Governments are looking for ways to leverage Web 2.0 communities and social networking within their organizations, many looking to do so based on their commitment and interest in Microsoft SharePoint.  Based on nine years of experience working in this field, there are a number of principles organizations can apply to successfully deploy communities in social networking.  In this three part series, I will outline 11 principles for social networking on the SharePoint platform, or more generally.

This week, I’m going to examine four principles for government 2.0 – simplicity, crowdsource relevance, appropriate calls to action and measurement matters.

Principle #1 – Simplicity

Call this the Google lesson.  The popularity of sites like Google and Twitter are based on the simplicity of their interfaces, and a clear path for participation.  Even new users can quickly and easily comprehend the steps they need to take.   To increase adoption of government 2.0, organizations need to ensure that they practice simplicity and not make things overly complicated.  A clean user interface, with a specific path for participation from the first visit engages users instead of intimidating them. Furthermore, it is important to understand that much of simplicity is about layering; you can achieve the same outcome in terms of activity or desired activities by just not showing everything up front.

Principle #2 – Crowdsource Relevance

Most social networking sites and communities have so much content, that it can be overwhelming to  users.   These sites, to varying degrees, make use of crowdsourcing, where users essentially do the work of “classifying” the information.  For enterprises, crowdsourcing is a powerful tool that enables the organization to take mountains of information and connect users with only the best and most relevant content. 

Just a few examples of crowdsourcing in action include when users bookmark information (which is an implicit endorsement), users mark something as helpful, users visit something (implies popularity), users tag or classify something (when you upload the content) which provides important meta-data.  Crowdsourcing, when used in conjunction with social filtering, becomes a powerful tool for government 2.0 initiatives as the information is classified and aggregated for users, enabling them to get the most valuable information fast, sorting information by what their peers find most valuable.

Principle #3 – Appropriate Calls to Action

The unique value of government 2.0 is engaging the voice of community members, but in the beginning it can be difficult to get people talking within a community.  There may be a lot of lurkers, but not a whole lot of people participating. Often, new users aren’t clear on what actions they could be taking – whether it be uploading a video or making a comment on a piece of content — so they end up doing nothing.  To get users participating from the inception of the community, and new users engaged from the day they join, there needs to be appropriate calls to action throughout the community.

A strong example of appropriate calls to action are found within FaceBook.  With each user`s status updates, there is the opportunity for their friends to indicate that they like the item, or to comment on that item.  It is clear to users what steps they can take with that content to participate, and this principle offers an immense amount of value to enterprises as they work to build thriving communities.

Principle #4 – Measurement Matters

To truly ensure the success of your government 2.0 initiatives, metrics need to be clearly defined and measured on an ongoing basis. Metrics are central to being able to plan and strategize efforts and activities in a project. This enables users and community managers to have tangible metrics so they can know what is working/what is not, who is participating/who is not,  and setting targets for growth of the project.  

Social networking sites are driven by metrics, numbers of friends, followers and so on.  Enterprises need to take these metrics much deeper to identify short, medium and long term goals, manage and nurture top contributors and determine what is most successful within the community.   A project without substantiated ROI is not a project for long, so measuring items like page information and overall community information can make a critical difference in the adoption and success of the community.

Watch this video by Andrew Chambers of Northern Lights (and formerly of the US Federal Reserve Bank) on how measurement matters in communities.

Next week I’ll tackle four more principles for communities and social networking  as part of Government 2.0.

So it turns out that search engines may not be all they’re cracked up to be – with possibly huge implications for government, of all places.

NextGov, a newish online newsletter on technology and government, cites research by James Evans of the University of Chicago, who studied a database of 34 million science articles. Evans found that, as more articles came online, they were less likely to be cited in research – and those that were cited tended to be more recent.

“Searching online is more efficient,” Evans wrote, “and hyperlinks quickly put researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but they may also accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas grappled with by scholars.”

NextGov also noted Evans’s suggestion – however counterintuitive – that poor indexing actually makes print library research more valuable. “Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within journals—likely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship,” Evans wrote. “By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.”

NextGov then gets to the point for the public sector:

“It doesn’t take much to see the implications for government analysts of any type – intelligence and law enforcement agents, environmentalists, economists, health researchers and, of course, scientists — who use Internet search engines as well as proprietary ones linked into government databases, such as Justice Department case files. Highly relevant and specific search results narrow findings and can possibly prohibit the eurekas that come from a broader search, which can link what is seemingly unrelated material that provides real insight. Or does the Internet’s benefits outweigh those costs?”

A good question, deserving of an answer.

(Evans’s notes, on his blog, were actually in response to Nick Carr’s now famous [or infamous] article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” in The Atlantic. Carr argued that the Internet has rewired our brains so that it diminishes our ability to be reflective and to be more interpretive).

For all the churn around Web 2.0 in the public sector– can we? should we? how much would it cost? – it turns out that there’s a much more prosaic possibility than the conversion of Facebook into a focus group gizmo. And it’s one with built-in appeal to government

In emergencies, according to a report prepared for the University of Colorado, people are more likely to turn first not to traditional media but to social media sites, blogs, instant messaging and other staples of the 2.0 world.

Twitter and Google mashups in particular are useful, according to the study.

A related study of wildfires in southern California last year found that people used Twitter to keep friends informed of their condition, minute by minute. They also used Google Maps to track the progress of the fire.

e-Marketer Daily said the study found mass media unreliable “as they struggled to access remote areas from which Web site users with an Internet connection could easily report.   Media sites also focused on the ’sensational,’ such as fires close to celebrities’ homes, which distorted the overall picture, the scientists said.”

It’s an intriguing finding; shouldn’t require too much in the way of Deep Thinking to weave 2.0 into the array of emergency management tools that are standard everywhere these daysl