2013 update Automating online activities without IT intervention - using web tools to make jobs easier

There's often lots of small - and not so small - activities that communications teams want to carry out online that would make their jobs easier, but aren't really tasks to give to IT teams.

For example, you may wish to update your agency's Facebook and Twitter profile pictures when your logo changes, automatically post your blog posts to LinkedIn and Facebook, be sent an email whenever someone tweets at you or receive an alert whenever your Minister is mentioned in a breaking news story.

This is where it is useful to get familiar with services like IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes.

IFTTT, or "IF This Then That" is a simple logic engine that allow you to string together a trigger  and an action to create a 'recipe' using the format IF [trigger] then [action].

For example, below is a recipe used to automatically tweet new posts on this blog:

A recipe in IFTTT

This sounds very simple, but it can be a very powerful labour saving tool. Each trigger and action can be from different online services, or even physical devices.

A recipe in IFTTT (click to enlarge)

Recipes can be more complex, with various parameters and settings you can configure (for example the recipe above has been configured to append #gov2au to the tweets).

For example, at right is the full page for a recipe that archives your Tweets to a text file in your Dropbox.

Besides connecting the trigger (a new tweet from you) with the action (posting your tweet in Dropbox),  you can choose whether to include retweets and @replies.

You can set the file name where your tweets will be stored and the file path in Dropbox, plus you can set the content that is saved and how it will be formated.

In this case the recipe is set to keep the text of the tweet (the 'Text' in a blue box), followed on a new line by the date it was tweeted ('CreatedAt') and then, on another new line, a permanent link to the tweet ('LinkToTweet'), followed by a line break to separate it from following tweets.

You can add additional 'ingredients' such as Tweet name and User Name - essentially whatever information that Twitter shares for each tweet.

Rather than having to invent and test your own recipes, IFTTT allows people to share their recipes with others, meaning you can often find a useful recipe, rather than having to create one from scratch.

In fact I didn't create either of the recipes I've illustrated, they were already listed.

There's currently over 36,000 recipes to choose from, for the 47 services supported - from calendars, to RSS feeds, to email, to social networks, to blogs and video services, from SMS to physical devices.

All the online services that can be 'triggers' for IFTTT

It is even possible to string together recipes in sequence.

For example, if I wanted to update my profile image in Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and LinkedIn, I can set up a series of recipes such as,

• If [My Facebook profile picture updates] Then [Update my Twitter profile picture to match]
• If [My Twitter profile picture updates] Then [Update my Blogger profile picture to match]
• If [My Blogger profile picture updates] Then [Update my LinkedIn profile picture to match]
• If [My LinkedIn profile picture updates] Then [Update my Facebook profile picture to match]

Using these four recipes, whenever I update one profile picture, they will all update.

Also it's easy to turn recipes on and off - meaning that you can stop them working when necessary (such as if you want to use different profile pictures).

However there's limits to an IF THEN system, which is where a tool like Yahoo Pipes gets interesting.

Yahoo Pipes is a service used to take inputs, such as an RSS or data feed, webpage, spreadsheet or data from a database, manipulate, filter and combine them with other data and then provide an output with no programming knowledge.

This sounds a bit vague, so here's a basic example - say you wanted to aggregate all news related to Victoria released by Australian Government agencies in media releases.

To do this in Yahoo Pipes you'd fetch RSS feeds from the agencies you were interested in, 'sploosh' them together as a single file, filter out any releases that don't mention 'Victoria', then output what is left as an RSS feed.

Building a Yahoo Pipe (click to enlarge)

But that's getting ahead of ourselves a little... To the right is an image depicting how I did this with Yahoo Pipes.

Here's how it works...

First you'll need to go to pipes.yahoo.com and log in with a Yahoo account.

First I created a set of tools to fetch RSS from Australian Government agencies. These are the top five blue boxes. To create each I simply dragged the Fetch feed from the 'sources' section of the left-hand menu onto the main part of the screen and then pasted in each RSS feed URL into the text fields provided (drawing from the RSS list in Australia.gov.au).

Next, to combine these feeds, I used one of the 'operator' function from the left menu named Union. What this does is it allows you to combine separate functions into a single output file. To combine the Fetch feed RSS feeds all I needed to do was click on the bottom circle under each (their output circle) and drag the blue line to a top circle on the Union box (the input circle).

Then I created a Filter, also an 'operator' function and defined the three conditions I wanted to include in my final output - news items with 'Victoria', 'Victorian' or 'Melbourne'. All others get filtered out.  I linked the Filter's input circle to the Union's output circle, then linked the output from the Filter to the Pipe Output.

Then I tested the system worked by clicking on the blue header for each box and viewing their output in the Debugger window at bottom.

When satisfied it worked (and I did have to remove the filter condition 'Vic' as it picked up parts of words such as "service"), I saved my pipe using the top right save button, giving it the name 'Victoria RSS', then ran the pipe and published it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0392f5ec8f7450abbf650056c22f1e5d.

You can also see the output RSS feed at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0392f5ec8f7450abbf650056c22f1e5d&_render=rss

Note that pipes don't have to be published, you can keep them private. You can also publish their outputs as RSS feeds or as a web service (using JSON) for input into a different system. You can even get the results as a web badge for your site, by email, phone or as PHP for websites.

An IFTTT recipe built from the Yahoo Pipe above
(click to enlarge)

Alternatively you can even combine them with IFTTT - for example creating a recipe that sends you an email every time an Australian Government agency mentions Victoria in an media release.

In fact I created this recipe (in about 30 seconds) to demonstrate how easy it was. You can see it to the right, or go and access it at IFTTT at the recipe link: http://ifttt.com/recipes/43242

So that's how easy it now is to automate actions, or activities, online - with no IT skills, in a short time.

There's lots of simple, and complex, tasks that can be automated easily and quickly with a little creativity and imagination.

You can also go back and modify or turn your recipes and pipes on and off when needed, you can share them with others in your team or across agencies quickly and easily.

Have you a task you'd like to automate? 

• Finding mentions of your Department on Twitter or Facebok
• Tracking mentions of your program in the media releases of other agencies
• Archiving all your Tweets and Facebook statuses
• Receiving an SMS alert when the weather forecast is for rain (so you take your umbrella)
• Posting your Facebook updates, Blog posts and media releases automatically on Twitter spread throughout the day (using Buffer)

The sky's the limit!

2013 update How Facebook has become a risk for public servants, and what you can do about it

If you are one of the majority of public servants with a Facebook account, then it may be time to reconsider how you use the service.

As discussed in ZDNet's post, Is Facebook damaging your reputation with sneaky political posts?, Facebook is now posting messages in your timeline and saying you 'Like' the messages simply because you once 'Liked' the Facebook Page that posted them.

So what does this mean, and how is it a risk to public servants?  Here's how it works.

When you 'Like' a Page in Facebook, Facebook assumes this means you also like all the content, status updates, images and other material, that may be posted on that Page by its administrators.

To be 'helpful' Facebook will automatically place some of the Page's content in the newsfeeds of your Facebook friends, with a notice that you 'Like' the content.

Facebook calls this a feature, as quoted in the ZDNet article,

To help people find new Pages, events, and other interesting information, people may now see posts from a Page a friend likes. These posts will include the social context from your friends who like the Page and will respect all existing settings.

This may sound innocent enough, but what it means in practice is that if you ever 'Liked' a Facebook Page for any reason, any new content posted in that Page may now appear to your friends as explicitly 'Liked' by you.

As Pages can change administrator, content and focus, that innocuous Facebook Page on pet rabbits you liked two years ago may now start spewing controversial, obnoxious or otherwise inappropriate content into your Facebook friends' newsfeeds - with each piece of content indicating that you 'Liked' it.

This could merely be embarassing, or it could put your career at risk.

Say you 'Liked' a Facebook Page for a charity you support that works in a policy area covered by your agency. Due to a change in government policy, that charity loses funding and, as a result, begins posting messages on its Facebook Page which are strongly critical of the government's new policy to galvanise their supporters to write to the Minister. Even worse, one of the Page's administrators has been radicalised and frames some of these messages in very strong, almost abusive, language.

These messages begin appearing in the newsfeeds of your friends, complete with a notice that YOU 'Liked' them. Incidentally, you don't see them yourself because Facebook doesn't notify you that they're doing this and these messages don't appear in your own newsfeed.

One of your friends (a colleague at your agency) is horrified that you'd act so unprofessionally and sends screenshots of the messages with your 'Like' to HR, notifying them that you've broken the public service code of conduct by publicly criticising your agency and the government.

You get called in for a discussion with your manager and a HR representative, who shows you the screenshot and asks you to explain your conduct...

Will they believe you when you claim ignorance?


Now compound this issue by thinking about every single Facebook Page that you've every Liked.

Any of them could begin posting messages which could embarrass you, or threaten your job and, thanks to this Facebook feature, indicate automatically that you 'Liked' each message.

Even worse you don't even know when they're doing it because you don't see these messages in your own newsfeed.


So what should you do to deal with this?

Assuming that you're not prepared to close down your Facebook page or, at least, unLike all pages that you have liked, I recommend that public servants look at their 'Likes' page (accessible from their Favourites page) and cast an eye over the pages they've Liked to see if any are likely to post content that will get them in trouble in their friends' newsfeed.

Then make this a regular habit - check all your pages every month to see what they're saying.

Finally, bring this issue with Facebook to your agency's attention, so you'll not be accused of 'Liking' content you didn't.

2013 update Should government agencies or Ministers supply content to newspapers if it will end up paywalled?

Thirty years ago if you wanted to read the news, you bought a newspaper. A paper newspaper, with real money.

As a result all of a government's announcements - media releases, Ministerial statements, advertising and other content had a price tag by default.

You didn't get to see them if you didn't pay the paper's price (except if you browsed in-store - a practice news agents discouraged).

Over the last twenty years however, news has become freely available online. Go to any print publisher's masthead, online-only news service or agency website and you can read the releases, statements and even see the ads without paying a cent.

Clearly this has been good for governments, who can reach a wider audience with their content due to the lack of a 'paywall' barrier to consumption.

However with the major newspapers now considering paywalls, should government agencies be prepared to go back to the days of allowing commercial providers to charge money for the content they provide to newspaper proprietors for free?

This is a thorny question. On the surface it looks easy - it was OK before, it should be OK now. However we have a new generation of citizens who grew up with free news, who are less inclined to pay for news and therefore government is likely to struggle to reach them.

At the same time we have a phlethora of news sites, some will be paywalled but others won't. Agencies can now distribute releases, statements and even advertisements via their own websites, email lists, and social media channels.

So does government need to rely on traditional media to carry straight news? It is still appropriate for agencies to allow newsprint publishers to 'clip the ticket' for the content they release for free?

Should there be a requirement that Ministerial and agency content isn't hidden behind the paywall and remains part of the free content provided by news services? A traffic generator, but not a profit centre?

I don't have a ready answer to this.

I would expect the news publishers would be quite happy commercialising government content, as they have done in the past, as it gives them cheap content to boost their profits (which can, of course, be taxed).

I also expect that older public servants and politicians wouldn't even question the right of publishers to make money from government content, as it was done before.

However for younger people the situation may not be so black-and-white.

2013 Having a website crash due to high traffic is a failure of management, not load

Today has provided an interesting lesson for several organisations, with the crash of both the David Jones and ClickFrenzy websites in Australia.

But first, some background.

ClickFrenzy is a new 24-hour sale for Australian online retailers starting from 7pm on Tuesday 20 November.

Based on the US 'Cyber Monday' sale, which now attracts over 10 million buyers, ClickFrenzy was designed to entice Australian online shoppers to buy from local online retailers by offering massive discounts on product prices for a short period of time.

The event was announced over a month before it was due to start and has been promoted through newspapers, online and in some retail stores, with the ClickFrenzy team expecting thousands of shoppers to log on, likening it to a "digital boxing day sale".

I've kept an eye on the ClickFrenzy site and signed up to receive an email alert when the sale began.

Just before the sale started I hopped back onto the ClickFrenzy site to see how it was going, and only saw a basic page of text, with no graphics or formatting. Puzzled I tried reloading - and the site wouldn't load at all.

That's when I hopped onto Twitter and learnt from the #clickfrenzy hashtag that the ClickFrenzy site had already crashed from the load and no-one had any idea when it would be back online.

This meant that the list of participating retailers (many of whom had been kept secret) was inaccessible. No shopper knew who had the specials, meaning few sales could occur. Of the retailers that were known to be participating, two-thirds of their sites crashed too (such as Priceline and Myers).

In competition with ClickFrenzy, David Jones had decided to run its own independent 24-hour sale over a similar time period. Their sale, named 'Christmas Frenzy', was to be run from their main website.

How did their launch go? Their site also crashed, and was down for several hours, taking down not only the shopping site but all their corporate information.


So we had two major online sales on the same day from Australian retails, and both experienced crashes due to the volume of traffic.

What was to blame? Both claimed the failure was due to unprecedented demand. So many people tried to get onto both sites that their servers could not cope (the same reason given for the mySchools website issues at launch in 2010 and the CFA website issues during the Victorian fires in 2009).

Let's unpick that reasoning.

The world wide web is twenty years old. Amazon.com is 18 years old. The US 'Cyber Monday' sale is six years old.

David Jones is an experienced retailer, with significant IT resources and has been operating an online store for some time. Their Christmas Frenzy sale was planned and well promoted.

Click Frenzy is being run by experienced retailers as well. They built an emailing list of people interested in the event and also widely promoted the sale. The retailers supporting them are large names and operate established online shopping sites as well.

In both cases the organisers had a wealth of experience to draw on. The growth of Amazon, the US Cyber Monday sales, their own website traffic figures and email list sign-ups, not to mention a host of public examples of how to manage web server load well, and badly, from media sites, social networks and even government sites (such as mySchools and CFA examples above).

There are many IT professionals with experience on how to manage rapid load changes on web servers.

There's scalable hosting solutions which respond almost instantly to fast-increasing loads, such as during an emergency or with breaking news, and 'scale up' the site to support much larger numbers of simultaneous users. (Though in the case of Christmas Frenzy and Click Frenzy a large increase in load was expected, rather than unexpected.)

There's even automated processes for testing how much load a website will be able to bear by simulating the impact of thousands or millions of visitors.

In other words, there's no longer any technical reason why any organisation should have their website fail due to expected or anticipated load.


Load is not a reason, it is a justification.

We have the experience, knowledge and technology to manage load changes.

What the Click Frenzy and Christmas Frenzy failures illustrate is that some organisations fail to plan for load. They haven't learnt from the experience of others, don't invest in the right infrastructure and may not even test their sites.

They are literally crossing their fingers and praying that their website won't crash.

A website crashing when it receives a high level of load that could be expected or planned for is crashing due to a failure of management.


The next time your agency's management asks you to build a website which is expected to have a big launch or large traffic spikes, ask them if they're prepared to invest the funds necessary for a scalable and tested website, built on the appropriate infrastructure to mitigate the risk of sudden large increases in traffic.

If they aren't then let them know to cross their fingers and pray - and that a website crash due to high traffic is a failure of management, not load.

You might even get a Downfall parody video to memorialise the failure - as Click Frenzy received within two hours of their launch crash.

What may a 2.0 organisation look like?

As the world changes, so must our institutions - particularly government, including government agencies.

Without getting into how hard or easy it is for government agencies to change (recognising there's a diversity of views), any change should, necessarily be for the better.

So how should they change? In which ways should they reinvent themselves to suite a changing nation?

The wrong changes could lead to massive costs and organisational failures, so identifying the right type of changes (as near as possible) is a necessary first step once an organisation has reached a point where it recognises and accepts it need to make changes.

Fortunately there's lots of people thinking about this around the world, and in the US, over the last six months, a group of 900 people, spearheaded by Jonathan Opp and Chris Grams and as a joint collaborative effort by the MIX, Saba, and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, have conducted a Management 2.0 hackathon (inspired by software hackathons) to consider how management and organisations will need to adapt to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

Entitled The Management 2.0 Hackathon: Using the inspiration of the web to hack management, the process resulted in the blog post (linked) and the marvellous report embedded below.

The report is available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I strongly recommend that you take a look at the report and consider circulating it to your senior leadership team. It may provoke new thinking and support your organisation's efforts to identify and implement the right changes to ensure your organisation remains relevant, influential and effective into the future.

For all online community managers - register now for Swarm 2012

Last year was the first Swarm in Sydney- part conference and part peer support network for online community managers.

The event is returning this year in Melbourne on 13-14 September, bigger and friendlier.

The website is now live, with early bird rates to attend.

One of the highlights of Swarm this year will be the presentation of the results from the first ever Australian and New Zealand Online Community Managers' Survey.

I'll also be presenting on quite a controversial topic.

See you all there!

What are Australian Government agencies using social media to achieve?

I'm still collecting responses to my FOI request, however felt it worth providing some interim data on what Australian Government agencies are telling me that they are using social media to achieve.

Of the 166 FOI requests I sent out, I have, so far, received 59 legitimate responses in survey format (35%), another 10-20 in other formats (not analysed below) and 6 refusals to respond.

(I also received a survey response from the 'Dept of Silly Walks and Frilly Pants' that I've disregarded in this analysis. However I am pleased that FOI officers have healthy senses of humour!)

Of the 59 legitimate responses, 43 agencies indicated in Question 8 of my survey that they used social media channels for some purpose.

That is, 73% of Australian Government agencies in my sample are using social media.

This demonstrates how far the public service has come in embedding social media into their activities. However what do they say they are using social media to achieve?

Question 8 of my survey asked agencies:

Has your agency used social media services in the following activities?
(Please indicate all that apply and name each of the specific social media services used, ie: agency operated blogs or forums, third party blogs or forums, social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, social sharing sites such as YouTube, SlideShare or Flickr, etc)

The responses (so far) are as follows, listed from most to least popular uses of social media:

Answer choice	Responses	Share
For stakeholder engagement or collaboration	32	54.24%
Operating an information campaign	25	42.37%
Responding to customer enquiries/comments/complaints	25	42.37%
For engaging with journalists and media outlets	24	40.68%
For engagement or collaboration with other government agencies	24	40.68%
Monitoring citizen, stakeholder and/or lobbyist views and activities	17	28.81%
For a public consultation process	16	27.12%
For a stakeholder or other restricted access consultation process	13	22.03%
Other type of activity	11	18.64%
For policy or services co-design	7	11.86%

The 'Other' category was broken into the following 11 responses:

• cartoon competition - Flickr
• day to day information for subscribers and stakeholders
• Youtube
• No, but use of social media to advertise Gov Jobs is being assessed.
• YouTube
• LinkedIn (recruitment activity)
• Internal communication
• Yes
• Crowdsourcing
• Yes. Facebook (Promote Aboriginal Studies [ED: followed by two unreadable words])
• Facebook, Twitter

So, what are my conclusions from this data?

Firstly, there is a high use of social media for official purposes throughout the Australian Government. Almost three-quarters of agencies (73%) reported using at least one (and more commonly two or more) social media tools.

The most popular use for these tools is for stakeholder engagement or collaboration (53.24%) - well ahead of operating an information campaign (42.37%), indicating that social media use is expanding beyond Communication teams into broader agency use for two-way dialogues.

Responding to customer enquiries/comments/complaints was also quite high (42.37%), indicating that many agencies are serious about the use of social media channels for engaging.

Monitoring citizen, stakeholder and/or lobbyist views and activities was lower than I would have expected (28.81%). This is potentially the most cost-effective use for social media as it doesn't require engagement by an agency and can often be accomplished with free tools and limited time. I hope more agencies take this up in the future as it can provide deeper insights into their stakeholders and clients and help head-off issues.

Consultation was also lower than I had expected, with only a quarter of agencies respectively using social media for a public consultation process (27.12%) or for a stakeholder or other restricted access consultation process (22.03%). This is an area with significant potential to add value to policy deliberations and to provide a cost-effective extension or replacement of physical consultation events (particularly when budgets are tight). I hope more agencies take this up in the future as well.

The lowest rating answer was for policy or services co-design (11.86%), an emerging area which has a potentially bright future ahead of it. I can understand this being low as it is a new area for many agencies, but hope it grows as they realise the efficiencies of online co-design processes (alongside offline processes).

Finally, the other type of activity answer provided some interesting food for future thought. The answers provided by agencies, excluding the naming of specific social media tools and general use, fell into several significant categories; recruitment, internal communication and crowdsourcing.

These are all emerging areas where social media can make a significant difference and I hope we see a lot more of them in the future.

There is more analysis I will do down the track - which social media tools are most often used for each type of activity, what are the average number (and types) of tools used by agencies), however I'll wait for all responses to be received before putting this time in.

All in all the interim responses are very positive (at least from my position as a Gov 2.0 Advocate), with Australian Government agencies making strong use of social media across many different types of activities.

There's many who are testing, piloting and practicing different approaches to social media use, which will provide an ever-growing source of useful social media examples, case studies and expertise for all agencies to draw on and thereby build their capabilities and effectiveness online.

Frequently Asked Questions for Gov 2.0: How do we manage the resourcing requirements of engaging online?

Another question I get asked regularly is "How do we manage the resourcing requirements of engaging online?"

This is an interesting 'length of string' question as the resourcing requirements of social media vary dramatically depending on why and how an organisation chooses to use social media. Generally the more engaging your participation the higher the resourcing needs - although even social media listening can soak up resources rapidly.

I consider social media participation as a 'ladder of effort'.

At the lowest end your participation can be limited to a Twitter account or Facebook page, auto-publishing content from your website or media releases. This requires little or no resourcing and, while not a particularly effective approach, can serve as a platform to build on with more engaging content.

Moving upwards, an engaging Facebook page (or similar social network presence) may require several custom posts per week (or day if you are really, really active) and some moderation, responses and management oversight, possibly 10 hours or 1/4 of a person each week. Twitter, when used well, with around 5-10 tweets per day, may require the same or a little less time.

If you step up to participating in forums and blogs or using social networks as customer service channels the resourcing is likely to increase further. This is, however, where leveraging your existing customer service channels becomes essential. If you trust people to answer phones or emails with citizens on the other end, then you should trust them to respond to citizen enquiries online (otherwise you have an internal issue).

I have not seen many examples of agencies giving their customer service teams access to use social media on behalf of their organisation, and there may be challenges in skilling people to engage correctly in more public forums - however au remain hopeful.

If you decide to actively run collaborative exercises online via social media, or create and run communities using social networks and forums, you are likely to need to dedicate substantial resources. However even this can be managed through sharing the load around and operating in a pragmatic fashion. The ATO, for example, has done a great job with its SME forum over the last few years on a limited budget (and with some external support).

Cleverly managed many social media channels can be run efficiently through good planning and piggybacking. For instance, your website is chock-full of pre=approved content that can be reiterated through social media channels. Also, when seeking approvals for media releases, reports, policies or the like, pre-write one or more tweets, posts and social network updates and send them for approval with the document. That way you don't need to re-engage on the same content, providing context and a new proposal.

Keep in mind that, sometimes, you can 'trade-off' resources, potentially retasking people from activities that you are cutting to replace with social media engagement. Also it may be possible to find people willing to spend a few minutes a day, or hours a week, supporting your social media efforts (even if just for the resume boost)

Important things to keep in mind are:

• Live within your means - choose the social media channels and engagement approaches that suit your available resourcing limitations. 
• Don't grow unnecessarily - being bigger and better than anyone else is a common desire (as is the desire to be first), however if it doesn't suit your goals then don't extend yourself beyond your resourcing. 
• Set limits - make it clear to participants the amount of time you will dedicate to a channel. Some might criticise you, but most will appreciate that some engagement is better than none and that time is money.
• Seek resources beyond the usual suspects - Don't simply seek dollars to get things done, see whether you can discover innovative tactics to unlock resources.
• Invest proportionate to your goals - if you do have significant goals for your social media presence, then ensure that your organisation are prepared to invest appropriately. If your goals are larger than your resourcing, something has to give (and typically individuals burn out before organisations do). 
• Develop exit strategies and pull the plug if needed - while it is hard to let channels go, sometimes, if your resources are cut, so must you. It is better to do this in a planned and considered way that preserves reputation and carries forward as much good will as possible.