Posts By Craig Thomler

What if we let ordinary citizens represent Australia on social media for tourism purposes?

Tourism Australia, state and territory tourism agencies and many regions and cities are now using social media to promote their location (their brand) to potential tourists. Using the traditional approach, these accounts are managed by professionals employed by agencies and tourism bodies, communicating with official approved messages. However other countries have begun to explore theRead… Read more »

Queensland appoints Australia’s first e-Government Assistant Minister

The Queensland Government has become the first jurisdiction in Australia to formally appoint a politician to a specific e-government role, with the appointment of Ray Stevens as the Assistant Minister to the Premier on e-Government. His role is to oversee the development of the QLD government’s open data site (to be at data.qld.gov.au), supported byRead… Read more »

Deloittes Australia social media report offers guidance for internal comms

Deloittes Australia has released its Social Media Report 2012, providing much more than a glimpse into how social media is empowering their staff to connect, collaborate and solve problems, sharing wisdom, knowledge and ideas to deliver better customer outcomes. If your executive and internal communications area are still resistant to the use of social mediaRead… Read more »

Sharing and comparing political party policies – developing an XML schema for party policies

Something I’ve had on the backburner for awhile has been the development of a better way to share and compare political party policies. If you’ve ever looked at the policy platforms of different political parties in the same election campaign, you’d recognise that each writes their policy in a different format, including different information andRead… Read more »

Government tops the list of effective email marketers

For all the claims of government communication being expensive or ineffective compared to the private sector, government has topped the Vision 6 Email Marketing Metrics Report for January – June 2012. Vision 6, an email marketing company based in Queensland, has reported on the email marketing effectiveness of Australian companies and agencies for the lastRead… Read more »

Making APIs for government data – should agencies do this or leave it to third parties?

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a technique for interacting with data (usually on the web) which liberates users from relying on particular applications or having to do complex programming to reuse the data in interesting ways. Unfortunately few government agencies go the extra distance to release their data with an API, instead using specific dataRead… Read more »