From behind the scenes access from the media and each candidate’s content to larger sites tracking how the candidates are doing overall, here are just a few sites to check out.

This was reported as a first step with the platform… The first module released is the Data Management System, which provides the tools and capabilities for an automated process for publishing data in the Open Government Platform, an open source product designed to facilitate governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites. Any government adopting the Open Government Platform will be able to download and use the DMS code to submit, approve, and update catalog data electronically on Open Government Platform websites and view management metrics reports. (Source: Data.gov)

See more on the Whitehouse Blog

Suggested Resources:

• The Data.gov opengov platform
• Open Government Platform repository on Github
• http://www.data.gov/
• The OpenGov Partnership

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While most of the articles at least mention in passing that it’d be unlikely for this to pass government review, I haven’t seen many people actually discuss why Google is involved.

Why wouldn’t a Google acquisition of Yahoo! pass government review? Well, if the Department of Justice wouldn’t pass the search deal that Google and Yahoo! worked up in 2008 where SOME of Yahoo!’s search results were powered by Google, then why would they actually let Google take part in buying all of Yahoo!?

In fact, many thought that Google knew in 2008 it wouldn’t pass government review, but tried to do the deal just so Yahoo! would turn down Microsoft and waste a lot of Yahoo!’s internal time (and it worked). I sat in many meetings at Yahoo! that were spent talking about the tests we were running with Google and how we were going to implement the deal.

There hasn’t been enough change in search market share for anyone to seriously even think it could pass. I’m not entirely sure if Google being only part of an ownership group with private equity firms would change the government’s view, but I doubt it.

Which leaves us asking, why is anyone even taking Google’s interest seriously?

I can’t answer why anyone is taking Google seriously, besides the fact that they are one of the only players who actually have the cash to do something around Yahoo!.

It just seems like any major involvement on there part is going to just raise big red flags with the governments of the world and will never pass “go”.

Why would Google get involved then?

I feel like there are two obvious answers to this one.

1. Google can pretend to at least have interest in Yahoo! to draw out how quickly something happens here. The more time Yahoo! is in limbo, and the more time Microsoft spends figuring out what to do about it, the better that is for Google to continue to separate itself from them.
2. Google can go as far as even floating prices out there to try and get others (Microsoft) to feel like they have to pay more in order to get Yahoo!. The more money someone spends on Yahoo!, the better that is for Google.

I suppose it is possible that Google really does want to keep Yahoo! out of Microsoft’s hands, but it seems like Microsoft having to acquire and digest Yahoo! would just allow Google to accelerate ahead even further ahead. It’s all just a ruse to waste time by complicating matters and drive up the price. Well played Google.

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For example, what is it going to be like leading a new workforce that is conditioned to manage relationships through text messages and accustomed to the continual stimulation and reward of video games?   As they enter the workforce, are they going to change our companies?  Or, are our companies going to change them?  Maybe a little of both?

The intersection of technology, Generation Text, and corporate culture will have vast implications for recruiting and retention, training, compensation, HR policies … nearly every company-employee touch-point in fact!

With this backdrop, you can imagine how interested I was to read a report from McKinsey on a competition they held to identify how Web 2.0 tools and technologies are changing management.  From 143 entries, here are five big ideas:

1. Sharing common resources more efficiently

Employees of the Dutch government are using web-based tools to share offices, conference spaces, and other resources. The employees were facing too many bureaucratic hurdles, and even had to reserve meeting space in their own buildings through an outside agency!  One particularly frustrated employee tweeted her exasperation to colleagues, and they decided to form a group to build their own reservation system with open-source software.  They rolled it ou,t building by building, and now the system includes more than 53 offices and 554 work spaces across the country. The employees say the net result is a “shift from the focus of individual ‘ownership’ as defined by specific government buildings and offices to a sense of ‘stewardship’ shared across the spectrum of government.”

2. Global training with local experts

Essilor International, a global maker of ophthalmic lenses, created an internal training program that mixes in-person and Web 2.0 formats to transmit best practices among 102 sites in 40 countries. The company says that a mastery level that once took three years to achieve can now be reached in about one.  A lens-processing center in Thailand, for example, developed a game to teach new workers how to understand the shape of a given kind of lens; now it’s used in Brazil too. A social-network feature enables coaching across multinational locations. The system is called “Entangled Talents” because the company said “the talents of individual employees across the globe have become entangled, creating a web that supports the company’s daily operations.”

3. Powering continuous improvement

Best Buy has more than 1,500 locations and more than 100,000 employees on the frontlines of customer service.  In an effort to make sure that senior managers learn what those employees are hearing from customers, the company created an online platform that rewarded employee feedback on what they are hearing from customers.  The platform allows everyone to see collated information from all stores in a useful and searchable format. This information is powering a movement of continuous improvement that has affected things as simple as the signs in one store and as complicated as decisions about how to implement a national promotion.

4. Social networking for new product development

Rite-Solutions, a software company, built an internal idea marketplace that has so far generated 15 new commercial products that account for 20 percent of the company’s total revenue. This system goes far beyond a typical brain-storming platform. The internal website connects potential new products with the resources, experience, and expertise that can bring ideas to life. The internal social networking site enables communities to organically develop to further improve, develop, and commercialize new product ideas.

5. Using internal communities to reduce time-to-market

The Mexico-based cement giant Cemex introduced an internal-collaboration platform called Shift, which has helped the company reduce the time needed to introduce new products and make internal process improvements. Shift uses a mix of wikis, blogs, discussion boards, and Web-conferencing tools to speed problem-solving.  When employees use Shift, ideas, suggestions, and  recommendations bubble up across the network. Communities of interest are form to tackle challenges common to their locations, markets, and skill sets.  Projects can move forward without the barriers posed by traditional hurdles, such as over-reliance on e-mail and live meetings. The payoff is lower cycle  times, faster time to market, and real-time process improvement.  The company has 500 active internal problem-solving communities.  An example: Cemex invited 400 employees involved with its ready-mix products to help figure out which worked best and which were redundant. The result is a slimmed-down product line offered in a constantly updated catalog available globally.

How is your company using social technologies and Web 2.0 tools to manage smarter?  Any case studies and successes you’d like to share?

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You may be wondering, What will be different about publishing your geospatial datasets to Data.gov?

The Response: Up until now, Data.gov has been receiving Federal, downloadable, geospatial datasets through flagging of these selected datasets within the GOS metadata management interface. These existing flags for sharing datasets with Data.gov will be maintained through the transition process. Additionally, Data.gov will accept a wider variety of content type than just downloadable data, to include live data and map services. After the migration is completed, it will be a good time to do some cleanup and maintenance of old records.

See more details in this official announcement

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The new set of social collaboration Cloud offerings on the IBM Federal Community Cloud addresses the Obama administration’s drive to adopt a “cloud-first” policy that is designed to help the government reduce and consolidate its 2,100 data centers. The government plans to reduce that total by at least 40% by 2015. Bringing social networking capabilities to the IBM Federal Community Cloud will help federal government organizations with collaboration, generate new ideas, and increase government efficiencies. I can support that.

IBM’s social software, which is part of the new service, has many productivity tools including:

• Blogs allow staff to gather and prioritize community ideas, present their own ideas and learn from others.
• Communities allow people to exchange and share information with others through a web browser, instant messaging, or email software.
• File sharing and micro-blogs facilitate collaboration with dynamic networks of co-workers, partners and customers.
• Profiles allow people to find and work with others who share common interests and expertise as well as expand their social networks. Tags and social analytics technologies assist with this task.

A variety of regional government organizations, including the State of Vermont and Michigan Municipal League, have recently adopted IBM cloud collaboration services in order to transform their business processes and increase efficiencies.  In keeping with its cost cutting initiative, the State of Vermont is lowering costs, reducing paper consumption and increasing efficiency in its Department of Information and Innovation (DII). The DII is transforming the way it processes vendor contracts with IBM cloud services and Silanis’ electronic signature technology.

IBM is now providing tools for organizations to collaborate both on premise and in the cloud. For example, the U.S. Army is already using a variety of on premise IBM collaboration tools including electronic IBM Forms that help reduce the time, costs, and problems inherent to paper-based forms processes to help speed process automation.  Additionally, several Federal government organizations use IBM services that provide cloud and data center capabilities to build, manage, operate and analyze their computing environments.

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To concisely re-cap: from early 2010, anyone copying and supplying UK newspaper web content to others for a fee (monitoring or press clippings agencies to PR agencies, for instance, and from those PR agencies to their clients) must acquire a license from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), a body that’s owned by the mainstream media.

Software and services company Meltwater (which provides media monitoring services to PR agencies and others) filed a legal challenge at the end of 2009; the Court of Appeal in London ruled on that challenge earlier this month, the detail of which they’ll publish soon.

Now, Meltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) have prepared a template letter (which I’ve  uploaded to Scribd and embedded below) that anyone with an opinion on this issue can use as a means of raising its profile with their MPs.

 MP Letter

One key element in the letter focuses on the broader issue which is to do with copyright law (and, in my view, to do with propping up an unfair revenue model in the mainstream media when fairer and sustainable solutions exist):

[...] The NLA Ltd.’s exploitation of outdated copyright laws to develop revenue streams will lead to the criminalisation of thousands, if not millions of regular search engine users, because under the new licence snippets (small extracts) will be considered sufficiently substantial to be copyright protected. Furthermore, headlines are to be considered copyright protected as well, meaning even reproducing film listings will be against the law. This sets an untenable and absurd precedent.

The government said last November that it will look into copyright laws to “make them fit for the internet age” as Prime Minister  David Cameron put it.

Maybe this lobbying campaign can help that fitness programme.

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What many heard, including those in the Chinese Government, was that the Chinese Government had been making these hacking attempts. Official Chinese publications and statements said it was clear Google was “deliberately pandering to negative Western perceptions of China, and strongly hinting that the hacking attacks were the work of the Chinese government.” This led to accusations that Google had become a political tool for the West – a choice that, according to Chinese publications, would lead to Google being “spurned by the marketplace.”

Many have seen additional implied threats from the Chinese Government, although exactly what sort of punishment or retaliation may occur is hard to say. China has little power over Google since the company withdrew from China in the beginning of 2010 (a decision made due to a series of similar cyber-attacks that happened at that time, as well as an unwillingness to bow down to China’s censorship rules).

But are Google’s statements what they’re describe to be within China (as one Chinese writer puts it, “spurious, have ulterior motives, and bear malign intentions”)? It’s certainly possible that there’s a western slant to the whole ordeal, and it’s true that no proof has been presented that the Chinese Government is the origin of the attacks. Given that Google never claimed they were the origin of attacks, however, the Chinese response seems highly reactive.

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Back in October 2009, you might recall the huge uproar over the fact that the FTC said that bloggers must disclose their advertisers and sponsors or face stiff penalties or maybe even a huge fine. Here is part of what I said:

“This is the “first time that FTC rules have covered bloggers. This is significant because the US Government is actually acknowledging bloggers as being a source of information that apparently needs guidelines. It’s another step in the “acceptance” of blogging and blogs–which is a good thing.”

The FTC, back in 2009, said in a press release:

“Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor. ”

Since the FTC first published their dot com disclosures in 2000, the FTC says that the “online world has changed dramatically since the original guidance was published in 2000, and the FTC is seeking public comment about how it should be modified to reflect these changes.”

I totally agree. The online world now, in 2011, is not what it was in 2000. So, now, the FTC is looking for public comment, and you have 45 days to do it:

The FTC will seek public comment for 45 days, beginning today and continuing through July 11, 2011. You can submit written comments electronically or in paper form. You can go here to submit it electronically or hard-copy comments should be mailed or delivered to: Federal Trade Commission, Office of the Secretary, Room H-113 (Annex I), 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20580.

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Why Public Sector? First, because Semphonic’s Public Sector practice has grown dramatically in the last few years. It’s become so important to us that we actually went through the process of GSA certification (about as painful from a corporate perspective as giving birth). I also think it’s a fascinating practice area.

Public Sector sites face challenges different and in some ways more severe than those (already challenging enough) endured by the private sector. Government sites have struggled with the basics of measurement. Fettered by extraordinarily restrictive visitor tracking rules (thankfully somewhat relaxed), the basic mechanics of segmentation have been largely missing from the public sector. That, however, is really just a small part of a larger problem. Public Sector sites have struggled mightily with the most basic problem in Web analytics; deciding what is success on their Website.

There are no transactions on Public Sector sites; there are no leads; there are no ad impressions on every page view. In such a situation, what is meant by success?

Most Public Sector sites have chosen to answer this question outside of behavioral analytics. They’ve come to rely on Voice of Customer measures of satisfaction and basic measures of Reach as captured in Visits to the Website.

It’s far from a terrible solution. Satisfaction measures embodied in opinion research provide an excellent measure of overall site success, a means of comparing sites and even a method of isolating success by task. It’s no wonder that Foresee has become the de facto standard for measuring Public Sites and that the adoption of VoC in public sector is at least on par with the private sector even while Web analytics practice has severely lagged.

There are, however, drawbacks to this extreme reliance on Opinion Research. Pure VoC isn’t very fine-grained. As a way of identifying site problems and opportunities it’s rather poor. As a means of site targeting it’s useless. It’s not that VoC isn’t a powerful and appropriate tool, it’s just that giving up on behavioral analysis on the Web is like giving up wine when you’re visiting Napa; wrong place, wrong time.

I believe that our Two-Tiered Segmentation provides a behavioral approach to measuring success on Public Sector sites.

The idea behind Two-Tiered Segmentation is simple: proper segmentation in the Digital world requires two-dimensions. The first is the classic dimension of Visitor Type, the second is Visit Type – what the Visitor is trying to accomplish. Almost every aspect of Web analytics can be framed within this simple Two-Tiered Segmentation of “Who” and “Why”.

In the past few posts, I’ve showed how this scheme can be used in Financial Services, Hospitality, and Media. It’s our belief that almost every type of Web site can and should be analyzed within this type of framework – including Public Sector sites.

The search for good measures of success on Public Sector sites has always been defeated by the very problem that Two-Tiered Segmentation is designed to address. Brute-force site-wide measures like “views per visitors” or “average visit time” can’t be applied consistently across different use-cases. Increasing views per visitor when deploying engaging content is great, increasing views per visitor for getting to a form is not so ideal. For a Website with both functions, all you get when you track the site-wide metric is noise.

A Two-Tiered Segmentation solves the problem. It parses up every visit to a Website into a specific type of Visit by a specific audience. In doing so, it creates a context for metrics that is both powerful and comparable.

Probably no vertical is more diverse than the Public Sector. I cannot hope to create a Two-Tiered Segmentation that is completely representative. Instead, I’m just going to assume a Public Service website for example purposes. The Visitor Type Segmentation might look something like this:

In this case, I’ve assumed the site has a particular target audience in addition to some common additional communities (Professionals, Educators, and Students). If a Website is designed to reach a particular target audience, it’s essential to try and identify whether you’re visits fall into that group or not and to make sure your Reporting and Analysis reflect that. Being successful with the wrong audience is no success.

Unlike my previous segmentations, a Public Sector site will not typically have a “value” dimension to sub-segment the audience. Some of the Visitor Type Segmentations I suggested for media will sometimes apply (Local/National/International, Access Channel, and Site Relationship). Site Relationship, in particular, is often a good Public Sector Visitor Segmentation:

Public Sector sites have often failed to incorporate Visitor Segmentation into their approach just as Private Sector sites have usually missed the boat on Visit Type. It’s a mistake either way. Using only Visit Type simply isn’t enough to achieve clarity in your metrics and KPIs.

Suppose, for example, that I wanted to measure Engagement on the site. No matter what measure I create or how complicated I make it, the standard of success for a Health Professional is going to be different than for a Student. The two types of visitors arrive at the site with different needs, different interests, and different content that will satisfy them. Capturing success in a single Engagement Metric will necessarily confuse the issue – no MATTER WHAT MEASURE OF ENGAGEMENT YOU USE. There is no one metric of Engagement that can possibly measure engagement accurately across two different populations.

What’s more, if I don’t segment, my view of site success will become dependent on changes in my customer mix. If Students register as more engaged than Health Professionals, then an increase in Student visitors relative to Health Professionals will indicate improved site-wide Engagement when, in fact, no such improvement exists.
Engagement, like any other KPI, simply cannot be applied site-wide without creating unacceptable levels of noise.

In common practice, Visit-Type is probably more congenial to Public Sector analysts. The concept of Use-Cases is widely understood and, what is more, ties in well to existing VoC practice.

Here’s a sample Visit Type Segmentation for our hypothetical Public Service Site:

One interesting aspect of this Visit Type segmentation is the split of “Finding a Form” into two Use-Cases. We find that almost all Form sessions fall into two basic patterns. In one pattern, the visitor arrives knowing the form needed and is searching for that form. In the other pattern, the visitor arrives at the site knowing they need a form but unaware of the appropriate Form Name / Identifier. In one sense, both visits have the same success (download a form). However, the level of success and the supporting metrics (time to find / satisfaction) are often quite different.

These are very common Use-Case on Public Sector sites (and not just Public Sector Sites). Remember, when a segmentation scheme would conflate two populations with significantly different performance, you’ll always want to at least consider a further sub-segmentation.

It’s within the matrix of Visitor Type and Visit Type that truly interesting KPIs, site analytics, comparative benchmarking, and testing opportunities all exist. Of these, I’ve talked a great deal about KPIs, testing and analysis. So I want to emphasize the idea of comparative benchmarking. Behavioral benchmarking of Public Sector sites would be a huge advantage to all concerned. With a consistent Two-Tiered Segmentation across multiple sites, that type of benchmarking would be possible. Given specific use-cases (Visit Types) and generalized audience types, it should be possible to create a real benchmark for success across multiple web properties. I think that’s a compelling prospect for Public Sector analytics and one I would love to tackle someday.

This is the fourth Two-Tiered Segmentation matrix I’ve demonstrated. I think that’s enough (maybe more than enough) to convey the general idea. In my next post, I’m going to tackle the art of actually building a segmentation in a Web analytics tool.

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