Agencies not prepared for citizen input

The support of President Barack Obama's goal to move to a more open and citizen engaged government is wide and gladly accepted by both industry and agencies.

But one hitch in this goal is, how can agencies deal with the volume of comments coming in?

This specific challenge rose to the forefront when the General Services Administration made it easier for agencies to use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo and blip.tv.

GSA on March 25 signed standard terms and conditions agreements with these four social media providers. GSA also says Twitter's existing standard is good enough for the federal government.

"What we are hearing and what we are seeing is a lot of agencies are looking at how they are realign their resources," says Sheila Campbell, GSA's manager of USA.gov and Web best practices.

"Ultimately if you are using your blog the way TSA is using their blog to monitor public opinion and public feedback, potentially that will reduce the number of phone calls coming into your phone line. And so, agencies need to think about it in terms of overall business needs to use these tools."

GSA officials stressed that agencies shouldn't just jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon until they have identified a true business or mission need.

But with administration initiatives such as Recovery.gov where the White House actively wants citizen feedback, agencies are interested in how they can use ratings and rankings tools to understand what citizens are telling them, says Teresa Nasif, GSA's director of the Federal Citizen Information Center.

"There is a real opportunity for vendors to provide a solution that aggregates comments," Nasif says.

"Every agency is faced with the question of how to deal with citizen input."

Martha Dorris, the acting administrator of GSA's Office of Citizen Services, says the agency is exploring several ways to provide a common set of tools for all agencies.

"We are looking at what contracts are in place now, what contracts may need to be put in place to facilitate buying across the government," Dorris says.

"We are looking at open source tools and free tools. What can be bought, built or acquired free of charge?"

Woody Talcove, president and CEO of Lexis Nexis special services, says there are several tools already available that his and other companies are using.

"There are a lot of freeware tools out there like Tweetbeat or Linked-In to monitor blogs and Wikis for your name," he says.

"We get a report monthly that tells us about the activity online. It is a shareware free service that helps us know where we fit in compared to competitors."

Talcove adds that before agencies-or any organization for that matter-begins implementing these tools, they must set policy for how employees should use social media, and ensure the company is putting information online that people want.

"The new world is iterative and there is no best answer to how to use these tools," he says.

"Consumers will read it and criticize it, and offer all sorts of comments. We all need to look at that as an opportunity, and that is part of the mindset the government needs to get its arms around. This is a great equalizer."

Talcove adds that when the comments do start coming in, he looks for themes, consistency and specificity-both positive and negative.

"Certain groups provide better feedback than other ones and sometimes you get random feedback that doesn't fit or other times you get lot of feedback from people who use the your information all the time," he says.

"So I always look for who my constituents are and focus on those comments especially."

Talcove adds that Lexis Nexis uses a database tool to analyze feedback by specific words.

"I do take the time to look at our comments," Talcove says.

"Every week, I scan them and look for those that catch my attention based on what I'm interested in. It's basic old fashion reading of notes. And when something stands out to me, there is no bigger surprise for our customer to get call from me to see how we can fix the problem. That feedback carries so much wait in the community and it gets people to pay attention that you care."

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