, 2009 in Blog, events, open government, Twitter | 1 comment

I am at Change Camp Ottawa and there are a lot of very good sessions lined up. I am currently blogging from the Social Media in Government session.

For live blogging check the Apt 613 Blog.

Public Health Agency of Canada, during swine flu they were using twitter to keep folks updated.

There are tonnes of folks complaining about government agencies on twitter, but is anyone watching them and responding? It seems that there is currently no mechanism to respond to these complaints and help out.

Fisheries is using twitter to send out releases, this is just the first step, working in both French and English in one feed, took a seven page plan to describe how to use to 140 characters.

Tweet Congress – degree on conversation happening with their consistuents.

The government is trying to use social media with policies that were created before all this technology was available. Tho shalt not use any other thing than windows being one of them.

How do you deal with the innundation of messages that are flooded in social media. Those are technical issues that have been addressed.

Identi.ca is a Canadian opensource microblogging platform that would solve all of these integration issues.

Educating the public is a great use of social media for government. News media are now picking their stories from Twitter.

Know where your audience is and go there.

Part of Canada 150 connect 150 public service people. Ideas fair at NAC on June 3rd. Everything was done using web 2.0.

Summary

Performance metrics – managing the expectations. Successful in managing the email capacity on implementation. That gets reported every year. The idea is that citizens need to know that their money is being used effectively. Followers is not a good measurement. Communication with peope to figure how to use web 2.0 to drive change.

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