Do we care whether Government PR bods blog or not?

I do and so, it seems, do Tom Stenberg and Ed Mayo too; the last time I looked the COI (stands for the Stalinist sounding Central Office of Information folks) was the PR wing of central government.

Surely the point is that blogging holds potential to open-up two-way communication between authorities and activists, service providers and service users, governments and citizens…

Perhaps. But these Steinberg/Mayo/COI proposals are the opposite of this. Even if we leave aside any debate about whether the state has any business lecturing us on health and parenting and the fact that sites like Mumsnet and Bounty are already pursuing the whole health 'n' parenting thing very successfully (in terms of numbers at least) and well away from crude on-message state sanction, then you're still left with the fact that these proposals are top-down government business-as-usual stuff run by PR and communication professionals.

Just because you do something on the internet rather than through traditional media doesn't make it new, innovative or transformative in itself I'm afraid.

Which is where Civil Serf comes in. A senior civil servant openly telling us what really goes on in the management of our public services – whether it's on the internet, in the paper, on TV or on the radio – is genuinely new, innovative and really informative.

It's the message not the medium, stupid.

Do we care whether Government PR bods blog or not?

I do and so, it seems, do Tom Stenberg and Ed Mayo too; the last time I looked the COI (stands for the Stalinist sounding Central Office of Information folks) was the PR wing of central government.

Surely the point is that blogging holds potential to open-up two-way communication between authorities and activists, service providers and service users, governments and citizens…

Perhaps. But these Steinberg/Mayo/COI proposals are the opposite of this. Even if we leave aside any debate about whether the state has any business lecturing us on health and parenting and the fact that sites like Mumsnet and Bounty are already pursuing the whole health ‘n’ parenting thing very successfully (in terms of numbers at least) and well away from crude on-message state sanction, then you’re still left with the fact that these proposals are top-down government business-as-usual stuff run by PR and communication professionals.

Just because you do something on the internet rather than through traditional media doesn’t make it new, innovative or transformative in itself I’m afraid.

Which is where Civil Serf comes in. A senior civil servant openly telling us what really goes on in the management of our public services – whether it’s on the internet, in the paper, on TV or on the radio – is genuinely new, innovative and really informative.

It’s the message not the medium, stupid.

I agree regarding the senseless marketing speak that many blogs come out with and I am a great believer in plain English (it is my job after all of making sense of it all!)

Yes organisations do employ PRs and press offices to provide their communications for them. The point is that a bad PR will choose language that is over complicated and not relevant to the target audience.

A good PR will produce work that is relevant, targeted and above all it must be genuine not “flannel” as you put it.

Tom Stenberg and Ed Mayo produced an excellent report last year on the ‘Power of Information’ It looks at the role of Government officials in relation to user generated web sites and also urges Government’s to free up the information it holds. I am not sure that randomly distributing child benefit CD’s was quite what they had in mind more something like these maps http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/

Here are some of the report’s recommendations to Government…

Recommendation 1. To improve service delivery and communication with the public, the Central Office of Information (COI), in partnership with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), should coordinate the development of experimental partnerships between major departments and user-generated sites in key policy areas, including parenting advice (Department for Education and Skills), services for young people, and healthcare (Department of Health).

Recommendation 2. To reduce unnecessary duplication of pre-existing user-generated sites, COI should update the guidelines for minimum website standards by December 2007; departments should be strongly advised to consult the operators and users of pre-existing user-generated sites before they build their own versions.

Recommendation 3. Departments, monitored by COI, should research the scale and role of user-generated websites in their areas, with a view to either terminating government services that are no longer required, or modifying them to complement citizen-led endeavours.

The full report is here http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/strategy/power_information.pdf

If the public sector in the UK is to truly engage with the public, more transparency, interaction and therefore blogging is needed.

Evidence suggests that officially sanctioned (and presumably suitably censored and on-message) blogging is actually likely to provide a lot less transparency and interaction and lots more flannel.
If you look at officially sanctioned PR – a major growth industry in the public sector over the last 10 – 15 years – it’s actually harder now that we have “expert” communications officers supposedly providing information for the public to get to the information you actually want!
Transferring these methods to the internet and blogs would actually be a backward step. There’s enough crap on the internet already without government information officers joining in as well.
The point of Civil Serf was that it wasn’t the public sector engaging with the public. It was a very knowledgeable individual engaging with the public about the public sector.
A very dangerous thing that obviously had to be stopped.