Social Scoring Is Here…Like It Or Not

There has been quite a bit of noise around services measuring a users influence and overall impact within the social media space. Services such as Klout and SocialSprout, both of which I use, keep track of a users reach & influence within a network. While these ranking are extremely interesting (and I promise, you WILLRead… Read more »

Better Meetings

I was volunteered to watch a client’s repeating meeting. Depressing. It was scheduled for an hour, people arrived late to protect themselves or avoid discomfort, went for over 90 minutes. What I learned: Opinions don’t count. As satisfactory as airing an opinion is to the opinionator, it didn’t add value to the conversation. Higher statusRead… Read more »

Happy Birthday, Open Government Directive

To mark the one-year anniversary of the Open Government Directive (OGD), Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, and Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Founder and President of AmericaSpeaks, penned a piece cross-posted on Government Executive (http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=46682) and NextGov (http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20101208_2722.php) highlighting the successes of the OGD to date and recommending “next steps” for the Administration to take to make governmentRead… Read more »

Australia is the second largest government user of Yammer – over 110 active networks

There’s recently been some controversy in Australian government over the use of Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network, which I discussed in my post, The ongoing struggles to balance IT security and staff empowerment. I asked Simon Spencer, Yammer’s newly appointed Asia-Pacific General Manager, how many government agencies in Australia were using Yammer.Read… Read more »

Transparency Questions Answered from the National League of Cities Conference

We attended the National League of Cities conference last week and got a lot of questions about streaming council meetings online to increase transparency. There were some concerns raised about pricing and complexity, we wanted to address these in a blog post to give people some key things to consider when deciding what type ofRead… Read more »

ChatterBachs announces GovLoop training

On the ChatterBachs blog: ChatterBachs announces GovLoop training http://wp.me/p14i4G-50 ChatterBachs announced today that they will offer training on GovLoop as a part of their services. ChatterBachs, a social media and communications consulting firm based in Northern Virginia, has capabilities to create and maintain blogs, conduct social media training, act as an outsourced component for establishingRead… Read more »

Questions for Journalists, Politicians and Police Departments about Public Information Access

When Bradley Tech, a troubled Milwaukee public high school, had to be locked down and receive massive police support to stop a fight involving gang members and kids from other schools, the most important issue is not about the school, the 18 arrests, the gangs, the fight, or the police response. It’s about having noRead… Read more »

USDA Communications Moves To The Cloud

Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a massive move of its 120,000 employees to communications technology hosted in “the cloud,” the common term for Web-based services like email, instant messaging, and content management. This new initiative is part of a major consolidation of over 20 different email systems currently in use, andRead… Read more »