Sunday, February 7, 2010

Blake, meet Craig. Craig meet Blake's chest hair.

Jesse and I dropped by the Gov2.0 LA “unconference” this weekend and got a chance to see Craig Newmark speak on government involvement in social media.




Craig has recently been working with IAVA and the VBA (VA) to help improve their customer service. He mentioned that the problem with the VA, like most stretched out agencies, is the bottom up approach inherent in their leadership structure. Managers seek only to make their bosses happy by telling them what they want to hear. Meanwhile, the employees on the front lines are the only ones who really know what’s going on.  Naturally, upper management never really gets a clear picture of the actual interaction between customers and their employees. This distillation process is the primary reason for such poor customer service. He went on to mention Obama’s recent SAVE campaign as an effort to bridge these gaps. The VA now has its own version called, Innovation Initiative. What a creative solution! 

I also got to sit in on Alan Webber’s presentation entitled, “Sun Tzu and the Art of Facebook: Developing and Implementing Your Gov 2.0 Strategy.” Alan is a partner with the Altimeter Group which is a social media consulting company based in San Mateo (Jeremiah Owyang author of “Best Practices” is also a partner). A lot of what he discussed is similar to Meerman’s take on personas. One thing he mentioned, which I agree wholeheartedly with, was the fact that an agency/organization’s central online presence should be its own website. I believe that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, although useful, allow for limited functionality. Only by building a website with specific functions tailored to your particular customer base will you take full advantage of what the web has to offer. 


Gov 2.0 LA provided some very insightful discussions as to how I could creatively implement some of my ideas at work. It would be interesting to see what sort of topics/issues will be discussed a year from now. Oh yeah, and I got me meet Craig!

1 comment:

  1. This is cool! Thanks for sharing this experience with us!:)

    ReplyDelete