Government Public Relations in the Age of Web 2.0 Presented by Nick Jones, Director of Interactive Services, COI, UK Government 18 February 2014.

Government Public Relations in the Age of Web 2.0

Presented by Nick Jones, Director of Interactive Services, COI, UK Government10 April 2023

Introduction to COI and HM Government The Challenge of Transformation 2.0 in the public sector The challenge of 2.0 to communicators 2.0 and the anti-fraud domain

Agenda

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Where I’m coming from

Central Office of Information, UK Government’s centre of marketing communications

excellence for over 50 years Annual turnover of £391m, benchmarked savings of 47.7% Interactive Services responsible for digital policy, strategy

and delivery of digital sites, creative, campaigns, presences; through a 100 agency procurment framework

Turnover of £35m, 30 staff, 90 clients, 300 jobs, 491 campaigns, 350k keywords, 7.7bn impressions…

Policy on web convergence, site rationalisation, web standards for finding and using online information and social media…

COI

4

The challenge: Transformed public services

Turning the citizen and government relationship around. To give the citizen greater control over the way they interact with public information and public services

What do we mean by ‘transformation’?

• Focus on the user be it a citizen or business.• A much stronger focus on professionalism and skills• Join up, don’t duplicate

Some of the things we don’t do well.

• Finding it. We have too many websites, we don’t address the right things to the right people and we don’t ‘label’ our content well enough.

• We don’t think about the design of our services upfront; we’re still converting the old brochure into a website, rather than thinking about the tools that people use and how we adapt our services to these tools and techniques (for example a widget that sits on your PC to help you search your local area for services).

• Culture: a better dialogue with the public and to give people a say in our public services.

• Sharing and reusing.

Our plan should be to…

• Deliver information and services to citizens and businesses in a joined up way.

• Use a limited number of websites, TV or mobile routes • Create a consistent high quality experience through higher

standards • Share and reuse – public sector information, people and

infrastructure.

• And then came 2.0…

What is 2.0?

• A philosophy to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web

• Manifests itself in social media and netoworks. A space where people can have a voice, express themselves and connect with other people

• A conversation economy

Much more than MySpace, Facebook and Bebo…

France4m

Italy3.4m

Turkey2m Pakistan

0.97m

Czech0.6m

MEXICO4.1m

China43m

South Korea9.7m

Taiwan4.2m

Philippines2.4m

BRAZIL7.6m

Spain4.5m

India8.7m

Japan14m

HongKong

1m

USA26.4m

CANADA1.6m

UK4.5m

Greece0.3m

Australia1m

Germany5.2m Romania

0.5m

Denmark0.3m

Poland1.1mNetherlands

1.6m

Switzerland0.5m Austria

0.4m

Hungary0.1m

Russia2.4m

It’s about creating content

% Write their own blog

60%+

40% -60%

30%-40%

<30% 16-54 Active Internet Universe Estimates

Source: www.universalmccann.com Wave 3 survey

Italy3.9m

Germany8.2m

Switzerland0.9m

USA43m

Spain4.7m

France4.2m

Japan12.4m

Czech0.8m

Denmark0.6m

Austria0.6m

Greece0.5m

Turkey3.3m

China39m

India11.7m

South Korea9.4m

Romania1.4m

Netherlands3.7m

CANADA4.2m

UK11m

Australia2.6m

Hong Kong1m

MEXICO5.1m

BRAZIL11.4m

Pakistan1.8m

Poland2.7m

Taiwan3.9m

Philippines3m

Hungary1m

Russia6.1m

It’s about connecting and sharing

% joined a social network

70%+

60% -69%

50%-59%

<49% 16-54 Active Internet Universe Estimates

Source: www.universalmccann.com Wave 3 survey

Government forays into 2.0

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Insights:

• Networks

• Rich content

• sharing

Action: Where is my audience now?

Insights: networks, experience, conversation, community

Action: how do I prepare my organisation for conversation?

Insight:

• Advocates

• Rich content

Action:

• Change job descriptions

71% saw it as a serious problem before the campaign, this rose to 90% after the campaign.

Insight: peer-to-peer is a powerful behavioural change driver

Action: What content is valuable enough for them to share?

Insight:

• tools and widgets are valued. 393k users.

• Knowledge in organisation may be used outside

Action:

• Identify frontliners who have the knowledge

Insight: community will appear in the strangest places.Action: blend-in!

The challenge of 2.0 to you

Where are we on this? Where to start? How to behave?

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Start by understanding the spectrum of engagement

Passive monitoring

Signpost Respond DiscussDebate

Passive Active Engaged

Prepare to go on a journey

Empower staff: Principles for participation online

Be credible • Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent. Be consistent • Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be

cordial, honest and professional at all times. Be responsive • When you gain insight, share it where appropriate. Be integrated • Wherever possible, align online participation with other

offline communications. Be a civil servant • Remember that you are an ambassador for your

organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency

http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/codes/social_media/participation.asp

How others are preparing: 1

• Social media is an opportunity to drive new levels of engagement

• Brands should be creating content or services– Consumers are – brands are no different

• Brands can help connect consumers with premium content • There is a need to be open and honest

– No secrets in the world of social media

• Let consumers create and distributeyour content freely and withoutcontrol

• Social media is globalising mediaconsumption – Consistency of brand message

is essential

How should brands behave?

Be honest

Be transparent (what’s in it for you?)

Be usefulGive me an experience (not a bag or something)

Don’t try too hard

From 2.0 to 2.1: the challenge of evaluation

Novelty will run out Business cases for investing in 2.0 activity The need for evaluation

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ImpressionsReach Clicks

Awareness

Message recall

Changes in perception

Repeat website visits

Tell a friend

Dwell time

Number of pages visited

Leads generated

Change in behaviour

Ad interactions

We will measure success in many different ways…

2.0 and the Anti-fraud domain

Search for fraud on DG and BL

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Distribution

Insight:• connections generate leads

Action: how do we investigate?Digital shoe leather?Who do they turn to online?Who has the authority to respond?

Who has the online authority?

Who has your confidence?

Who is impersonating you out there?

In conclusion

Go listen Then converse Understand the spectrum Prepare for organisational readiness