Most people who use Twitter have just one personal account. And that’s fine. But over the almost two years I’ve used Twitter, I have seen some creative uses of more than one personal account. For example, Chris Cillizza from the Washington Post tweets at The Fix and speaks authentically as himself. But when there’s a press conference or something like the State of the Union address, he rapidly live-tweets everything at a second, supplementary account: The Hyper Fix.  No less authentic, just a different way of conveying a different kind of information.

Another example is former Apple evangelist and now founder of AllTop.com, Guy Kawasaki.  His personal account is a bit impersonal, by design – it’s an information fire hose that points to whatever he thinks is interesting (and often routed through one of his own sites). But what if he wants to reply to someone’s question – he can’t disrupt the information hose, right? No problem. He has a second account, named Guy’s Replies, where he writes back to people.  Another cool social hack, in my opinion.

Some of you may have seen my blog post announcing that I’ve joined Microsoft as Director of Innovative Social Engagement for their U.S. Public Sector division in Washington, D.C.  As part of that effort, I’m reading more than I previously had been about Microsoft business and products and services, and also those of companies like Google, IBM, Apple, Cisco, Adobe, and so forth. Often my philosophy has been to take the best of what I’m reading and thinking about and tweet it on my personal account, but I’ve come to think that overwhelming my personal stream with tons of Microsoft links would start to become inauthentic to some degree – or just annoying to the people who have come to like the diversity of my postings.

Thus, I've started a new Twitter account named “Microsoft Mark.” If you’re interested in science, technology, innovation, communications, the future, and particularly news, opinion, and events in the information technology and Web space, I encourage you to follow my new account. It will be a high-quality fire hose of the best information I find (and to some degree, produce myself) for the communities I’m a part of and care about. It will not be a company marketing stream with Microsoft-only information (those already exist), and it will not be impersonal. It will merely be specialized.

And I’ll continue tweeting as Cheeky Geeky. That account won’t change at all, save for the fact that my life in 2010 will be a bit different than it was in 2009. But that’s just an authentic change that I hope you and I both enjoy. I think that Chris and Guy are good examples of social hacks whose tactics can make both your professional and personal lives work just a little better. As I wrote in my original post,  I want to use my position with Microsoft as not just a job, but as a thought leadership platform where I can continue to personally innovate and contribute ideas and tactics to the larger community. I hope that the evolving way I will be using Twitter this year is part of that contribution.

 

Posted via email from Mark’s Cheeky Posterous

The relatively new Federal government website Data.gov has made a lot of waves and gotten many people excited as part of a larger government transparency movement. But who really wants all this data?

Primarily, the people I see excited about Data.gov and similar efforts are what I call "tech elites." Bloggers, evangelists, startup companies, software developers, former CTO's, large tech company execs, and the like. They hold apps contests, they run BarCAmps on weekends, they create new websites with open data, they get consulting contracts with local, state, and federal government. I see nothing wrong with tech elites or their behavior per se. But I wonder if a larger community – average citizens – has been ignored to some degree.

Ellen Miller related to me that the Sunlight Foundation did a poll which showed 80% of citizens were in favor of more government transparency. Interesting, but that could mean many different things. I'm interested in knowing if there's a poll, or even some man-on-the-street type video, asking citizens if they want more government data, and if so, what – specifically and individually – they would do with it. I suspect that few people want more data.

The data might benefit them indirectly, through websites and tools that others develop, no doubt about it. But what citizens – the real community the government serves – really want is information. They want news. They want analysis. They want content. Not XML, a tool catalog, or geodata. To me, this begs the question of whether the government should have an Information.gov site full of compelling, immediately useful, simple content for average citizens. What do you think?

It's great that the government can check some boxes on a form and say, yes, we have a new "open" website, and yes, we have made more data public and available (counting the number of data sets per agency has become a bit of an amateur sport). But if the citizens don't care, who is it helping? Forget the lobbyists people love to complain about – While they're enjoying their eggs benedict, have tech elites stealthily become the newest powerful special interest group in Washington, DC?

Posted via email from Mark’s Cheeky Posterous

The initial deadline for Federal agencies to meet the Open Government Directive (OGD) has come and gone, and many of them have checked the necessary boxes to prove that they are more "open" and transparent. They have new websites with new features and some new data that new people can use if they choose. And there's more new things to come in 2010.

But, as I noted in a quote within this Federal Computer Week article on the OGD,

“What concerns me about the Open Government Directive is the notion of ‘check-box government’ it seems to encourage. Very little emphasis seems to be on the actual engaging, or even on the strategy for doing so. The focus is on the technology. Where's the focus on the humans?”

Knowing that these new websites, user interfaces, and datasets are what the public wants and needs, and that the new forms of public engagement are actually, truly effective is far more important than merely peacocking them on the Web. Where is, in fact, the focus on the human side of the equation? I haven't studied every single open website in depth, but generally the emphasis is on new technology or new data, and not new engagement.

FCW also quoted me as saying,

“Engagement is hard, very hard, and it doesn't happen completely from behind a computer terminal in a cubicle on Independence Avenue,” he said. “It happens through genuine, human interactions with people, and through caring about the communities your agency is supposed to be supporting.”

When you hear Gary Vaynerchuk speaking about openness and engagement in the video above (possibly the single best video I've ever seen on social engagement with stakeholders in your organization), you don't hear about putting more options on a website, nor about this or that technology very often. You hear an awful lot about people – talking to people, listening to people, providing content that people want, and generally caring about people. And a lot of it is very one-on-one, not email blasts and blog posts. It's human and authentic.

In a talk long ago, I heard Gary use an acronym that I still use to this day, one that should be at play in all the discussion about the OGD. The acronym is RAT. RAT means Real, Authentic, and Transparent. RATs win. RATs use technology, but aren't focused on it. They're focused on people.

How the new open government websites and tools are used to interact with individual people, to engage citizens around topics (not agencies, topics), and act as platforms to build communities around those topics remains to be seen. But there's one thing anyone involved in communities already knows – these things take time and are not subject to artificial deadlines.

Joseph Jaffe recently wrote a truly excellent post about the Toyota recall, and their engagement with customers and other people online. He's fairly critical of their efforts. And what I couldn't help thinking about as I read it was the OGD. In Toyota's case, they seem to be doing all the right things (i.e., checking off all the boxes): apology in the newspaper, some of their website devoted to the crisis, 15k Twitter followers, an official Fan Page on Facebook, and more. But they're not engaging, because there's more to engaging than having a presence. It's about being alive within that presence. (Read the post for details on how Jaffe thinks they can "flip the funnel" on their communications crisis.)

Deadlines are good for checking off boxes in some kind of scientific manner. Engaging people is an art, a true street-smart craft that few are good at. Can one mandate such an art?

Posted via email from Mark’s Cheeky Posterous