3 ms·

Great comment. As someone who works for the U.S. government (all opinions here are my own!), one of the most frustrating things about working there is the extr

Great comment. As someone who works for the U.S. government (all opinions here are my own!), one of the most frustrating things about working there is the extreme sense of risk aversion in trying new things. If you stick to the status quo and don't rock the boat, even if what you are doing isn't effective you won't run into any difficulties. However, the second you try something new and it fails (or just doesn't live up to expectations), allegations of waste and incompetence follow. In the private sector, how many companies have spent millions trying to figure out how to make social media work for their businesses before finding an approach that delivers results? If government doesn't have the same flexibility to experiment, it will never figure out how to harness some of these new tools and will end up being relegated even more than it already is to using obsolete approaches and technologies. Ideally government would have the ability to rapidly try new, small dollar projects with the expectation that many efforts would fail but a few would succeed and end up contributing to a new way of doing business. Unfortunately the institutional bias towards big, safe, and old-fashioned approaches is reinforced each time an innovative attempt at something new is perceived as falling short.

shortformblog 13y ago
That's exactly it, Scott. In my day gig, I regularly see these kinds of bureaucratic waste stories surface about fairly innocuous things taken out of context, showing up on sites like the Examiner or the Daily Caller or Politico. They're meant to rile folks up and get them angry, because they draw traffic and such. But when you dig a little deeper, the scooplets at times don't tend to stand up to scrutiny. (An example of this from a couple of years ago, involving a "$16 muffin": http://sfbne.ws/122aqOr http://sfbne.ws/122aqOr ) In this case, the two-percent engagement number is a huge tell, because if you were to say 40,000 users or whatever it is, it wouldn't sound nearly as much like a waste of money. And if you were to put this in context of what other marketing companies pay to get on Facebook, as well as the per-user costs they were paying, especially compared to other marketing venues, you might find that this is actually the most effective form of marketing for them. (How much did they spend on TV/magazine/other forms of outreach in the past? And what was their success rate?) I'm not saying that this isn't a huge waste of money or time—it may still turn out to be, and a big one at that—but we aren't being given all of the variables here, and being asked to base this entire story on one side of the claims. Remember—in D.C. political media, sometimes you won't hear the other side of the story, so being skeptical and not taking things at face value is probably for the best.

shortformblog 13y ago

That's exactly it, Scott. In my day gig, I regularly see these kinds of bureaucratic waste stories surface about fairly innocuous things taken out of context, showing up on sites like the Examiner or the Daily Caller or Politico. They're meant to rile folks up and get them angry, because they draw traffic and such. But when you dig a little deeper, the scooplets at times don't tend to stand up to scrutiny. (An example of this from a couple of years ago, involving a "$16 muffin": http://sfbne.ws/122aqOr http://sfbne.ws/122aqOr ) In this case, the two-percent engagement number is a huge tell, because if you were to say 40,000 users or whatever it is, it wouldn't sound nearly as much like a waste of money. And if you were to put this in context of what other marketing companies pay to get on Facebook, as well as the per-user costs they were paying, especially compared to other marketing venues, you might find that this is actually the most effective form of marketing for them. (How much did they spend on TV/magazine/other forms of outreach in the past? And what was their success rate?) I'm not saying that this isn't a huge waste of money or time—it may still turn out to be, and a big one at that—but we aren't being given all of the variables here, and being asked to base this entire story on one side of the claims. Remember—in D.C. political media, sometimes you won't hear the other side of the story, so being skeptical and not taking things at face value is probably for the best.