I wrote a post in March about a workshop I was invited to by e-Envoy. The Office of the e-Envoy (OeE) was set up in September 1999 as part of the Cabinet Office, and is headed by Andrew Pinder who was appointed e-Envoy in January 2001. The OeE has responsibilities across the whole e-agenda, notably e-commerce and e-government.

I gave my presentation to the Heads of local Government in London. The idea was to give Councils some insight into how they can ‘better engage people through the Web’. So, a pretty wide agenda.

I kicked off my presentation with a little story to get things warmed up. I like to start with a giggle whenever possible. My taxi ride to the City of London (where most of our tax must end up judging by the prestigious offices) was the basis for my opening.

The driver was very friendly and we struck up a conversation right away. It was mostly idle banter with the conversation below forming the basis of my opening, for which I received a welcomed giggle (phew).

Driver
“I notice you’re not wearing a tie for your presentation?”

Me
“eh, no, I very rarely wear one these days, why do you ask?”.

Driver
“Ah no reason really, it’s just amazing how times change isn’t it?! I notice that people being interviewed on the BBC news for example, don’t wear ties anymore. I’m sure you know what you’re doing”.

Me
“Gulp, well, you haven’t looked properly as I’m also wearing jeans!”.

Driver
“plenty of laughter”

So, I was a little worried for about a minute and a half. Then I realised that the conversation and what I was wearing, was contextual to the presentation I was about to give. I started my presentation with the little story and finished off by telling the attendees to loosen up, be more receptive to change and loose the ties if they want to better engage with ‘the people’. I then pointed to myself and stated that this is the new look; “Boss 2.0”.

Thankfully most of them got the whole Web versioning thing and found it funny. Could you imagine how stupid I would have looked if they didn’t get Web 2.0?!

I received positive feedback so I guess the presentation went well. I talked about how to adopt Web accessibility best practices without losing creativity. Importantly, I explained the financial/commercial benefits, rather than highlighting their legal obligations and shortfalls. I think they appreciated my approach. I then moved onto some cool stuff such as how to enable a two-way conversation through blogs, thereby enabling them to make continuous improvements based on consumer feedback. I like to call this ‘permanent beta’.

There was much more meat around my two messages but I won’t bore you with all the detail.

After the talk, the floor opened up for general dialog which included the OeE. In summary, I was very disappointed by the lack of internal marketing done by OeE as they’re responsible for directing each government agency to help them better understand digital.

The OeE managers were amazed that local Councils weren’t aware of how to find out more information about their services and how to gain access to useful marketing tools. To make matters worse, it was me who highlighted this fact and advised that it should look internally regarding its own marketing before it can engage with the public in a consistent way that is also cost affective. Ouch!

I was deeply disturbed by the OeE’s lack of understanding when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns too. I was amazed and very scared by what I heard from the guy who appeared quite senior with this outfit.

He said

“We know our advertising campaigns are very successful because the amount of hits on our homepage increases significantly after we put an advertisement on MSN”.

I don’t know who to blame, the agency responsible for managing the campaigns, or the OeE for not hiring people with brains and common sense to help ensure the Government (we) get value for money.

My response was obviously to the point and a little direct (as you can probably imagine). I stated that they weren’t measuring anything useful when referring to hits, or worse still, ‘homepage’. It’s obvious that the site will see more hits after advertising on MSN (the most expensive real estate on the Web), but this doesn’t mean that users are getting the information they’re looking for. It certainly doesn’t mean that users are being encouraged to engage with specific products or services online.

I advised them to identify what a successful conversion is, then map a process flow which will increase the likelihood of users finding and then utilising the information they’re looking for. Lastly, I explained the concept of homepage(s). Users of very large Web sites are likely to visit Web pages from search results. This means that the homepage is likely to be different for different people.

So in summary, how on earth is Local Government supposed to get it right if the agency responsible for helping doesn’t know how to communicate effectively or work out if it’s getting value for money from suppliers?