The latest news comes from The Stratford Institute for Digital Media . Here’s the scoop:

“Having released the first-ever evaluation of provincial and territorial open government and egovernment initiatives, the Stratford Institute for Digital Media, in partnership with Brainmaven, turns to Canadian citizens to participate in the Citizen-App Challenge. Visit egov.brainmaven.com to share ideas for apps that draw on government data to provide new and useful services. Top voted ideas will be presented to the federal Advisory Panel on Open Government”.

Simple enough. Now start submitting those ideas!

The  key problem I see now is people using the broad term “social media”  when in fact  they mean either “social media tools” or “social media engagement’. Rarely do they mean both. This simple little difference is in my opinion the reason why there is such a massive social media knowledge gap in plenty of organizations. Proper context is simply lost in translation.

Here’s how I like to simplify things:

This year, my favourite excerpts are as follows:

“…the traditional relationship between government and citizens continues to evolve. Enabled by instantaneous communication and collaboration technologies, citizens are demanding a greater role in public policy development and in the design and delivery of services. They want greater access to government data and more openness and transparency from their institutions”.

Also,

“Doing new things in new ways comes about only by trying. We must couple creativity with courage and start to work in fundamentally different ways. We must resist the urge to create layer upon layer of rules and processes to shield ourselves from every possible error. This has been our tendency in the recent past. It cannot be our approach in the future…

…Across our vast enterprise, public servants are already devising creative ways to do a better job and get better results. We need to shine a light on these trailblazers so that we can all learn from their experiments and build on them. Managers and senior leaders can foster innovation—large and small—by encouraging their teams to ask how their work can be done better, test out new approaches and learn from mistakes.

So much innovation in the 21st century is being made possible by well-developed communication technologies. Yet many public servants are frustrated by a lack of access to the Web 2.0 and social media tools that have such potential for helping us transform the way we work and serve Canadians. Public servants should enjoy consistent access to these new tools wherever possible. We will find a way to achieve this while at the same time safeguarding the data and information in our care.

I also encourage departments to continue expanding the use of Web 2.0 technologies and social media to engage with Canadians, share knowledge, facilitate collaboration, and devise new and efficient services“.

Lots of great content, unfortunately still no differentiation between social media tools and actual social media engagement. While calling on departments to enable access is a great starting point, it doesn’t solve the problem of public servants not being empowered to engage once they have access, nor having the proper human resource allocation to do so effectively.

I look forward to the day Mr. Wouters directly addresses this.

With that in mind, consider these recent ComScore findings:

In October 2011, 1.2 billion users around the world visited social networking sites. Most notably, nearly 1 in every 5 online minutes is now spent in social networks.

In terms of worldwide age demographics, the breakdown is as follows:

Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean all these people are hard-core social content creators. Some may be clicking through to social sites based on something they found through a Google search.  As I’ve indicated in the past,  online users should always be further segmented based on their online behaviour.

What is significant about these findings however is that they indicate we need to stop thinking of social media users as a separate category of internet users (unless we are sub-segmenting of course). All internet users are now in one way or another influenced by social content (often without even knowing it). I find that this is a point that is clearly missed by many senior leaders in organizations that still treat social media in a silo as opposed to looking at it as part of a holistic web presence.

I look forward to the day when the phrase “social media users” will be merged into “internet users” as people realize this fact.

The high-level goals of this particular initiative (which is now in the implementation phase) are:

1. To enhance understanding and strengthen the capacity on the theoretical and practical concepts of social marketing
2. To develop a social marketing strategy aimed at improving the knowledge , beliefs and behaviours of public servants in the area of ethical conduct

A core component for us to deliver has been training and capacity building of the team to undertake the above goals. Let me tell you, the team on the ground is ready. Many challenges lie ahead, but nothing that collaborative team effort can’t solve. I’ve seen many training models throughout my career, but few as effective as the intensive “learning by doing” approach, where participants actually implement what they are taught during the training process. I have learned so much from this initiative myself, that my mind is spinning with new ideas for the effective engagement of people in our consulting practice. Personally, I really wish that traditional consulting and training models placed more of an emphasis on the importance of collaborative work between the client and consultant/trainer as opposed to relying on and expecting turn-key solutions. A single key will never fit perfectly whenever people are involved.

I look forward to being able to share more information regarding this undertaking. Stay tuned.