Over the last 3 years we have seen a steady increase in the use of social media by State servants:
- sanctioned government agency blogs (like this one),
- State servants blogging about their organisations in their spare time,
- State servants responding to blog posts,
- State servants writing guest posts on blogs,
- sanctioned government agency wikis,
- State servants editing articles relating to their agency on Wikipedia,
- State servants starting Facebook groups
This trend looks likely to continue. It is for this reason the SSC (and indeed some overseas jurisdictions) have created draft guidance for New Zealand State servants using social media. We have channelled some of our findings from this blog into the guidance.
This guidance does not cover the technical or administrative ins and outs of an agency running their own blog or wiki (though hopefully this is not too far away), simply how to monitor and interact with existing social media sites. The guidance is heavily derived from the Standards of Integrity and Conduct which we feel is most of what we need.
View the draft guidance at: http://webstandards.govt.nz/index.php/Talk:Social_media_monitoring_and_interaction*
*Edit (23/2/09): Mirror of original http://blog.e.govt.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/guidance-on-social-media-monitoring-and-interaction-dec-2008.htm
Our guidance is by no means finalised and we really hope you will share your input with us (by commenting here, at the Web Standards wiki, or emailing matt.lane@ssc.govt.nz) by February 13th, 2009. The final guidance will be available shortly after that date.
Edit (24/04/09): See the post Guidance on monitoring, and interacting on, social media for the final outputs of this work.
3 Comments
I was surprised at the high level of use quoted from the 2007 World Internet Project report - ie
“The World Internet Project New Zealand (PDF, 1.2mb) found that 27% of New Zealanders have posted messages online, 34% have posted images online, 10% keep a blog. 28% participate in social networking sites at least on a weekly basis.”
The report actually says that the 10% who keep a blog and the 28% who participate weekly in social networking are a percentage of USERS, which was 78% of the sample overall, so these figures are indeed overstated.
While trying not to sound like an informercial… I have set up an internal blog in our Ministry with the help of Matt and Joanna and their guides and it’s going really well. It’s still in a trial phase (with just over 200 users) but we’re getting comments and contributions and people seem very pleased with it.
Cheers guys
Paddy,
My apologies. That was sloppy. I will add an amending statement.
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[...] State Services Commission has issued guidelines for State servants using social media, together with the Code of Conduct there exits sufficient guidance for State servants to use their [...]
[...] State Services Commission has issued guidelines for State servants using social media, together with the Code of Conduct there exits sufficient guidance for State servants to use their [...]