My New Years Wish? That form follows function in government communications.

The Wainright Building by Louis Sullivan

It’s a well-established principle in modern architecture that the shape of a building or object should be primarily based on its intended function or purpose. The same is true of the tools and media we use to communicate. The technology shapes the nature of our discourse especially tools like Twitter that restrict our ability to write more than 140 characters. It’s hard to be corporate using such a short amount of characters so the behaviours we exhibit online are more relaxed, informal and generally more fun. 

The relationships that evolve from these online interactions are therefore different to those that evolve from say email exchanges. Working in government communications and engagement, I am unlikely to email a journalist asking about his or her family, their musical tastes or to ask for access to their personal photographs, things I know routinely from their social networks.

The Medium is the Message

Relationships are built on trust and reciprocity, qualities commonplace in the social web, and so the relationships that I have with journalists today are by their nature different to the ones I would have developed pre-social. Here the medium is literally the message.

Social media users value authenticity and that’s what seems so lacking now in more traditional forms of government communication. I’m not suggesting that things like press releases are false just that they seem outdated and unfit for purpose in a social world. This is not news. As far back as 2004 companies like Flickr were completely shrugging off the press release model opting instead to just blog about their product releases letting journalists join the dots.

Tom Foremski

Publish Don’t Send

In 2006, Silicon Valley watcher Tom Foremski wrote a brilliant piece calling for the death of the press release. He suggested among other things deconstructing the release into sections tagging the information so that as a publisher he could make the information useful. 

This is in large part what we do in Government Digital Service so for example in the 5 weeks leading up to the launch of GOV.UK we published around 35 blogs about every aspect of our work. Publishing in this way rather than sending also shapes the form of the communication since on the web there is an imperative to evidence any claims you are making via links which also helps the authenticity factor. 

#Nomorepressreleases

We had lots of coverage for the launch of GOV.UK and lots of interaction with journalists but there were others who found the information through social media, read the blog and constructed their own stories. One example is this piece by Kate Kiefer in Forbes writing about GOV.UK and the style guide behind it. She didn’t need to contact us to write her story nor did she need a press release to make sense of our blogs. I subsequently tweeted her @katekiefer 

brill 2 see result of @gdsteam being open on blog and journalists writing their own stories #nomorepressreleases

And so the potential for a new relationship evolves based on mutual respect for the work of the other. In my experience, mutual respect buys you a lot of good will so I’m hoping that in the New Year many more of my government communication colleagues across Whitehall will begin to explore how different relationships can be built through the behaviours we manifest in the social web and how ultimately that just might be a good thing for government.