I have been busy doing some evangelizing outside of the World Bank recently and it has been a great experience. On March 29, John Bell (from Ogilvy PR) and I spoke at the Web Managers Roundtable, a group of web execs in the DC area. The topic was "Creating a complete social media strategy" and both John and I had great fun presenting. John has a very flattering account of the event here. What's interesting about John is that he truly gets it. He and his team are busy developing models, methodologies for rolling out, measuring and pushing social media in its truest sense: people communicating with other people. I have interacted with many other PR professionals who see social media as just another way of shoving messages, of faking authenticity etc...We have seen what happened when they get caught...John and I are taking the stage again towards the end of may, on another session focusing on measuring social media. I will be talking about the buzzmonitor and he will lead us through the fairly advanced methodology he has developed for Ogilvy. More on that later.

Anyway, yesterday, I delivered one of the two keynote addresses at the Government's web managers university. The main topic of the workshop was "Focusing on top taks to improve services to citizens". Like many large organizations, the US government is facing several challenges on the web: disjointed look and feel, turf issues, duplication of content and services , heavy technology, low digital literacy etc...

Alex Langshur, from Public Insite opened the workshop with a very compelling presentation on how to use metrics to understand user tasks, align your supply (i.e. your content) and your business (mission) and remove politics from the web management process.

My spiel focused on trying to explain what social media is, why it matters and how can large organizations start embracing it. The two main challenges are technology - i spoke about open data, apis, web services, the need to integrate various sources - and culture - we are talking about organizations who still largely perceive the web as a large repository of content and not as a strategic communications tool. I emphasized that social media is organic (not to say bottom up) and that the natural champions in an organization should be encouraged to take the lead and evangelize. During the Q&A session, someone made a very telling comment: she created a facebook account just to see how student were coping with the Virginia Tech massacre and this led her to browsing around, finding a page about her organization  etc.. etc....This curiosity, I said, is how social media will happen in government. The session was videotaped, i will put a link to it when available. If you attended the session and have some feedback, please leave a comment.