My last blog...

Hey guys,

Sorry for the late update again. I was woking on my final assignments over the weekend and now I finally have a time to memorise my last day in DAFWA.

It was such as fresh experience to give a presentation in a broad room, everyone was sitting around a large table and watching you. The presentation was orginally a brief summary of the report I wrote for the BYG project, but then I decided to change the topic into an introduction of Gov 2.0 as I found that people attending the meeting may not have a deep understanding of the concepts. My presentation was divided into 3 main parts:

• Explaning the concept of Web 2.0
• Introducing Gov 2.0
• How it works to use Web 2.0 tool in government?

I was pretty nervous at the begining of the presentation because I couldn't remember some of the ideas I supposed to say (and as a non-English speaker, presenting in English still made me felt a bit stress). But then, I felt a lot more relaxed after we started discussing on the topic. Some attendents in the meeting are very experienced people in terms of government 2.0 movement. They contribute some interesting viewpoints towards the topic and I was really glad to hear people shring their thoughts about Web 2.0 from different perspectives.

My internship finished with the presentation, I truly enjoyed the 3 months I spent in DAFWA. The internship did not really related to common Public Relations practice but through the researching process, I found a lot of interesting facts about Gov 2.0 movement. And these findings do confirm my idea on Web 2.0 in Public Relations: It is going to be a era of PR 2.0 in the future as engaging and collaborating with consumers through Web 2.0 tools produce a more effective and interactive communication method. I want to take this chance to thanks my supervisior and colleges who have been encouraging and teaching me lots of valuable knowledge.

By the way, here are some tips I generated for a sucessful presetation:

• Keep it short and simple: The length of the talk should less than 20 minutes because people would starting losing their concentration after hearing 10 minutes of speech.
  
• Engage with your audiences: Prepare questions to ask the audiences, it helps you to know what theu understand from the presentation and also keeps them awake!
• Using visual materials: Adding videos in the presentation would be a good to help audiences to find the presentation intersting and understand more about your idea, but please keep it short (less than 5 minutes).

Don't know if they would work for you, please feel free to have a try!

Going to the end...

Hi guys,

Haven't been updating my status after my last entry for a while. The last 4 weeks went really fast and I finally finished my main task of my internship: A report on investigating the use of Web 2.0 tools in creating collaborative communication platform between the Department and its stakeholders.

Here are some recommandations I made for the implement of the online platform:

• Organising information session before the online platform launch, contextualising the benefits of Web 2.0 tools and introduce the concept to the stakeholders

• Develop a social media policy to monitor the operation of the website

• Develop a framework of the online platform, describing how it will accomplish its mission and the resources needed for the operation.

• Having a administrator to monitor and give quick response regards to any queries
• Establish a clear copyright guideline
• Provides experience of collaborative communication by organising workshops and testing of the websites.
• Develop a disclaimer and post on the site, indicating the site is provided by a third party service provider.
• Publishing a clear statement to acknowledge the legal responsibility under the terms of service
• Building a sense of ownership among the stockholders by inviting them to contribute in the creating process of the online platform

Due to the fact that there still quite a number of grain growers in WA are not familiar with the concept of Web 2.0 and some of them remain a passive attitude towards adopting new technology. It is important for the government ageny to provide them a clear idea of the whole project and encourage stakrholders to involve more in it.

I am going to give a internal pitch to the staff in DAFWA tomorrow, which is about the benefits and the needs of using Web 2.0 tools in government communication. This will be my final task for my internship, I'll share about the pitch and the overall experience of the internship later this week.

My internship in DAFWA

Sorry guys, I had just found that my first post is not here so I post it again. Luckily I saved a copy of it.

Hi everyone, my name is Ki Yan. This is my first post here to talk about my internship experience in the Department of Agriculture and Food. I have started my internship two weeks ago and I would like to give you a scope of what I am working on now. A new initiative called “Bridging the Yield Gap” was launched early this year by the department to increase gain production. My main task during the internship is to produce a research report that seeks the opportunity to use social media tools in a government project. Unlike most of the Public Relations work experience, the work I am doing is at the beginning stage of a PR strategy, which is research and development. I am really interested in this project because using social media is one of the newest PR and marketing tool, thus it is getting more and more frequent used in PR strategy. I am also keen in studying the implement and the development of “Government 2.0” because I think the trend of having an “open” government is spreading around the world in recent years. The Australian government had announced its Gov 2.0 report earlier this year, through the feedback of the report from the federal government; it is obvious to see the Australian government has a positive attitude towards “Gov 2.0”. Although it is hard to say whether this attitude would remain or not after the election, it is still a good sign to show that the government is aware of the issue.

The other main issue of the task is to find out the possibility of using social media to collaborate with the gain farmers in Western Australia. Consider the ability of accessing the Internet and famers’ attitude towards new Internet technology; the social media strategies that most commercial corporations and government department are using may not be applicable to this case.

At the moment I am researching data about how Australian farmers (especially those in Western Australia) use the Internet and their attitudes towards it. Hopefully I can share some interesting findings with you in my next post.

Working in Progess

Hi all,

Sorry for my delayed post since my first one. I was spending most of my time on researching and reading all resources related to my project. I've been working on the research report for weeks and I've found a lot of interesting facts about Web 2.0 in government and also some challenges of using social media tools in a farming project.

As a part of Internet users, we can experience the power of social networking sites. According to Nielsen research, 20 per cent of Australia's web users are using social networking tools, and within this group, people averagely spend nearly seven hours a month on posting twitts, updating posts and blog entries - more than in the United States, Britain or Japan. This result shows us social media is a great tool for Public Relations professions. It is the easiest and cheapest way to reach the largest numbers of people. There are more and more PR and marketing companies establish social media campaign for their clients as most of the major organizations nowadays have a twitter account or a blog. Government, as one of the biggest and most important information provider in the society, would create more benefits to the citizens if it started to share information through Web 2.0 tools.


As I mentioned in my last post, Australian government appointed Government 2.0 task-force to produce a report that included some accommodations for a government to create a collaborative platform for the citizens. The report was released in December 2009 (http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/gov20taskforcereport/index.html ) and the federal government made its response to the report by releasing “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0
" report (http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/gov20taskforcereport/index.html). Australian government showed a positive attitude towards building a open government to Australian public by accepting most of the recommendations. This response was praised by some Gov 2.0 evangelists and claimed Australia “beats” the US in terms of the progress on Gov 2.0.


The general trend on Gov 2.0 is quite positive in Australia, numbers of governmental projects and departments stated to release information by using facebook, twitter, blogs and creative common license. However, when it comes to the “Bridging the Yield Gap” project, some of the benefits may not be applicable. So far, I've found some difficulties of using social media tools in a farming project. Unlike citizens in metropolitan area, farmers in Western Australia do not necessarily have broadband Internet access and their attitudes of using new technology are not as positive as those in metropolitan area due to their age, perceptions on new technology and income. Another issues like privacy and copyright are also issues that needed to take deeper consideration in the planing stage of a social media campaign.

Anyway, I'll continue to work on the task and look for the ways to solve these challenges. Please feel free to give me some comments and suggestion if you are interested in this topic.