Recently in Email Communication Category

You've been talking about it for a while, but now your organization has finally decided to get a new content management system (CMS).  This is the "BIG" project of the year.  All of your hopes and dreams for where your website is heading are wrapped up in your CMS project. 

In fact, if you're a typical organization, everyone has started to project their own goals onto the project.  "We'll have that fixed when we get our new CMS," they say, and, "That will all be addressed with our new CMS." 

Goals for almost every CMS project:

• Keep content more up to date
• Allow individual "content managers" easier access to update their areas of the website
• Create a more consistent look and feel for the organization
• Make search indexing and search within the site easier
• Improve navigation
  

More advanced goals for your CMS project:

• Improve content structure: Produce content in multiple standard formats so it can be reused by other websites and systems
• Support improved navigation: Publish content with appropriate tags and categorizations so that new content appears in all appropriate locations rather than just in one place.  For example, if you publish three safety publications on water, fire, and snow, the publication on "fire" should appear in the fire safety area of the website as well as the "safety publications" area without much extra effort
• Works well with other technologies (Web 2.0 widgets, other systems you buy, etc.):  Your CMS needs to "play well with others."  If you are looking at CMS vendors and the vendor says, "we do that" in response to all of your questions, that is red flag.  CMS are not best in class at everything.  You may want to use YouTube for video, Google for search, GovDelivery for email communication, and Wordpress for blogging.  Find out how the CMS will work with these systems rather than hoping the CMS will do everything you want.
  

5 outcomes you should expect from your content management project:

1. New content can be posted within 15 minutes by any approved individual in the organization. 
   
   I know that some content has to be approved, but if your project is more focused on "workflow" and approvals rather than efficiency, you may want to rethink things.  The fact is that in order to be current, Web content cannot be bottle-necked by cumbersome approval processes.  Set policies and guidelines for content and let people publish without too many extra steps.  As long as you're not publishing the new interest rates, you can make edits later without major consequence.
   
   
2. Any web page can be published as an XML / RSS Feed at the same time as it is published in HTML.
   
   This ensures that other Web managers, bloggers, and even other systems (including GovDelivery) can read and interpret your page in an automated way.  In the Web 2.0 world, this type of openness and sharing is important and will ensure that your content "has legs" and gets reposted and repurposed across the Internet.
   
   
3. All web pages are easily indexed by major search engines.  I'm not an expert on this, but it's an easy topic to research online.  Google has all kinds of tools for this at www.google.com/webmasters
   
   
4. Content can be published to multiple locations at the same time without too much extra effort.
   
   
5. Your system supports a user-centric design. 
   
   Oops, you thought your CMS project was going to give you a "usable website."  If that's the case, you should stop right now and focus a bunch of time on the design and usability of your website.  A CMS is for managing the content on your website.  If you have a poor design and a good CMS, you will just have very up to date, but unusable content.  

Finally, you need to have a way of capturing information from people who are interested in your content so you can reach out to them when updates occur.  My company, GovDelivery, works with government websites on this and has found the following best practices to support the rollout of new content management systems.

• Have a proactive communication system in place before you launch your CMS. Why? You want to know what people are interested in on your current site so you can focus more effort on that content and make sure people know how to find it when the new website is up and running.  Even the best redesigned websites often annoy their most regular users.  You can help prevent this frustration by allowing regular users to signup for updates before you rollover to the new CMS when links/designs/navigation will typically change dramatically.
  
  
• Make sure that your new CMS will work with whatever proactive communication solution you are using or plan to use to allow you to automatically send updates when you publish Web content.  You don't want to publish Web content and then have to login separately to send email.  In GovDelivery's case, if you publish information in RSS or can connect to a Web Services API, you'll be able to automate your outbound email communication.
  

This is a complex topic that I will return to if there is any interest.  When I mentioned I was writing this blog entry, I got some great links to other resources on vendor websites and regarding open sources CMS.  If the topic is of interest, I will write another article on vendor selection.

This post from Chris Dorobek at the DorobekInsider.com and Federal News Radio is an interesting look at Gartner's 10 Technologies to watch.

Find the post here

Here are the technologies listed:

• Virtualization
• Cloud computing
• Servers -- Beyond Blades
• Web-Oriented Architectures
• EnterpriseMashups
• Specialized Systems
• Social Software and Social Networking
• Unified Communications
• Business Intelligence
• Green IT

We've talked about the Web 2.0 concepts (Social Networking, Enterprise Mashups, and Web-Oriented Architectures) in this blog.

Chris points out that Cloud Computing is a challenge in government.  I think this is true, but I believe that government can find certain areas where Cloud Computing provides real benefit for minimal risk.

We have been working with a government agency on allowing them to tap into our email delivery infrastructure for messages they need to send out regarding new rulings.  Rather than force them to manage all of the data on our servers, we simply accept the email address(es) of the recipients and the message content when it is ready for distribution.  This information has to go out over the Internet anyway, and by using our email delivery infrastructure, our client has better assurance that the information will get to the inbox of the intended recipient in a timely manner.  If the email bounces, we take care of it.  If the client needs to send a lot of emails, they leverage our scale.

Cloud computing is just as powerful for government as it is for others, but we need to work hard to find the right opportunities to make it work well without risking secure data.

There is a lot of interest in this topic.  Yesterday, we had 80+ people on a webinar discussing the work we are doing in cloud computing through our On-Demand Mailer which allows any government agency to use GovDelivery as its mail sender for any important email (we used to just offer our service for mass email communication.  The interest and the fact that no one dropped off during the whole presentation or the case study by www.nlrb.gov was a good sign to me.  You can signup to get a recording of the Webinar and our presentation here if you're interested.

One of the challenges for us with Cloud Computing is figuring out how to explain it to our clients.  In our webinar, everyone kept asking us to "explain again how this is different from what we already do."  I am hopeful that is people get more used to the concept the explaining will get easier.

Citizens crave information, but they are also busy and difficult to reach.

Blogs, social networks, and other Web 2.0 capabilities can help you reach citizens with critical information how and where they want to obtain it.  But, are any government agencies really using these tools?  We've provided examples before, but here are some new findings.

In April, a ScienceLogic survey found that more than 65 percent of government IT workers surveyed said Web 2.0 tools are important to their operations and 20 percent were using tools like wikis, blogs and RSS feeds. More than 50 percent said they are planning on having these tools in place by next year.

In some cases, such as the Intelligence Communities' wikopedia project, Intellipedia and the Navy Department CIO blog, the Web 2.0 tools are internal communications tools.

But other applications face the public such as those at USA.gov where they use social media applications to reach the public, including blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and microblogs.

A recent article on Read Write Web, "To 2.0 or Not 2.0? That is the Governments' Question" (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/government_20.php), provides additional examples of how the government is using social media to reach the public.

In a recent blog post by Daniel Mintz, chief information officer for the U.S. Department of Transportation, states, "The second generation of Web access will change the way government delivers services and its relationship with the American public."

While there are many examples of government embracing Web 2.0, I am now looking for more examples of how this embrace of technology is resulting in positive change and efficiency in how government interacts with the citizen.  The changes instituted following comments on the TSA blog are very positive examples.  I hope to find more and document them here over time.

One thing we do see is that content that challenges and engages the citizen (what we call, "Compelling Content") seems to be more successful in Web 2.0 which is fundamentally an environment where content faces a lot of competition for attention.

We will be discussing these issues at the Proactive Communication Roundtable at the Department of Treasury where we will talk about embracing new channels, leveraging channels that have been with us for longer (mainly email), and how different agencies use compelling content to engage users.

I have the following rules for my use of email with colleagues, friends, and family:

• Avoid emails when I'm angry
• Avoid constructive feedback by email
• Avoid emails in the evening (Google has a new tool called Mail Goggles that forces people to do math problems before sending email in the evening so you don't email anyone while intoxicated)

This incredibly insightful video that should be required watching for the whole world really gets to the bottom of why email is not useful for many types of communication.

The main reason... drum roll please... email is good for facts and data, but does not carry the visual and emotional cues that are critical to human interaction and understanding.

What does this mean for government?

• For official communication (i.e., facts and data), email is unrivaled and is perfectly suited for the role.  You can see my previous entry on this.
  
• For citizen service, email is only useful up to the point where tone becomes important
• For internal collaboration and cooperation between offices and agencies, there is no substitute for in person and (as a decent substitute) phone meetings and conversations