Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I got 26/30 for it, along with these comments, along with some “Cynical!” written in the margins:

Joanna – a very bright and breezy journalistic review – most enjoyable and containing good thematic links to Corp Comm. Take care not to sound too flip which lessens impact – but that’s a small quibble. Some more use of textbook would have given it that “gravitas”.

I haven’t eaten McDonalds in over a year, and I don’t intend to start now, but as I was reading descriptions of ads in Fast Food Nation, I started craving a cheeseburger – even if it was going to be a cheeseburger made by poor iterant workers who are paid below minimum wage to put together substandard meat infected with faecal matter and e-coli that would result in the entire nation becoming obese as Eric Scholsser’s Fast Food Nation suggests.

Fast Food Nation has become terribly trendy to read, this year’s version of No Logo by Naomi Klein. It picks up on current anti-globalisation sentiment, health consciousness and worker rights, and rages against the evil practices of evil companies. Essentially, Fast Food Nation is about Triple Bottom Line Reporting, although it doesn’t call it that. Its chief allegations against the fast food industry is that all they care about is profit, not the social and environmental consequences of its products. As a study of corporate practices, admittedly with a clear bias, Fast Food Nation is an essential read for any businessperson hoping to maintain a good company reputation.

To avoid falling pretty to the same kind of bad publicity generated for the fast food industry by Schlosser, corporate communicators must not only respond well to any attacks but also work to ensure that they are working for an organisation that cares about society and the environment as well as its profits. As well as the basic necessities of life, consumers want to know that the companies they are buying for are essentially good – otherwise they will take their business elsewhere (Ferell et all, page 90). In the final chapter entitled “Have it your way,” Schlosser advocates that people force companies to become ethical by only supporting companies with good social and environmental policies, and holds up a company called In-And-Out Burger that prepares all its food freshly and pays its staff at least $10 an hour as an example of a good business. In Fast Food Nation, McDonalds is the baddie, hurting people and ruining the environment.

So exactly what terrible things does the fast food industry do to the environment, according to Schlosser? In the chapter ‘On the range’ he details how beef conglomerates that have exclusive supply arrangements with McDonalds have pushed traditional free-roaming sustainable ranchers out of business, replacing them with cattle feedlots that churn through grain and other far less savoury feed. Food technology dedicated to improving profitability commands the entire technical battery of growing, preserving, processing distribution and cooking, and displaces local food culture – capital intensive feedlots and factory production of chicken chains the nature of food available for consumption (Germov and Williams 1999, page 64).

In ‘Why the fries taste so good’, Schlosser describes the large chemical plants that manufacture the ‘smell’ of fast foods, and the polluting waste that the plants create. In the ‘Your trusted friends’ chapter which outlines the origins of fast food chains, he describes the growth in disposable packaging and the increase in refuse and waste that is caused as companies moved away from reusable plates and cutlery. This is one area where Schlosser does not give enough credit to the industry for adopting better practices. McDonalds was one of the first restaurants to drop Styrofoam and use paper instead (Ferrell et all, page 94). As their Social Responsibility Report (McDonalds Corporation, 2002) states “we support environmentally sustainable practise and since 1990 we have purchased more than $4 billion worth of recycled packaging and products weighing more than 400 million pounds”. Many New Zealanders may still remember, however, that around 1990 McDonalds installed ‘recyling bins’ into its restaurants, allowing customers to separate their rubbish. This would have been both a corporate communication strategy to show that McDonalds was committed to the environment and an excellent bonus for their triple bottom line – but unfortunately, it was discovered that all the rubbish was ending up in landfills and not being recycled at all. This strategy was a public relations nightmare, and would have been good fodder for Schlosser, if he had needed to venture out of America for more horror stories.

Because Fast Food Nation is primarily about America, except for its chapters on globalisation, it doesn’t really touch on another environmental issue that would be important to New Zealanders – Genetic Engineering. In fact, GE gets a mention only in passing – a reference to Taco Bell tortillas being pulled off the shelves because they contained GE corn that was ‘only fit for livestock feed’. In the current New Zealand climate, the omission of this issue seems to almost discredit the book. Another shortcoming is that while the use of hormones and steroids is suggested a few times, there is no mention of any health risks to humans associated with this kind of animal growing. Likewise, another major theme that seems like it would fit in but wasn’t included was animal rights. Schlosser talks about the brutal conditions in the slaughterhouse, and how chicken farmers are given a poor deal by chicken-buying conglomerates, but while describing how cows are fed to other cows, he doesn’t talk about the living conditions of the cows, or the battery cages that the chickens are surely caged in.

Meanwhile the fast food industry has anticipated investigation into the treatment of the animals that will eventually end up served to their customers, and have prepared stamtes to head off criticism. Demonstrating its environmental concern, the KFC website states “as a major purchaser of food products, we have the opportunity, and responsibility, to influence the way animals are treated. We take that responsibility very seriously, and are working with our suppliers on an ongoing basis to make sure the most humane procedures for caring for and handling animals are in place” (Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc, 2002). The lesson there is that even if authors like Eric Schlosser haven’t yet got around to finding the flaws in your organisation’s environmental practices, you should still have the answers at hand. Or better yet, make sure that you have flawless environmental policy so there is no need to defend yourself.

Possibly Schlosser limited his exploration of the environmental impact of fast food in order to focus even more on the social repercussions of its business. According to Ferrell, Fraedrich and Ferrell (1999), there are four steps of social responsibility – legal, ethical, economic and philanthropic. Different parts of Fast Food Nation state that the greater majority of the fast food industry doesn’t act philanthropically at all. When he writes about Fast Food Literacy programmes that organisations such as Pizza Hutt have started, Schlosser focuses on the free pizza vouchers that provide the incentive for children learning to read, which are, in his opinion, dooming the children to a lifelong habit of poor nutrition, rather than the fact that the children have now learnt to read. This is the kind of cynicism that much corporate sponsorship is greeted with. In her book Making Fast Food (1996), which could be a companion novel to Fast Food Nation, Ester Reiter writes “Many companies become involved in community activity in order to create a benign image of themselves”. Corporate communicators need to be aware that this may be the reaction their community initiatives receive, unless they are presented properly. The idea of small children being taught early in life that fast food is a great, exciting option does seem a little insidious, admittedly. A key message that should accompany any corporate sponsorship is that corporations are made up of people too – there isn’t just a money-hungry robot at the centre of the organisation that intentionally wants to harm people.

But, as Schlosser lists over and over again, many people are hurt by fast food. In ‘The Most Dangerous Job’ he describes the brutal conditions in slaughterhouses and lists various decapitations, chemical burns and loss of limbs that workers in them have suffered. In ‘Behind the counter’ he relates stories of injuries to staff in the actual fast food outlets. Although he is basing his writing entirely on anecdotes, there are plenty of studies that have been done, such as Youth at Work (Tannock 2001) and Making Fast Food (Reiter 1996) that can back up his claims. One of the main causes of injuries, according to Schlosser, is that as fast food outlets often employ the cheapest labour possible, resulting in a workforce who have English as a second language and who don’t understand safety procedures, and who are given inadequate training. This obvious lack of internal communication is something that socially responsible organisations would fix. Schlosser also claims that many workers are encouraged not to report injuries, and that those who do are severely penalised, signs of a troubled human resources department. Fast food workers are also very unlikely to belong to a union, and are unlikely to have job security or employee benefits. Despite this, McDonalds was voted 1999 Employer of the Year in Australia (McDonalds Corporation 2002), so either they have different practices in Australia than they do in the USA, or the Public Relations Department in Australia is doing a much better job.

It isn’t just those who work for the fast food companies are suffering health problems as a result. Recently newspapers have been full of stories in America who are suing fast food companies for making them fat (Gumball 2002). Schlosser backs their claims, listing statistics like that 25% of the vegetables in American children’s diets come from French fries, and tying the rise of obesity to the availability of fast food – using statistics from countries such as Japan, who are fairly new to the fast food market. Many food companies will state that by providing the nutritional information about their products, they are enabling customers to make nutritious choices (Germo and Williams, 1999, page 86).

Fast Food Nation meanwhile maintains that with advertising campaigns pitched at three year olds, no one is getting to make a choice. Certainly any socially responsible company would let its consumers know what they were eating, not just so they knew how many grams of fat was in their burger, but also in case it contained anything they were allergic to. The fast food industry is particularly vulnerable to charges that it contributes to the obesity epidemic by actively seeking to increase consumption of foods on which profits depend regardless of nutritional consequences (Germov and Williams 1999, page 86). Schlosser credits the Subway franchise with dedicating itself to producing lower fat sandwiches, while chastising all other fast food industries for the increasing of supersizes and the addition of bacon to almost everything.

Providing full information to buyers is one step towards social responsibility, but McDonalds France has taken social concern one step further and actually ran an advertising campaign advocating that McDonalds should only be eaten once a week or less (Field 2002). In India and other places with large Hindu populations, McDonalds no longer uses a formula to coat its fries that involves beef tallow, out of respect for the holy place of the cow in Hindu religion. However, Schlosser writes about the lack of internal communication at McDonalds whereby the organisation issued a statement that said it had never claimed its fries were entirely vegetarian, while customer service people wrote letters to individuals letting them know about the vegetarian options in their restaurants – including the tallow-coated fries. This illustrates the need for consistency in message throughout an organisation, as well as highlighting the need for honesty and responsibility for its actions.

The fact that McDonalds, the most recognised brand in the world that has been in operation for nearly 40 years has only published its first Social Responsibility Report this year, a year after Fast Food Nation was first written, speaks volumes in itself. Although the fast food industry continues to grow, so does the anti-globalisation movement. With stories such as the McLibel case hitting the spotlight, the industry is becoming aware that it needs to start looking at its environment and social impacts as well as its profit. There is much evidence that social responsibility, including business ethics, is associated with increased profits, due employee commitment and customer loyalty (Ferrell et all 2000, page 82). Schlosser states in his introduction “I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every social problem now facing the United States”, but he goes on to explain in great detail about the problems that it does cause. While the book is clearly intended as a call to arms for consumers – and an effective one at that, as evidenced by reading any amateur reviews of it on Amazon.com or other such web site – it can also be viewed by businesses as a “what not to do” manual. Fast Food Nation may put you off takeaway food for a while, but it is well written and very readable. Place it comfortably on your bookshelf between your well-thumbed copy of No Logo and next to the novel My Year of Meat for maximum street credibility.

Girl geek dinners are an opportunity for like-minded ‘girls’ to talk about technology over good food and to learn from some of their best fellow girl-geeks in Wellington. Attendees are usually geeks by profession such as software engineers, computer scientists, database experts, engineers and the like but anyone is welcome to attend as the primary objective is socialise and network.

I spoke at the first one in Wellington in 2008 about my career so far, and In the past I’ve helped with the events by organising prizes and goodie bags, but this time round I get to just relax and enjoy the speakers. Although the work that I’ve done and continue to do is often less technical than many of the speakers, I learn a lot from their presentations. For example, When Trudy Rankin from the Department of Conservation spoke at the last dinner, it was very clear that she absolutely gets ICT and social media, and that was really gratifying to see that a government department could actually be that proactive and supportive of online participation.

As far as the networking side of things go, sitting at big communal tables is a great way to get talking. When I was at the SSC, it was a great chance to share the work I’d been doing on things like SMS guidance, and find out what vendors were offering. Now that I’m looking for a permanent full-time job, making contacts is even more important. At the last dinner I sat next to Amie McCarron who runs her own web design company. After getting to know her then, I ended up doing some data entry for her recently. Data entry is obviously not very glamorous, but it did enable me to get some basic training in Joomla, which is a content management system I hadn’t used before, so that’s quite handy in my quest to become a Jack of all CMS.

But back to the ‘Girl’ part of the Girl Geek Dinners –  I hope you’re not questioning why we need our own separate event, but if you are, here’s a good post from Brenda to get you started if you haven’t realised that women in tech are in the minority.

The community aspect of Webstock is a huge part of what makes the event so special and why there was no way in the world that I wasn’t going to attend, but hopefully I will come back to that part again and again as I go through the speakers that I saw and what I took away from it. It was all kinds of adorable though that in his opening speech Mike Brown dedicated the event to Darren & Amanda who were getting married the next Saturday – especially since I actually introduced them at a Halloween party quite a number of years ago. But on to the speakers!

Scott Thomas was the design director of the Obama presidential campaign, and since that was something I was very passionate about at the time, I was really interested to see what he had to say. He spoke about how to really get the message out there, they opened up all their resources so that people could assemble their own channels – like putting things onto Youtube, having branding material available, transcripts of every speech, etc. I can see how that would be applicable in pretty much any kind of marketing campaign, although it’ll take a brave agency to adopt that attitude. I was also fascinated at the language Scott used, that he said things like “because Obama was so open” etc, not “because one of our campaign strategies was to make Obama’s language open” – you could tell that he was still inspired and given that I’m probably going to be a life-long public servant, I’m hoping that one day I’ll have a leader like that too. My notes in bullet point form:

• “Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand” – Newsweek
• important that every single part of the website was consistent and organised.
• “giant button lovers for obama” – supporters brand very important, so created downloads page. Let everyone do what they wanted with images and stuff.
• We get so stuck into how our organisation is organised that we don’t think about how the users are using the site
• If you could create an account on a website, we probably had one for Obama!
• Think about the human experience. Ask what humans know, not what computers know. Have a conversation with your users, use real questions. That way you know what to ask next.

Brian Fling was a great presenter, but he didn’t seem to have very much to say. Nevertheless, my notes:

• In less than five years, the mobile generation could have more buying power than any other group.
• Mobile industry is worth a TRILLION dollars. Twice that of the publishing.
• Six ways to make money: ringtones & wallpapers, games, subscriptions, web-based subscriptions, advertising, native applications.
• In less than five years, the mobile generation could have more buying power than any other group.

In contrast, Lisa Herrod had a lot to say in pleading for people to design with diversity in mind. It was really interesting to hear that she had come from a sign language background (especially because we were missing the added visuals of signers that Webstock normally has – learning how to sign “whip somebody’s ass” during Ze Frank’s presentation last year was particularly awesome). She endeared herself to me straight away by suggesting that everyone who doesn’t have an iPhone should leave the auditorium straight away and go watch her presentation on a tiny screen somewhere else instead, because as a non-iPhone-owner, it was kind of a bit extreme how very few of the other presenters would shut up about them, and seemed to refuse to acknowledge that not everyone owns one, or will indeed ever own one. It was also really nice to hear her praising the NZ Govt Web Standards site which so many of my former colleagues did good work on – which is also where you’ll find my introduction to Government Use of SMS.

The main point that Lisa drove home was that many people have many different experiences of the web, and saying “oh, my users aren’t like that” isn’t good enough. Hear hear.

• WHY ARE WE SEGREGATING PEOPLE? Why are we not taking an inclusive approach to user design?
• Everyone has the potential to be disabled at some point. It’s all about being inclusive, don’t disregard people just because its too hard or you can’t be bothered or you don’t have the budget.
• You don’t have to understand every single thing about accessibility, you should just be taking a little bit more time and care to make your projects more inclusive and less exclusive. ‘
• Do you conduct userbility testing as part of your work? So, if you’re doing user research, if you’re interviewing people and doing testing, howcome it’s so hard to find someone who uses user-assisted technology? Why is it so hard to call up someone and ask?

I was looking forward to Bek Hodgson’s presentation because I am all about the participation, but since her flight was delayed and she swapped with Lachlan Hardy, I ended up going to see Toby Segaran’s Beautiful Data instead. I’m not entirely sure (yet) if it was directly relevant to the work that I do, or the work that I hope to do, but he was fascinating non-the-less. I wonder if we succeed in opening up govt data after all if people will build Radiohead videos out of Ministry of Education league tables some time…

Ben Cerveny’s presentation was likewise fascinating and somewhat over my head. I felt almost as if I was in an XKCD cartoon which is not a bad thing at all!

Shelley Bernstein present at the National Library last year, I was seriously looking forward to her talk, and I wasn’t disappointed at all. The Brooklyn Museum’s use of social media is absolutely fantastic and inspirational. So many of the things that she talked about are all really cheap to build (in cash terms anyway, they do require significant time investment, especially at first) and really help to enhance the museum’s reputation. I admire the way that they use social media not just to celebrate their successes but also to talk about the bad bits too. That’s an important lesson that agencies in New Zealand really need to learn.

Jeff Atwood didn’t deliver interpretive dance as the programme promised, but he did talk at great length about building a community of users. Even though StackOverflow itself as a site doesn’t interest me as I’m not a programmer, the ways that they’ve developed to foster knowledge and community are totally transferable to really any community site, such as using rewards systems, and allowing users to vote comments up and down as per usefulness.

Regine deBatty and Rives were both a little more out there than some of the other presenters, so were more inspirational rather than practical. Rives in particular was absolutly astonishing to watch. I love that the last slot on the first day is saved for the really emotional experience, ala Kathy Sierra or Ze Frank. They’re the speakers that make you want to do your damn best to make the world a more beautiful place, at work and outside it.

Day Two was really startup orientated so I’m still processing how to transfer what I learnt from those talks into such a different environment here in NZ – especially if I’m going to continue to work in government. My notes are thinner on the ground here, but I do recommend seeing anything you can get your hands on by Amy Hoy. Her presentation style is so absolutely personable, she uses really informal language, interesting slides and talks about octopodes and other things that you woudn’t immediately think would be relateed but somehow she works them in. She’s my personal presentation idol. And I really should check out Freckle to manage my time.

I’d met Seb Chan when I represented the SSC at an AGIMO roundtable on government use of Social Media back in 2008, and I’ve really respected the work he’s done for the Powerhouse Museum, but since he was up against the re-aligned Bek Hodgson, I decided to check her out instead. I was really interested in to find out more about Etsy and their huge community base, but her presentation didn’t really speak to me very much, unfortunately, and it was really short. There hadn’t really been many speakers who’d taken questions before, so I didn’t think to have any ready to ask.

talk on elements of a networked urbanism was fascinating, and I would love to see him co-present with Matt Bidulph who spoke last year because I think they would really feed off each other. It was the sort of presentation where the auditorium goes darker because everyone shuts their laptops and really listens instead of twittering about it. Jeff Veen was similarly enchanting, with the way he managed to link ice sales to CSS. Meanwhile Mark Pesce’s history lesson about how the web has really only been around for 15 years (and I’ve been online that whole time!) was well-considered and made me really optimistic and full of plans for the future. It was a wonderful note to end on.

Except that of course it didn’t actually end there, not really, because there was of course the ONYA awards, and it was lovely to see great sites getting rewarded for their goodness. I’m hoping to see more government nomineees up there next year, and/or something I’ve worked on. That’s my goal for the next year. To quote Mark Pesce’s blurb,

” Everything we thought we knew about how the Web works, what the Web does for us, and who controls the Web is up for grabs, once again. We will see bright shining stars – and sudden, brief supernovas – just as we did in the Web’s early years. The opportunities are breathtaking, the innovations will be flying fast and thick. All of this is now within our grasp.”

Thank you so much Webstock for inspiring me again,  and thank you to all the amazing speakers and attendees that I had insane amounts of fascinating conversations with during the past week. Despite still being underemployed, I’m excited to be a part of this community and world once again.

Bruce Sterling’s “Web 2.0 guys: they’ve got their laptops with whimsical stickers, the tattoos, the startup T-shirts, the brainy-glasses — you can tell them from the general population at a glance” caused us to start a game where we had to find that exact person.

It was me who won that challenge, pulling Darren Wood out of the crowd, which meant I got to set the next challenge. We hunted through the afterparty looking for content creators, foreigners and public servants and the like. We got to meet new people and start new conversations and it was a lot of fun.

Conversations on Twitter lately centered on what kind of games we could play this year that would enhance our Webstock experience. I think that so much of the value of the conference lies in the people you meet, both in terms of new friends to make and also new business contacts, so I figured that meeting as many people as possible should be part of the game. Collecting business cards would be one way, but what if we could use Twitter to keep track of what was going on? So I tweeted this, in hopes of some crowd-sourced help:

“We need random bingo sheet generator with twitter icons to cross off when you meet that person @ #webstock. Who can make this happen please?”

Walter replied back, and I showed him the game of Hipster Bingo that I was using as inspiration. We decided to use twitter profiles instead of hipster stereotypes, and he got busy building.

Because we were doing a lot of our planning over Twitter, we’d already started using a hashtag #webstockbingo to keep our thoughts together. We decided that people should opt into the game, so we asked them to tweet yes and include the hashtag so we could keep track of who wanted to play. Using our accounts and also the Wellingtonista twitter account, we soon found over 50 people who wanted to play, even though they didn’t know quite what to expect.

Testing the autotweets from the game, we saw some negative feedback from people who weren’t playing, who didn’t want #webstockbingo cluttering up their timelines. Although some people use twitter clients that can block particular hash tags, I realised that the easiest way to keep people happy would be to set up a new twitter account so that only people who were following @wsbingo would see game updates, and then only ones from people they were already following. Having a specific webstock bingo twitter account also makes it easier to do official announcements and follow people who are playing the game who I wouldn’t personally follow.

Now the challenge was to explain the game to everyone. 140 characters wasn’t really enough space, so we wrote out some rules, and then added an FAQ. Hopefully it all makes sense to people. Walter’s done a lot of tweaking behind the scenes, and I’ve been talking the game up everywhere, including making sure it’s included in the other Webstock Game.We’re launching it this afternoon before the Official Wellingtonista (unofficial) Webstock Warm-Up that I’ve organised, so hopefully tonight and tomorrow and Friday all our participants will have even more incentive to meet new people and have a great time. So, if you get me on your board, come say hi, buy me a drink for extra points, and let’s chat. Awesome.

• Gadgets & Games
• The Internet, Web 3.0…
• Business & Technology
• Wellington/NZ/the Universe (open slather)

If you check out the results of the twitter-poll done on the night it will appear that I won, but I think people voted for me after the fact, because in fact the wonderful Brenda was the winner of the tiara for the second year in a row. I had a blast though, and thoroughly enjoyed alienating myself from the room by telling them that they did not represent the population as a whole. If you’d like to see my predictions for 2010, you can view my slides on Slideshare (although I talk a lot more than I use words on the screen, which is as it should be), or watch the video of the event below:

So, do you reckon I’m right or wrong? What do you think will happen this year? And will I ever learn to present without fidgeting?

How not to be a dick on twitter

1. Build up your posts before you start seeking an audience. People want to see what sort of things to expect if they start following you.
2. Identify key stakeholder groups and start following them first. Try interacting with them by @ing them first. Don’t randomly follow everyone you can think of unless you’re actually at least vaguely interested in what they have to say, otherwise a) you’ll come across all spammy, and b) you’ll never have time to keep up.
3. Try not to use your twitter as an RSS feed. If you think that your followers don’t use your RSS, (and you’ve already quoted my GOVIS presentation comparing RSS to a dog fetching the newspaper from your letter box for you, and have already pointed them to the great Common Craft video explaining RSS) try to add a little value to your post so people know what they’re getting into. As an example:
   • Bad: “http://joannamcleod.com/new”
   • Less bad: “A new blog post http://joannamcleod.com/new”
   • Better: “I express my thoughts on people sucking at twitter http://joannamcleod.com/new”
   • Best: “What do you reckon are the worst twitter crimes? My thoughts http://joannamcleod.com/new”
4. Don’t start using Twitter unless you’re prepared to spend the time responding to people who respond to you. You don’t have to automatically follow everyone who follows you, but you do need to make sure you’re paying attention to things people say about you on there, and respond accordingly.
5. Twitter is not the be all and end all of all channels. It reaches a specific group who use it a specific way. It isn’t a catch all for society. You need more ways of building your audience and getting your message across that you can use in addition to Twitter.

Web 2.0 is not a big deal. It is not a scary freaky place. It is you doing what you’ve always done (or at least should be doing), just through an extra medium. New technologies may assist government/public participation, but most of the old rules still apply. Don’t be afraid.
Key learning points:
1. People are using new technologies to communicate in the exact same ways that they always have communicated.
2. Therefore, you have nothing to fear from using new technologies to get your message out.
3. But there are a few things you should consider.

You can view it on the GOVIS website, or check out my slides embedded beneath. I have to say it was a career highlight for me, because it was the culmination of 18 months work at the SSC, and it was very well received – the magic of Twitter allowed me to see feedback straight away, including:

• Mike Riversdale: Yesterday’s #govis09 highlight seems to have been @JoannaTMcLeod and today @MattLane is also @webstock worthy. SSC, you losing BOTH these people???
• nzlemming@joannatmcleod Best preso of conf so far. Good content, well presented. Thanks #govis09
• auchmill@joannatmcleod hammering home the basics: don´t lose the plot just cos it´s ¨social media¨ #govis09
• gnat@nzkoz No f-bombs from @johubris. She’s REALLY good and appropriate to audience. 10/10. Authoritative, accessible and friendly. #govis09 about 8 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to nzkoz
• trib@johubris doing a tops job on real use of socmed. Gratz! #govis09about 8 hours ago from Tweetie
• sigurdmagnussonEnjoying govis09 @joannatmcleod talk.Thx for reiterating to crowd that facebook, twitter are just new ways to exhibit age-old human behaviorabout 8 hours ago from Twitterrific
• nzrumi Joanna McLeod presso on Social Media was great. #govis09 about 8 hours ago from Tweetie
• Cle0patra#govis09 @joannatmcleod doing great and relevant preso on social mediaabout 8 hours ago from Twitterrific

SMS or texting has a high adoption rate in New Zealand. Some government agencies are using computer-to-mobile texting to deliver their services to New Zealanders in a direct way. SSC has prepared case studies from four different government agencies who have trialled SMS. This presentation will discuss lessons learnt. It provides a starting point for agencies considering SMS as a solution for service delivery or communication with their customers.

If you didn’t catch it, you missed out! But luckily you can either listen to it on the Public Service Intranet, assuming you’re on a government IP, or check out my slides here. I’m very happy to talk about this in greater depth, although obviously I am no longer able to advise in an official capacity on it.