In Development

I recently spoke at Comms 08 but had to skip the final quarter of my presentation due to time constraints. The silver lining of that cloud is that what I was going to cover then, I will transcribe for everyone now.

Conducting a social media audit

We have entered an age of social media — the democratisation of online publishing. Now anyone can now say anything to everyone. This is leading to good stuff, bad stuff, and some really ugly stuff, to which no organisation is immune.

So how do we make ourselves a little safer with the least amount of effort?

Search the Blogosphere (via Technorati.com), and create several RSS feeds

Technorati monitors and can search nearly all of the blogs that exist on the web. As of December 2007, Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs, with more than 175,000 new blogs being created each day. With numbers like these, you can bet that some people are (or will be) talking about your organisation. Conduct a search on Technorati for your organisation and variations of terms:

Use a range of terms such as: “state services commission” “state services comission” “state services commision” “state services commissioner” “ssc”

Unless you want to conduct this search everyday (/week/month) create an RSS feed of this search. This will dynamically update you and you are now close to omniscient.

Note: As pictured below (click to enlarge), Internet Explorer 6 does not give you the option of an RSS feed, so get yourself Firefox (via guerrilla tactics if necessary).

Check Wikipedia, front and back, and create an RSS feed

Increasingly, our audiences are bypassing our websites, and are going straight to third parties for information. The largest of these is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written by volunteers, some of which may be sitting next to you. A colleague at the Department of Conservation told me that Wikipedia was the third largest referrer of people downloading their research documents.

Check your organisations Wikipedia article, making sure that all facts and figures are correct. Do not delete factual criticisms or controversies as it is underhanded, impossible to do clandestinely and will end up in the press. If you find incorrect or incomplete information, mention this on the articles discussion page. Wikipedians are supposed to act from a neutral point of view so should be happy to correct mistakes. Alternatively you can edit the content yourself. If you choice to do this, be completely transparent (ironically you preserve more privacy by creating an account versus editing “anonymously”). This links to the next paragraph. Create an RSS feed for changes to this article by clicking the “History” tab and then either the “RSS” or “Atom” button in the left sidebar (you just got a little more omniscient).

Ask your corporate IT support what your IP address or address range is. Type this number into Wikipedia’s user contribution page (this will give more accurate results than http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/) and voila! See what your colleagues have been writing about, and think about how transparent every move you make is on the Internet.

Search the “Twittersphere” (via Summize.com or a similar service), and create several RSS feeds

There are many new social media apart from wikis and blogs. One of the fastest-growing is Twitter. Twitter is a “micro-blogging” service (you don’t need to understand what that means). Currently, Twitter does not provide a search function for past “tweets” but there are third parties that do. Using http://summize.com/, enter the same search term list you created earlier. Once again create an RSS feed, sit back and reflect on your growing omniscience.  

Talk about Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and Bebo

It is not a question of whether your peers are using these social networking tools, it is a question of how intelligently they using them (are they bringing your organisation’s reputation into disrepute?). This is perhaps the most interesting section to think about, as online, the line between our personal and professional lives is now almost completely blurred. Most social networking users keep their profiles “non-publicly viewable” (which is very different to “private”). The smartest approach might be to have an open discussion (especially with younger employees) regarding if it is appropriate to publish online and I would add (especially with older employees) what things if published online should have no relevance in the workplace.  The goal here is to avoid everyone involved potential embarrassment.

Search Youtube

YouTube does not provide an RSS feed for searches, and it may be unlikely that there are movies up there regarding government organisations. Nonetheless, better safe than sorry.

I would be very interested to hear what people discover.

Technorati Tags: audit, blogoshpere, blogs, reputation, reputation managment, social media, twitter, twittersphere, web 2.0, web2.0, wikipedia