Closing keynote at GOVIS 2009 by Nat Torkington. First part: a Web 2.0 hypemerchant social media consultant. Second part: a bozo manager. Third part: honest truths.

1. A Play In Three
Acts

2. Social Brand
Mashworks
Kevin Ryall
Social Media Guru

3. /me
• @kevin1971 on Twitter
• kevin1971 on Skype
• kevin@socialmediaguru.co.nz
• http://socialmediaguru.co.nz
I have over 4000 followers on Twitter, including Stephen Fry and two basketball stars, a shoe
company, forty-three startups, and John Key’s press release feed. Here’s my website, where
you can sign up to my Social Media Blast newsletter.

4. this is the long tail. did they have long tails when you were young? no, you probably grew up
with short tails, or maybe long heads, or whatever it was, it was NOWHERE as cool as the long
tail. and social networks have long tails, man, they have them in spades. you’re probably
way out there, with no followers and a bebo page or something lame like that. i’m up here,
my page has followers up the wazoo and freakin GLITTER. anyway, the point of this slide is
to show that i know business and maths and i’m hipper than you are in ways your senior
citizen grey-power brains can’t begin to fathom.

5. Social Brand
Mashwork
Who here knows what a social brand mashwork is? Right, I didn’t think so. That’s why you
asked me here today.

6. Social Brand
Mashwork
=
Collaborative
brand-building
social mashup
spaces
It’s that simple, I wonder why nobody’s thought of it before. A web site where ordinary
people can have meaningful interactions with brands.

7. Pre-SBM
• IT Projects : Massive FAIL!!!
• 18% Govt IT Projects Succeed
(2004 Data)
• Was change this??? in 2004
that
anything invented
This is why they’re important.

8. The Answer
• Facebook and other social brand
mashwork spaces
• Social Networks: capability to
engage brand consumers in
leveraged interactions
• Game changing for IT!!!
Social networks are like kryptonite for IT projects. NONE of that 2004 study’s failures were
social network projects. THINK about it.

9. The World Is
Changing
• Web 1.0 was Yahoo! : PUBLISHING
• Web 2.0 was Google : SEARCHING
• Web 3.0BRAND MASHWORK :
SOCIAL
is Twitter + Facebook
• WHERE IS YOUR BRAND????
in 1996 we put things online. in 2001 we tried to find them. in 2006, we took pictures of
our cats, send them to our friends, and bragged about the things we found online. it’s the
future and why aren’t you here?
by now you’re probably slavering to learn more, so let’s dig into a social brand mashwork

10. Social Brand
Mashworks
• Information exchange
• Personal contact
• Game play elements
• Profiles
• Friending/Following
• Ratings/Rankings
all this plus your brand and if your brand isn’t in, it’s out.

11. Do U Kno UR
Cus2mrs???
They probably spell like this. It all comes down to this question: do you know your
customers? And the flipside: do they know you? Social brand mashworks help.

12. Three Stages of
Social Brand
Mashworks
LISTEN ENGAGE INTERACT
First step is to get a Twitter account. Then you listen to what people are saying about you.
Then you engage with them and tell them where they’re wrong. THAT’S INTERACTION!

13. Everything Is
Better With A
Social Network
So, to conclude with the first half of my presentation, everything is better with a social
network.

14. Case Studies
Before I came, I set my mind to designing some solutions to your problems. You haven’t told
me what you think your problems are, but it’s not necessary. The beauty of social brand
mashworks is that you can just drop them in anywhere. Let’s take three examples.

15. Archives New
Zealand
First, it’s Archives New Zealand. They look after papers and things. They’re like Flickr but
for papers. And there’s no Creative Commons. And it’s not on the web yet. It’s so boring. I
mean, they put things in boxes, write the box number down, and play Solitaire all day. No
public engagement, no brand equity in the mashup world. Let’s fix that.

16. Archives
• “friend” memos
• RSS feeds from file boxes
• “email me when this is released”
Look how a social brand mashwork really makes this come alive! Johnny User in Tamuku
signs up for an account on FaceBox and can friend memos, get feeds from the boxes, and be
notified whenever the boxes are opened. (You could probably save on money and just not
implement that last feature, but don’t tell the software vendors I said that!)

17. Internal Affairs
• Passports and visas and stuff
• BORing???
• No!!!
Next, IA. Same problem. SNORE.
Passports are SO unsexy.
Or are they?

18. Internal Affairs
• How cool would it be for chat with
other people waiting
to
their
passports or visas?
• MyIAspace.govt.nz
find partners, dates, marriages online
solve migrants problems : CUSTOMER FOCUSED
you build your brand as they build their family. talk about positive brand connotation: “your
government department got me laid/found me my wife”

19. MyIAspace: your passport ... to love!
kevin1971: Citizen : European
het : male : 1971 : harleys : romcoms
Latest Activity
thaitofield: i got a new job roofing in sth akland
for a friend! on my way up, baby!
tawny: new star trek movie sux!!! msg me if u
hated it 2!!!
chas: anyone know where i can work before my
permit comes through?
user chas retired
simong: looking for young classy lady to be my
soulmate. no smokers. msg me!
this is totally a Long Tail business, putting Affairs back into Internal Affairs ... possibly
Internal too, if we do it right.

20. The Queue
meets
The Game

21. The Power Play
• Migrant investors
• Partner with NZ Post
• Direct Marketing lists
Here’s how you pay for it: compile a list of migrant investors with over a million to invest and
rent the list to direct marketers. NZ Post, an SOE, has plenty of experience here. Synergies,
baby, it’s all about the synergies.

22. Ministry of Social
Development
• Serves millions of New Zealanders
• Large software shop, with
hundreds (thousands?) of
developers
• Where is the game play?

23. Ministry of Social
Development
• Register for a benefit, create an
avatar online
• Jobfought
be
applications are monsters to
• points for every CV submitted
and interview attended

24. Ministry of Social
Development
• Educational courses are quests
• exams the Big Boss battle at the
end
• certificate? Power up!

25. Letʼs go
down the jobs office
and submit some
CVs!
Dude
ur so gay!
Im off 2
plunket 4 LOL! PWND!
kidʼs shotz.
25 gold,
fool!
World of Welfare

26. Social Brand
Mashaction
I’m still saving pocket money to get an iPhone but when I do, I’m happy to come back and
show you iPhone app ideas.
Anyway, in short, you need my form of Social Brand Mashaction and if you hire me I’ll friend
you on Twitter. Thank you.

28. e-gov 2.0 Update
Simon English
e-government Office
Hello, team. Thanks for joining me for this exciting update on our amazing transformative
projects. You’ve all been just fabulous and I know you’ll be happy with how it’s going.

29. e-gov 2.0 Update
• Budget
• User engagement
• Twitter
• Facebook
• CE Blog
• Creative Commons
Here’s our agenda for the day.

30. Budget
• Line-by-line review complete
• Sustainability
• Focus on front-line
• On-time and under-budget
• Support and engage the
productive sector
• Transform and magnify
So, the line by line review of our department has concluded. You’ll notice the empty seats
around you. Karen, that corner office you were asking about has come open. See me later.
It has come to my attention that some of you still have “sustainability” in your project
descriptions. Just a reminder that you need to remove that before we get to the capital
allocation cycle. Use “core business” instead.
Here are our goals, straight from Himself at the top. I know we’re totally on track to
transform government and magnify our service delivery pro-actively in this new millennium.
e-wise.

31. User Engagement
• Comprehensive, multi-stakeholder
plan for full-course engagement
• Tweaks
• James
• Initial engagement: Thursday
• Transformative
Loved the plan for user engagement. I buy into it completely. Can’t do a project without it:
multstakeholder, full-term engagement, the whole thing. Just a few tweaks. Because of the
budget cutbacks, we can’t get in the mixture of demographics you wanted (state housing
resident, DPB recipient, etc.), but I think you’ll like the solution we’ve come up with. James
from mid-term asset planning will come over and he can pretend to be your users. He’s up
for it. Though as the Mid-Term Asset Planning Strategic Review’s entering its critical middle
year, I don’t think we can spare him across the whole project. You’ve got him for an hour on
Thursday, though, and if you give him the questions beforehand I think you’ll be pleasantly
surprised at how he does.
It’ll be totally transformative and absolutely check that box on our performance criteria about
being agile.

32. Twitter
• Department’s Twitter account set
up
• @MinSocCulEcAff
• Revolution in listening to citizens
• Janet
• 9-9.30 Thursdays, 1-1.15 Fridays
• Comms
retyping press releases

33. Facebook
• Simon running our Facebook page
• Up to 121 Friends
• Posted photos tea our Brains
Trust morning
from
• Comments
• Changing the game
121 is 10 more than DPMC, ha!
wry comment on the photo from Tony’s Mum, nice one Tony!

34. CE Blog
• Unqualified success
• Unmediated, unfiltered
• Straight from the CE
• Karen in Comms
• Fifth post goes up this week
thanks to Karen in Comms for her stellar work writing this
i don’t think i will ruin the surprise when I hint that in the next one the CE makes some very
hilarious observations on the strategic plan.

35. Creative Commons
• Enables reuse
• Cornerstone of openness and
transparency
• Legal quibbles
• Commercial pushback
• Our first CC release will be our CC
policy
• References
winnow down the list of things that CC applies to

36. Thank You
(Thomas, stay behind)
I know you’re getting a bit nervous with this open source and agile talk.
Don’t worry, mate. Look, if the vendors who wine and dine the Minister in their box seats
don’t kill it, the IT guys will never let it fly. They got two trips to Las Vegas for “professional
development” last year. No way they’ll let those hippies derail the gravy train! And even if it
does, we can always nail it in the budget round. The vendor’s slipped us a few white papers
that show that the cost of “free” is even greater than the cost of their product! Yes, I know,
the one we pay tens of millions for! It’s genius!
Agile’s not a problem, anyway. I’ve had a word with the Treasury boys and they’ll demand a
copy of the detailed requirements and specification before they’ll authorise it. Yeah, not a
hope. Nah nah, you’re welcome. Catch you later!

38. The Truth
Nat Torkington
Citizen, Geek

39. Why Am I Here?
outsider
Web 2.0 fairy dust
I’m not the social media consultant, the hype master.
And I’m not a pointy-haired boss, uncomprehendingly or callously grinfucking every good
idea.
Yeah, I think GOVIS bit off more than they can chew when they asked me to give the closing
keynote.

40. New technology
will transform
government and its
interaction with
citizens
I think ....
It already has. Look at how the telephone changed things. The fax machine. Email. Anyone
who thinks it stops there and we don’t have to deliver services through the web is mistaken.
And it doesn’t stop at the web: mobile phones will be critical, and who knows what next.

41. You don’t have a
technology
problem, you have
a people problem.
This sentence is always true, but it’s very true now. The technology your customers want you
to use, the technology that will let you implement transparency and the rest of it is all here.
The technology isn’t the hard part. People are the hard part. Actually, you have several
people problems.

42. Leadership
Politicians are not leading. They’ve gutted the SSC. There’s been no articulated vision
around IT from the top, just “broadband”, “jobs”, and “cut costs”. They’ve gutted budgets
like Jack the Ripper with a Ginsu knife kit. They haven’t just cut fat, they’ve cut sinew, spinal
columns, and in some cases brain. While they set and slash the budgets, you’ll find it bloody
hard to do things that they don’t understand.
I want to see signs that we have political leaders that understand bits as well as atoms, RAM
as well as lamb. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. Right now I need a sign and I’m not
getting one from the political leadership. That’s a people problem.

43. Shared Direction
We’ve seen a squillion idealistic visionary aspirational challenges in talks this week. Open!
Transform! Devolve! Involve! Do it like the Brits! The Americans! The Canadians! Even the
Aussies are ahead of us for fuck’s sake! You’re pulled in different directions because
everyone has a different idea of what the future should be. Some of them even want it to be
more like the past.
You need that shared vision, whether provided by the Government CIO or a committee of
yourselves, or someone else entirely. You don’t have one now, and that’s a people problem.

44. Obstruction
The political nature of your environment is a huge barrier to success. Infighting, squabbling,
treachery, backstabbing, deceit, and the rest of it. Most of you operate in an incredibly
dysfunctional workplace (I’m not picking on Government here--most large companies have
identical problems). This takes up your time, creates a lot of stress, and makes it harder for
you to do anything that might possibly be criticised.
This is a people problem.

45. Islands
You know John Donne, 1600s poet who wrote among other things the immortal words “No
man is an Island”? You’re all islands. You work away by yourself for most of the year, and
you count yourself lucky if you know what’s going on in your own department. At GOVIS and
a few other events you might run into people and learn something that happens elsewhere,
but it’s casual and haphazard. Talk more, learn more, share more. It’s hard being an island,
because you have to learn everything by experience. When I was a kid, the school issued me
a diary with words I’ve never forgotten: “experience is a hard master, but fools will have no
other”. People problem: the people don’t talk enough.

46. Dr Nat Prescribes
So what the hell are you to do? I’m not going to sugar coat, it’s going to be bloody miserable
for a few months. As Ros said, America and UK politicians are welcoming the openness
because it’s rebuilding bridges burned in the last eight years. NZ politicians are still
spending goodwill, they don’t need to earn it again.
So to do the Right Thing (whatever that might be, you don’t have a shared direction,
remember?) will mean going outside traditional methods.
I’m going to give you five easy tasks. If everyone who came to GOVIS does these, we’ll all be
better off.

47. Do the small things
and do them right
You can’t make big changes. Accept that. Government is typically pretty crap at big changes
whether you like to admit it or not. Lots of failures, particularly when IT enters the picture.
So grieve for what you thought you had, and move on. Those aspirational futures we heard
about won’t be yours this year.
But you can do small things. Small things that, regardless of the details of the overall vision,
will be helpful and correct.
What am I talked about? Let’s get specific, here.

48. Reality
Put your hand up if you believe that you make decisions based on reality and not on fantasy.
Ok, now say it: “I make informed decisions.”
Come on.

49. Visit something
social
Spend a week learning about something interactive. Twitter, for example. You can decide
it’s not for you, that’s cool. But make an *informed* choice. Do it like this: find someone
who already uses it a lot, ask them to show you how it works and how they decide what to
say and who to follow, and spend a week experimenting. Use your own name, not the
department’s. See how companies, organizations, and departments are using it. THEN
decide whether there’s a role for it in your department. You might decide “wow, we need to
know what people are saying about us, even if we don’t join in”. You might even decide that
it’s not important. Fine! I’m all for informed choices, but just as you shouldn’t make a
decision on something because you’ve bought into a social brand mashwork buffoon’s hype,
you shouldn’t make a decision because there people who overhype things. Go into it with an
open mind, try it, and then make a balanced assessment.
This is good because you’ll be making decisions based on reality and not rumour.

50. Use a cloud app
Cloud is a very real option today, not a hypothetical fantasy. You should investigate.
Try Google Docs. Get two willing coworkers, sign up for Google accounts, and together build
the presentation on Google Docs that you’ll give to the rest of your group. Take notes in the
word processor, build the presentation, use the spreadsheet to estimate savings if you
switched. Yes, the free version has an “all your base are belong to us” clause in the signup,
but the government version doesn’t.
Again, make an INFORMED choice about possible cost savings.

51. Learn about open
source
Open source gives you freedom and agility. Freedom to make the software exactly what you
need it to be. Agility to try things quickly and cheaply because you don’t need to go through
an RFP process.
Talk to Don Christie from New Zealand Open Source Society. Talk to the Electoral Enrolment
Centre who are all open source. Talk to any of the many great open source vendors. I’m not
saying you should rush out and do everything open source--that’s your decision. But again,
spend a short amount of time learning about it so you can make a reality-based decision.

52. Try
Creative Commons
Release something under a Creative Commons license. I don’t care what, it could be your
media releases. Tell Digital New Zealand at the National Library and they’ll add it to their list
of goodies. Talk to each other about what you’re doing and use each other as examples
(“hey, if those clowns in FISHERIES can do it, surely we can!”). Don’t stop at one thing, keep
doing it. Build momentum until you get the Alice’s Restaurant effect. You know, if one
person does it then they’re a freak. If two people do it, they’re queer. But if fifteen people do
it, you’ve got a movement.
This is universally good because you’ll be putting information into citizens’ hands in a way
that they can determine how they use it.

53. Talk with three
fellow GOVIS
attendees
I’ve spoken with enough of you this week to know that you’re not fools, you’re smart,
passionate, intelligent people. You’ve met plenty of people. Hopefully shared business cards
or email addresses. Pick three and keep them posted on your CC, open source, cloud, etc.
work.
Ask questions: how did you sneak this past IT? How did you get the lawyers happy with that?
How did you run that project so well? Who built that for you so cheaply? How many people
did you need to staff that?

54. We must all hang
together
or, most assuredly,
we shall all hang
separately.

55. Thank You
nathan@torkington.com
http://nathan.torkington.com