Dr. Govlove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

(or or: Why you should join Twitter / start a blog immediately)
Note: This post contains GCPEDIA links only accessible within the Government of Canada network.

Blogging about blogging. How meta can you get?

Not long ago, I made the acquaintance of a young, energized public servant. I was impressed by their¹ enthusiasm, imagination, expression and boundless drive to create. I encouraged this person to start their own blog and share their ideas with their colleagues at large. To my delight, my challenge was accepted and the resulting material was as good as I’d hoped: a wellspring of inspiration and discussion.

Then, one day, it all disappeared. Because of strong divided opinions within their shop about external social media engagement, my colleague had deleted their entire blog—without backing up any of the material.

I was saddened, but not surprised. I’d experienced a similar crisis at the beginning of my own public service career. There wasn’t a heated internal debate, nor any direct warnings from supervisors about the content of my writing. In fact, the awareness of social media within my division was only just beginning.

What I did experience, from orientation sessions and interactions with new colleagues, was the subtle and constant reminder that I was a public servant now. As a government employee, my life was at greater risk of coming under the microscope. Everything I said and did, everything I wrote, my personal and professional life—it all needed to be more carefully groomed and diligently managed. Don’t wear your ID off-site, don’t publicly discuss any issues that are unfavourable to the Government, don’t broadcast strong opinions that could be interpreted as partisanship, and absolutely do not speak to the media. By extension, I interpreted that as a cue to try and erase anything I might have produced that might fall outside the lines of generic male public servant. For expediency’s sake I just deleted everything. Some of it I’d backed up, some of it was lost forever. The next morning the sun still rose and the stock market didn’t crash, nor did Doctor Who arrive in the TARDIS to shake a stern finger in my face and lecture me about compromising the future of Earth history. All considered, I take this as an indication that I must have retained the good material.

I reverted to homogenized anonymity, and all was well.

Then, in August 2009 I discovered² GCPEDIA, and it was really hard not to notice the number of employees who were openly blogging or tweeting. Furthermore, they had the brazen audacity to actually add themselves to lists, where other rabble-rousers had already neatly organized themselves into snappy little tables, complete with links to their potentially offending material. Egads I was inspired!

Nearly instantly, intoxicated by equal parts of “Hey! She’s doing it! Why can’t I?” and “Ha ha! They can’t fire us all!” I launched a Twitter account of my own and embarked on this little blog for good measure.

Fourteen months along I can honestly say, its been almost universally beneficial to my career. Here’s why you should start a blog (and/or a Twitter account) of your own:

1. You can’t distinguish yourself if hardly anyone knows you exist

You have career aspirations; we all do. But how can you differentiate yourself from the other 250 candidates in the resume pile? How can you make sure that your resume remains filed on or near the top? Don’t be anonymous.

There’s a reason that successful people have PR representatives. For one thing, they can afford it, but for another it helps to keep them in the public consciousness. But fear not!—less successful and less wealthy people like you and I have the option of “promoting” ourselves by creating something publicly accessible (a blog or a Twitter account) and widely useful (insightful commentary, instructional articles, great links).

While I started working for the Government of Canada in May 2007, for all intents and purposes I don’t feel like really existed here until August 28, 2008. After that day, I started meeting dozens, then hundreds of other publics servants. My definition of public service changed significantly with the realization that my engagement with my own colleagues through the GC’s Web 2.0 toolkit and these external channels could be beneficial to Canadians as a whole… and a part of my job.

I am no longer anonymous, and that’s a good thing.

2. Increasing your personal network beyond your physical workspace

In an ideal world, I’d exist independently of the space-time continuum. I don’t want to be limited by the number of hours in the day and the number of people I’m in close proximity to. With social media, I don’t have to be. Now I can benefit from the experiences of people from everywhere in my government, or any government. They know the things I haven’t learned yet; they’ve read the things I haven’t found the time to search for; they’ve found the things I never believed even existed.

Now, unlike before, I know who to contact when I need something, and people know they can contact me for what I can provide. My blog and Twitter accounts have transmogrified³ my voice mail and e-mail and Twitter DM boxes into conduits of opportunity: expertise inquiries, project collaborations, membership invitations, career opportunities, social gatherings, speaking engagements, training requests… I help others in the ways I am able, and in return I’ve reaped great rewards from the enormous knowledge base, expertise, and connections of my network of colleagues.

For example:

– How many Directors (or higher) did you meet this year? How many of them made a point to make your acquaintance because someone else had told them about you? How many of them phoned or emailed you for advice? Until my blog, my answer to these questions was “zero”.