So, yesterday was the occasion of the eircom all-Ireland eGovernment Symposium, and we had some really fantastic speakers, and great attendance. Last year, I gave myself sore thumbs by tweeting (from an iPhone) non-stop through the day, but I was shouting into the void a bit - there were about 25 other tweets about the symposium all day. This year, up to this morning, there were 165 tweets with the official #iegovsym hashtag, and that’s leaving out my livestreaming on the @irelandgov account.  So that’s a 660% increase over last year.

Looking more closely at that, some of the tweets posted were spam. That brings down the signal to noise ratio by a bit, but it’s also a marker of success - in order for the spambots to pick up the hashtag, it had to be trending in Ireland. So for some measure of time yesterday, a bit before lunchtime, #iegovsym was appearing as a trending topic right across Ireland.

There are a few factors in this. First up, the theme of the symposium was “social media”. That’s probably a reason right there for the amount of Twitter traffic. But there was also a much, much higher number of mobile devices in the room. Dan and I were hammering away on our iPads, and I could see four more in the rows near us. There were smartphones all over the place, and there were people who weren’t there commenting as well.

There’s a fairly broadly accepted rule of thumb that for every comment you get, there are twenty silent readers (well, some people say a hundred - I think that’s optimistic). I’d reckon it’s fair to say, though, that you get ten times as many people looking with interest as you get tweets using the hashtag. So that would mean that - not counting my live tweets - there were about 1650 people paying attention to the symposium.

That makes a pretty strong case for the worth of social media.

However, I was at a briefing this morning given by the Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, wherein he was describing the impacts of these changes in regulation on the marketing industry in general. Most of his updates had to do with direct mail and phone calls, but I was able to ask about Google Analytics in particular, and how it might be possible to implement cookies for that, legally.

He was very definite about the notion that in any case, the opinion of the Data Protection Commission is that Analytics’ cookies fall very close to the “not a problem” end of the spectrum. However, he was also able to tell us that he’d very recently received a notification from Google directly that they’d be rolling out adjustments very shortly to bring the use of cookies in Analytics into line not just with EU regulation, but also with German law, which is quite strict on such things.

I’ve since had that confirmed by people in Google - the changes they’re making are mostly to do with opt-out functions and geodata scrubs - but the upshot is that Analytics will remain perfectly legal. That’s a very definite relief for me, as it’s one of my single most important tools.

If you’re going to use social media for marketing, then you have to use social media yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to make yourself look like an idiot, as you flail through the process of learning while representing a business, or worse, just don’t learn. And to use social media, you have to sit down and deal with them every day. In fact, it has to become a habit, like checking your email.

It really only becomes evident to me how habitual my social media use is when one of my networks is down. Livejournal, which is an old, well-established network, with little business use (except by genre writers, but that’s a whole different area) has been suffering a DDOS attack for the last few days. This has two effects; first, the one where I hit the LJ tab in my browser, and then wonder why it’s not working, and second, all my other networks are sprouting posts that go “LJ is down, so I’m posting here instead”. Now, with both of these going on, I know LJ is down, but I still keep going to that tab to look at what’s new there.

The same thing happens with Twitter, with Google+, and with all the other networks and network tools I use on a daily basis. And because of this habitual use, I know how it works - I know what’s annoying, what works well, which posts are likely to be RT’d, reshared, or otherwise passed on, and which ones will get responses. This isn’t something you can learn from a presentation or book, or keep a cheat sheet on, because it changes. It will keep on changing, too - what was ‘correct’ two months ago is not going to work now, and the things that will work well in two months don’t even exist now.

If you want to use social media for your business, you have to use social media yourself. Get in the habit.

So, what is it? Well, it’s Google’s latest attempt at a social network. And rather than the new functionality of Wave, or the near invisibility of Buzz, it’s basically a copy of Facebook’s functionality - so much so that it’s surprising. However, there are some important differences, and I think they’ll become more important in the longer term. Whether they’ll lead to success or not is another matter entirely, of course.

First and foremost, where Facebook defaults to sharing all the input you give it with whoever will listen, Plus defaults to setting up “circles”, such as Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Work, and so on, straight off the bat. And then you choose which circles each piece of data you add goes to.  Facebook can do this, but it’s functionality that was added much later, and which is not easily evident. People can’t see what circles they’re in, only that you have them in some circle or circles. They can, however, see a list of the other people who can see a given post.

Second, it has none of the annoying games, quizzes, and spam-producing applications for which Facebook is notorious. This makes a vast difference in the overall signal to noise ratio.

Third - and this is a subtle one - where Facebook has “like”, Plus has “+1″. This is more important than it seems, because a lot of the feedback one could give on Facebook is stymied by the semantic discomfort of clicking “Like” on a line that says “2000 killed by earthquake”, or “My dog died last night”. But the “+1″ communicates much more effectively that you feel the content is important, worth marking as such, rather than that you approve of it.

Plus is a sensible blend of technologies, terminologies, and sensitivities to privacy. It has the gradation of access from Livejournal, the ease of use that Facebook could have, if it had been properly designed, an underlying technological robustness, and very low barriers to entry, since it’s integrated with existing Google accounts.

So, it’s technically solid, but will it take off? Can it challenge Facebook? That depends. I’m bad at predicting these things, because the technical solidity means more to me. I reckoned Wave was the business, and didn’t think at first that Twitter would get anywhere - so wrong on both counts. On the other hand, I didn’t think Orkut would rise to much, and I was pretty sure Buzz would remain mostly invisible, so I haven’t been altogether wrong.

Here, in any case, is my set of predictions: Plus will never be as big as Facebook, but it will be better, and have a more loyal following. It will also be easier to monetise, which will help it immensely.

Let me deal with those in order. It will never be as big, because Facebook has now expanded to a huge number of people who have very little concept still of how the internet really works. They won’t move to Plus because they won’t really know it’s out there. Maybe some of them will move eventually, and maybe they won’t. Either way, they aren’t the core audience Plus is aiming for.

On the other hand, if you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly part of that core audience. You have an awareness of marketing and a notion of how the internet works. You have some concept of which information you want to keep private or limited, and which you’re willing to release into the world. You’ll use Plus because you know it’s better, and that makes a difference to you.

These technically informed circles are the people Google need to reach with plus, because we’re the people to whom they can offer advertising that works best. Google will monetise Plus, there’s no question of that. But they’ll do it with subtle, sensible ads, targeting keywords and demographics in a very, very precise manner, like they do with gmail today - except more so. There will be a point where you are never offered an ad that doesn’t have some appeal to you, either on a basis of want or need.

Facebook, I reckon, will be left as the place in which you communicate with more distant people - relatives you don’t often see or deal with, school friends, neighbours from three houses ago, and so on. Plus will be where your core networks, your closest circles, end up.

An airport with free wifi makes me comfortable, because I can pass the indeterminate time I’m there - even if I’m standing waiting to go through the gate - in familiar virtual environs. This makes me a far happier passenger.

Now, I’d be happy to pay something for wifi as well, if I could predict how long I’m going to need. But the nature of airports is that you’re waiting an indeterminate amount of time, which is in no way under your control. If you pay for three hours, and then there’s a gate change after an hour, and the plane arrives early, and so on, you can end up having only a fraction of the time you paid for. Or you have to go renew it after an hour because the plane is late. And by the time you’ve changed some money, found out how to access the paid network, and so on… it’s too much hassle.

This can be extended to other places as well, at home as well as abroad - although given the potential data roaming charges, it’s even better abroad. Cafés, parks, waiting areas in train stations, even, as The Atlantic points out, trains and buses themselves. In short, the best thing you can do, if your business involves any amount of waiting on my part, is give me free wireless access. I will be back. Further, I will tell people about it, and they’ll come there as well. It’s a tiny extra thing from a business point of view, but for a data junkie like me, I’ll go for your wireless before I’ll go for your coffee.

The mail goes on to remind me that I signed up via Twitter to reserve my usual online nickname (not that anyone is likely to take it; I think AOL chat is the only place I’ve ever been unable to get it, but still). All good so far. And then it says that if I “tag” ten other people on the website, I’ll get early access to the service. Now, this is where alarm bells go off in my head, and connect.me are making one principal mistake - they’re not immediately reassuring me. I don’t know what tagging is in this context - it may just be attaching a descriptive tag to someone’s Twitter username in the the website’s database, but it could be anything up to sending them a direct message going “Please sign up to this service!”.

So what I want to see when I go and look at the website is “here is what we mean by tagging”. At the very least, I want to see “We won’t send Tweets without your explicit consent”. And looking across the privacy statement, their “trust” page, and various others, I’m not seeing that. The website has a good feel to it. I don’t think they’re going to spam my twitter followers. But I’ve had enough applications send out messages to not be entirely happy until I see them say they won’t.

Essentially, this “tag 10 people to get access” thing feels a bit like a pyramid scheme, and it’s making me distrustful. I’m pretty sure that’s not the early impression they want to give.

Finally, having read up and down the website several times, I’ve found a line in the email I got that reads, “For now, tags = tweets. So be considerate to your followers. The official Connect.Me site will not require tweets” - which instantly makes me feel much happier, even though it says it’ll send tweets. But I now know, and can adjust what I want to do accordingly.

So the lesson is: if you’re providing an online service, provide reassurance as to what you’re going to do with the data you’re given. Lots of reassurance, even for things that are patently obvious to you, and in multiple places, so it’s easy to find.

There’s a simple answer to this, and there’s a slightly more complex one.

The simple answer is this: it’s where people are, online, right now. We use billboards and hoardings to reach people in public spaces, radio and magazine advertising to reach them when they’re commuting, television to reach them when they’re relaxing. Facebook is a ‘place’ where most users spend upwards of a hour each day, and if your business doesn’t have a presence there, then those who do are going to reach your customers instead of you. This applies whether your customers are actually customers, or are volunteers, students, clients, vendors, or whatever other contacts you’re dealing with.

The slightly more complex answer is that if you don’t keep up with networks like Facebook (or Twitter, or whatever), even if they seem silly or trivial, you’re going to be running to catch up when something more serious comes along in the same vein. We’ve seen this in a very serious sense in the Middle East and North Africa over the last few months, during the ‘Arab Spring’, when social networks were used to enable revolutions. The authorities in those countries hadn’t the slightest idea how to handle social networks, and in some cases, resorted to cutting off electricity to try to shut down communications.

So, as one client asked me last week, “Do I have to be on Facebook?”. No, you don’t. But there’s a cost associated with not being there, where you lose access to existing and potential customers, and there’s a future cost when you don’t have the understanding of some future network. And it’s very possible that you will have to be on that future network.

I’ve been watching the number of iPhones on the train rising. There are some other smartphones out there as well, of course, the HTC Desire being the other one I see most. Some people - particularly on the Intercity trains that come in from Sligo and Longford - have laptops. But I’ve never seen a rise in mobile devices like that immediately following the holidays this year. I watched in some amazement as every single person in the carriage I was in on the morning of the 4th of January took out a smartphone of some kind, with the iPhone being about 70% of those.

Smartphones have gone, suddenly, from being something still a little remarkable to being something nearly everyone has. The iPhone, which is definitely the root of all of this, has been available at semi-reasonable prices for about two years now. That space of time, from novelty to ubiquity in 24 months, is pretty impressive. So we really, really have to consider the mobile user for online marketing from now on, if we weren’t already.

This isn’t particularly in constructing apps, but more an awareness that the landing pages we’re putting together, the links we’re tweeting, and so on, are going to be viewed on a very small screen, which doesn’t handle Flash. That last, for example, is already a problem for a number of pubs and restaurants around Dublin, whose websites are entirely in Flash, and therefore can’t be viewed at all on the iPhone. HTML 5 takes a huge jump in importance, then.

Over the next while, I’ll be watching for appearances of the iPad. I’ve seen a few - not many - on the train, and a few more in airports during December. But I’d be willing to put money on it that there will be a lot of iPads appearing on commutes and in queues in the next year.

Shirky is calling out some of the behaviours we see in groups on the internet, and also pointing out that there’s a lot of documentation out there. But people aren’t aware of that; they don’t think of their platform, or their software, or their network, as places where group dynamics will appear.

These things don’t change. Where there are people interacting, you’ll see emergent behaviour. Sometimes this gets folded back into the technology, and sometimes it doesn’t. For years, there was a massive effort on the part of many people to prevent top-replying in email - that is, the practice of writing in replies above the old text, rather than below. Writing replies below has a huge number of benefits, not least making sure than an answer follows a question, and that the whole thing is readable and comprehensible later. But Outlook has never taken this on board, defaulting to a cursor at the top, and so it has never really caught on.

Over on Twitter, on the other hand, the practice of replying to people using @username was invented by users, and integrated later into the technology. Hashtags were another such invention, and both can now be seen in other places - comments on blogs use the @ shorthand, and hashtags can be seen everywhere from t-shirts to graffiti.

Group dynamics are one of the most interesting areas of development in any medium, but it’s important to see that the behaviours don’t really change from one to the next.

The main point made by Collins was to challenge senior civil servants present at the symposium to “making the case for State agencies to buy more products from indigenous Irish companies”. Collins’ also made indirect reference during the panel discussion to PPARS, the HSE’s payroll and personnel management application. The reaction, in his own words, was:

One of the most senior civil servants present quickly pulled me up and interjected from the floor. “The thing that people forget is that Ppars pays 70,000 people’s salaries every month,” he began before taking issue with my criticism of the project.

To say I was surprised is stating the obvious. I was shocked to my core. Perhaps mentioning Ppars in front of public servants was not a good idea.

This was, however, the beginning of one of the best discussions during the symposium. The dialogue highlighted potential barriers to Ireland’s continued development of a strong online government service.

It became clear that there has to be better communications coming from the public service to the public, the internet business community and journalists. This lack of communications means that those working outside, and even inside the public service, have little insight into the Governments online strategy, the projects that are underway, the vision and related priorities.

This view was reinforced by the results of an eGovernment survey carried out by Elucidate and Ireland’s eGovernment Awards amongst key players in eGovernment in Ireland. The survey showed that 53% want to know more about Ireland’s eGovernment plan and in particular Transforming Public Services.

Interestingly the survey also revealed that one of the perceived key barriers to delivering online services is poor marketing of existing online services.

The Ireland eGovernment Symposium provides one forum for such discussions, but it’s very plain that there’s a need for far more. Considering the central role collaboration will play in continued expansion of better online government services in Ireland, networking and peer-to-peer learning are key. More such events are essential, and possibly, considering the subject matter, it’s even more appropriate and useful that discussion and debate take place online.