ANZSOG
What we've seen in the Australian media over the last couple of years is a considerable reduction in the importance of print media. Double digit decline year to year in the circulation of print media has been the obvious arrangement. The sorts of things that we're much more likely to see these days are stories breaking online, perhaps on Twitter, and being picked up by the mainstream media a little later. Many of the mainstream, if not all the mainstream media publishers have online sites, as you'd expect, in which they can do the breaking news bit and get those things across. But it clearly isn't arresting the decline.
There've been some interesting models that the mainstream media have undertaken in order to address these things. There are models about pay-walling their news, about subscription arrangements and those sorts of things. I think we are seeing a very significant trend to new media and the new ways of breaking stories. I would regularly find that just with a Twitter feed on a computer to the side of my desk I'll see breaking stories arise in a way that might not be picked up even on the online media for an hour or so afterwards, just because of the way these things break. It changes the news cycle, it changes the need for us to respond, and it changes the need for us to know what to say to media in those circumstances. I think this has been a significant change in how public servants need to react to the new media.
Now I'll provide you with a copy of the slides by PDF afterwards so that you can see them, so you don't need to take notes necessarily, but the slides are largely around pictures rather than words. And I'll probably be talking to them.
These are the social media statistics for Australia as at the end of March this year. You can see there are about 23 million people in Australia, and you can see that slightly over half are Facebook users. Actually it's more important than that. About 19% of the people in Australia are less than 15. Now I'd like to think that many of those don't have their own Facebook accounts, it might not be true completely, but I think we can say probably the penetration isn't quite as high there. There are about roughly five or six percent who are over, over 85, I think it's over 80, and it's probably true that not a lot of them have their own Facebook accounts. It's a bit ageist I know, but I think we can say confidently that the saturation isn't quite as high there.
So what we've got is that these 13 million users are distributed amongst 75% of the population, which means that's about 13 million out of sort of 16 or 17 million. What does that mean? Well the real penetration of social media is about three people in every four, about 75%. It's certainly more than half of Australians between the ages of 15 and 80 are using social media all the time. I think it's important that we understand that this is the audience that we're likely to reach online. Over 12 million unique visitors to YouTube, lots of blogging going on, increasingly usage of Tumblr. Tumblr - 3.6Mn, or just over users of LinkedIn, significant numbers of people using social media. I think this tells us that if we're not paying attention to what's going on here we've got a problem.
In 2009, the then government launched a task force to look at gov2.0 and what could occur? The engaged task force. The task force reported at the end of 2009, and the government then made a declaration of open government in 2010. But encouraged the use of social media by public servants, and to inform people about what those services could be. Since then we've seen considerable growth in the use of social media by public servant agencies. There are hundreds of public servant Facebook sites, hundreds of authorised public service Twitter accounts, a whole range of blogs and things like that. You can find those relatively easily online. Indeed I'll show you in a moment where you can go to find a definitive list of those.
What are we using these sorts of tools for? We're using them for the delivery of services to citizens. So large agencies like the Department of Human Services run information accounts on social media, they run conversations on social media, they join groups on social media to make comments about things, they pursue this new media way of doing things very, very significantly.
We use it for media and marketing monitoring. Now one of the interesting things, and as an aside, is that citizens want us to use social media, and say the government should be doing this, or the government should be responding on that to social media. But, there are a significant number of them who also complain that we're monitoring social media. So sometimes in the one article you'll see, you should be paying more attention, but you should stop monitoring it. I'm sort of thinking well how can you do that? It doesn't sort of arrive in my brain without paying attention.
So there is a sort of challenge around what we do here, and balance these competing demands amongst citizens. I think the overall majority are very clearly interested in our delivery of services through social media. We're seeing some policy engagement and discussion on social media. Again there's something of a challenge here, and I'll show you some examples later. The challenges as we know, you can have a reasonable conversation about something that isn't particularly controversial on social media.
One of the games that you can play along with online media is to look at the ABC, the National Broadcasting Corporations website, look at the comments on the articles. I don't generally encourage you to read comments, because it could be problematic for you eventually. If you look at those comments it's interesting to see how many it takes before you get in to a fight between one side of politics and the other. It’s about 25. If you've read an article that has more than 25 comments that isn't about sport, and doesn't end up with two sides of politics essentially being abusive to each other, you'd be very surprised to see it. So we know that those topics deteriorate relatively quickly. What does it tell us? It's one thing to have conversations about IT strategy or something like that, using social media or IT policy. It's entirely another question to be using those same sorts of approaches to having discussions about migration policy, about customs protection and those sorts of much more emotive issues. Certainly it's hard to get the balance right there.
It's also about maximising internet resources. One of the, I think obvious things, not really picked up by people sometimes, is that if I want to put up a Facebook site for a particular purpose I could do it almost overnight. I can start a Twitter account at next to no cost immediately if I want to use it for a particular purpose. We're using someone else's IT resources to get our message across. Now we shouldn't be naive in thinking about what's happening in those circumstances, quite clearly if you're not paying, you're the product not the user necessarily. So what we're doing in those circumstances is using the resources provided by these companies, which are largely making their money from advertising, but using their resources to get our message across. I've got to tell you I'm pretty comfortable with that if we're doing it properly. I think that yes, we can manage that reasonably in a way that allows us to make good use of those resources.
Now the open government declaration talked about three pillars of the conversation. Informing, engaging and participating. Now I'm going to run through each of these with a couple of examples of where you can see what it is that we're doing.
The first of these is informing. This is Australia.gov.au, the website you can see in the background. We're in the process of a continuous improvement of this website upgrading it over the last couple of years. For those of you who are interested, we've moved it to a cloud like solution, moved it off a proprietary content management system, in to Drupal, and we're continuing to do that. By the end of this calendar year we'll have it in the public cloud. We're getting the benefits that you would expect to get as a consequence from those things. If you search this site for social media you'll find a tab, or a link that has all the government social media sites on it, and you can see what those are if you wanted to explore more what it is that we're doing.
We get a couple of million hits a month on this site, for a range of things. People overseas trying to find out information about Australia, very popular, one of the very popular hits is people looking for when the school holidays are. I suspect it is parents looking for when they finish rather than when they start, but we get a lot of hits around those sorts of things. So we do provide that general information. As you drive down further in it to it you can see the whole-of-government search, a big search box on the top, allows you to find links to government services, and things the citizens might want.
That's useful in terms of informing of citizens around services or around things that Australia provides. It isn't necessarily a rapidly changing set of information. We do upgrade it, we publish campaigns that we're using, or the government advertising is using on it, it's not meant to be an instant response website. That's as opposed to some of the emergency services, generally speaking, websites, online presences, where they are actively engaged in talking to people about what is it they're doing.
The Queensland Police Service is perhaps the best example of what's going on in this regard. Queensland, one of Australia's States, has a very active social media presence. Now it didn't happen by accident that they got very active at this. They were, to an extent, lucky. At the time of a very major set of natural disasters they had just launched their online presence. As a consequence of this from 2010 through to 2011 Queensland experienced a set of natural disasters, of some flooding and some cyclones, and as you can see, just as this one example, the ‘Likes’ on Facebook shot through an enormous increase as a consequence. Because what people found was an active way of engaging with the police service and getting information about the sort of things in which they were interested.
So successful was this campaign by the Queensland Police Service, they were able to establish a myth busters account almost on Twitter. When people put things out that were false, deliberately or not, they were able to correct that and make sure the public knew what was going on. They've had to go to the extent on their Facebook page of putting a display, and I don't think you can see it on the... oh yes you can, I'll just go back for a moment. You can see in the bottom left hand side they've got to say, if you're reporting a crime don't do it here, but go to these numbers, it's been so successful.
Now it's one of those interesting challenges I think, that the success was to the extent that people were reporting on their Facebook page, I was just driving down this street and I saw the crime going on in this house. Which was fine, except they had their real user name and their Facebook profile, and if the criminal subsequently got in to trouble they had a very good understanding of who it was who dobbed them in to the police. So it wasn't a very useful thing to do.
[Audience laughter]
Luckily they've got past that and understood where to go,it's not meant for those sorts of things. It is very good for getting discussion with the public, particularly about these matters around emergency services and urgent things.
Now I draw a set of rules from this particular part of usage that I think are worthwhile considering. The first is now is the right time to be engaged in social media, to provide government services. It's not something that one needs to wait in order to do. Now is when you should be doing it. Generally speaking I think it's true in the Australia context, if you aren't people are probably asking questions about your particular department and what it is that it's doing. The next is this notion of trusting staff. I'm going to reflect on that a bit more as we go further in to the presentation.
I think it's important to recognise that every day relatively junior government staff engage with the public on the telephone, across the counter, in the street, in a whole range of ways. They do that without creating enormous difficulties for the department. Indeed on the whole they cope with difficult situations in a very responsible way, and generate excellent results for the department. My concept here is why shouldn't we trust them therefore, to do the same online? At the end of the presentation I'll talk about some of the challenges people still see about social media. I think the lesson here is that we can trust our people to do things, and if we do trust them they respond very well as a consequence.
The next point here around social media is to understand that this is a two way conversation. Indeed the gov2.0 movement if you like, or the gov2.0 concept, is to take those web technologies and move them from broadcasting to communicating or collaborating with citizens, answering their questions, responding to their concerns, engaging with them. It's not just about broadcast. And if you don't understand the difference between those two things then that can be difficult on social media.
One of the interesting things I find occasionally in looking at Twitter accounts is the number of Twitter accounts that have very few followers and don't make use of #. Now when I talk to government agencies about this, they'll say oh we didn't want to follow anyone 'cause we don't want to endorse anybody, and consequently we don't have many followers, but we think that's more of a safe house. Well actually if you've only got 30 followers you're not using #. You're better off going out and screaming at the bus stop 'cause you'll actually connect with more people that way than you will putting out Tweets at 11 o'clock at night on your not watched account.
We know that two hours is about the life of a Tweet. If it isn't picked up in two hours it's gone, mostly. As a consequence you really do need to be engaged. You need to be accessible as well. This is the notion that again, that if all you're doing is broadcasting things, essentially putting out ads, and don't respond to questions or engage with people, you're going to get some benefit to a certain extent, but you're not going to get the full benefit of these new platforms, the ability to actually get involved in discussions with people, and help them in that regard.
Finally, and I've touched on this already; understand that although the free platforms do mean you're the thing that's being marketed. That doesn't matter, because you can use those platforms and get particularly good benefits at very low costs, in terms of hardware and infrastructure. Yes, there are other costs which I'll come to in a moment.
So I think this is the challenge here. We're ready to use these things now, and it's almost necessary, I think, in 21st Century government to be involved in doing those things.
The next thing that I wanted to talk about is around engaging on online media. I mentioned this briefly before. This is the notion of actually discussing things with people. I'm going to use a particular example that's about the business that I have most of the time, in terms of consulting around technology issues. One of the biggest challenges we have in government procurement previously has been a challenge of what we described as a probity risk, unfairly giving someone an advantage in a procurement. Now the risk averse nature of the public service, combined... and I trust there aren't many lawyers here, but combined with the risk averse notion of lawyers is that we get this probity event that says you mustn't do anything. You know it's really much better if you don't talk to anybody at all, 'cause then no-one will ever accuse you of doing anything wrong. The minor consequence of that is you also never buy anything useful. At least you won't get in trouble for doing that.
Now what online means have allowed us to do is something we couldn't do before. Online means we can tell everybody about everything. All you need to do is look at our site, and you can see what procurements are coming up, you can see the draft statements of requirements, you can comment about those things. As a major procurer the two biggest challenges that worry me are that I will attempt to buy something that isn't for sale, and of course companies will still offer it to me, but I won't know that they've had to cobble it together and charge me extra to do that, I won't know where the risks are as a consequence, unless I've asked them beforehand.
The second is the risk that I won't know what the cost drivers of something are. So I won't know that 80% of my requirements could be met at 20% of the cost, and the next 20% cost 80% of the amount being invested. If I could cut those back I might be able to save significant amounts just by not asking for those expensive things and doing without them. Previously it's been very hard to engage with companies to find that out. The use of online media like blogs and those sorts of things allows us to put these requirements out to everybody beforehand, in drafts, or in consultation, ask for comments. They don't have to necessarily be on the website, they can email us the comments back if they want to, separately, we can anonymise them or make them generic and show them on the website so we're answering everybody's questions. We can engage in a way that we haven't been able to previously.