The last decade has seen a transformation in community engagement by Government departments. Traditional “town hall” style meetings and telephone research have been increasingly replaced by the arrival of a variety of engagement portals and online surveys. With varying levels of success, departments are using digital tools to canvass opinions on everything from proposed procurement

My timeline continues to be dominated by the fallout from the news that Paul Shetler, having made the decision to leave the DTO, had written a farewell blogpost describing his sixteen months in Australian Government.  The DTO has since been renamed as the DTA and relocated to Canberra but imagining what lies ahead is as

I’m sure most of us took time over the holidays, not only to rest but also to catch up on our reading. (Happy New Year, by the way). Seems to me that away from the madness of world politics, the most prevalent theme in my reading seemed to be discussions about Artificial Intelligence. Even in

It never fails. Every post, every keynote, every workshop where I talk about the value of digital advertising always begs the same question. What would the digital guru say? When I talk about the low response rates to targeted advertising, what’s the other side of the story? Putting aside the fact that Facebook got their

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review was claiming that the rise of “digital” in business has become so dominant, so overwhelming, that it is no longer just part of the economy, but, and I quote… “Digital is the economy”. Far be it from me to take on the highbrow experts at Harvard, but

Some days working in communications in Government can be tough. Yesterday was definitely one of those days. After a tetchy few weeks in the run up to the census, the first I was aware of the communications drama unfolding at the ABS was a series of tweets yesterday morning describing graphically how a number of

It’s 2016! Happy New Year to all readers and I hope you were able to enjoy some rest over the holiday. My Twitter feed suggests that the new buzzword phrase for 2016 is “growth hacking”. Now, while we’re all beginning to realise that articles headed “the secrets to five great growth hacking tips” may not

Over the last few months, in the many meetings and conferences I’ve attended with people at all points of the Government communications spectrum, the buzz word has been innovation. Through working on GovCamps in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney with the team at CoFluence, we learned about the “barriers” to innovation. Uppermost in the philosophical word

One of the challenges of having been in marketing since the days when TV audiences mattered and customer loyalty was the golden goose is that it’s easy to think that some concepts are so clear, so patently obvious that they don’t need to be mentioned. Like knowing your audience for example.  It’s surely a staple

The last few months have seen some significant and timely shifts in the Australian Government’s approach to embracing the digital revolution. Most significant of all, and possibly the least planned element of the whole thing was Malcolm Turnbull’s appointment as Prime Minister. Prior to taking the top job, Turnbull’s plans for the newly formed Digital