Gov 2.0 and the human factor

By Jianggan Li | 30 June 2009 | Permanent link | 0 comments

During a recent new media dialogue I participated in (thanks to our friends Simon Taylor and Jeremy Woolf at Text 100 Hong Kong), a senior government representative asked a group of bloggers the following: “How we can find and engage with you?”

The response from one famous blogger was: “If you want to know what a blogger really wants, be a blogger yourself.” He said that also applies to corporations who want to reach out to the blogosphere.

Of course this should be interpreted as ‘put yourself in their shoes’. But I guess there should be further meaning to it, which is, the government should get equal and personal with the citizens who are online. Especially the young ones.

It’s the human factor which is at play here. In a virtual world, if you don’t know whether you are dealing with a real human being, what’s left for you is only a keyboard, a screen and the noise of your hard disk spinning.

It’s a competition for attention with millions of different things. Therefore governments need to go out and engage through the channels people usually use. And in this democratic game, the government has no real advantage over other competing entities.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of ‘I am the government and I need to be serious, always’. People are far more comfortable and are far less hostile when they realise they are dealing with a real individual rather than a perceived machine. This has been proven by various social science studies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is following FutureGov on Twitter. Although he has a machine-like look, it is far assuring for a private citizen to have him in their online space rather than “State Government of California”, which seems cold-blooded and more machine-like.

The Facebook page of Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, lists 103,307 fans this morning, when I last checked. Imagine if the name of the page was “State Council of the People’s Republic of China”?

Last year, Singapore’s government launched its Facebook page called “Reach Singapore”, which initially received scepticism and even sarcastic comments, which were basically saying the effort to reach out on Facebook looked silly, ill-prepared and was a waste of public money.

More than a year has passed, and now people seem to start to pay real attention to Reach Singapore’s Facebook page. The discussions were live and some fairly constructive comments and feedback has resulted.

Although not many people post, reply and debate, the 1-9-90 rule suggests that there is probably a far larger number of people who view the page without making comments, and so are ‘reached out to’ passively by the government.

One important element is that the posts by the government are put up by real individuals who also reply to questions, queries and suggestions. This makes people feel that they are having a dialogue rather than an interrogation session.

The way the government initially marketed it - by holding a fancy launch event - was not commendable. No individual would celebrate his or her joining a social network with such fanfare. If the government wants to portray itself as a real friend online, it should not either. Nevertheless I understand and appreciate that it was a learning experience for a government that has dared to step foot in a drastically different world.

As government starts to become less serious and truly engage with users on their own terms, so netizens also need time to adjust their expectations.

That’s why when Singapore’s Media Development Authority first put up a rap by its senior management online in 2007, people the world over (the rap was reported in international media as far as Canada) fell about laughing. It was embarrassing.

But undeniably many people enjoyed it – you can go to the Youtube page now and read the recent comments. People are more used to the fact that government can also be fun.

I guess the initial negative feedback was probably because singing and dancing skills left a lot to be desired, rather than the fact that senior government officials in suits were rapping. I suspect I would receive far worse comments if I put a video clip of me singing karaoke online!

Zhao Xiaoming, Mayor of the picturesque city of Zhangjiajie in Southern China, was recently portrayed as a slightly-exaggerated singing cartoon image in a online promotional video clip for the city’s music festival. An online poll shows that 80 per cent of internet users surveyed supported him. Although online polls don’t represent universal opinion, Mr Zhao managed to appeal to his targeted audience – internet users.

When you engage in the online world, it is very important to keep everything in a timely manner. Numerous research reports have indicated how people can lose interest quickly about a page or a conversation online if there is nothing new. Traditionally organisations (not only the government) tend to be conservative and play a safe game and every word is checked at different levels to make sure it conveys the right (and positive) image of the organisation. Their is an obsession with being “on brand”.

They might become more cautious in the virtual world as whatever you write on social networks is ‘on the record’. Any mistake you make is propagated far more rapidly than anyone could imagine in the days before web 2.0.

This means government has to be very careful when saying things, but to compete for attention and interest, we don’t have the luxury of a complicated approval process. By the time you come back with the appropriate feedback, the audience is long gone.

I believe, as an individual, that he or she (curiously I find it’s usually a ‘she’) who speaks on behalf of the government, but with a personal manifestation, gets far more understanding and appreciation from internet users.

“We are learning how to play with the rules in a third party’s territory,” Jeremy Godfrey, Hong Kong’s Government CIO, recently told me.

If you think carefully about the word “Civil Servant”, you will see that nothing is more appropriate than to make yourself less solemn and more approachable to today’s web-savvy citizens.