Going Dutch

This past Tuesday, Mark Drapeau and I had the honor of meeting with a delegation of new media representatives from the 13 ministries of the government of the Netherlands.  I found it fascinating that the 13 Dutch ministries are so coordinated in their new media efforts.  The group with which we met coordinates efforts and shares information cross-ministries.  They’ve, in fact, recently created a single look, feel and identity for all of their government ministries to use and are in the process of centralizing all government information into a single government-run destination.  

There are a number of impressive new media efforts underway in the Netherlands.  Their presentation will give you a sense of Internet and social media penetration and usage, etc.[slideshare id=2139841&doc=presentatiecnm1-091006080657-phpapp02]
Our Dutch friends shared with us a number of social media efforts that have been successful and some that have not been so successful.  One campaign, in particular, struck me as the most cutting edge – and controversial.  It was a recent social media campaign that their Ministry of Justice did regarding cybersecurity. 

Basically, it was a fictitious viral video about a Russian terrorist planning an attack on the recipient of the video.  The video was built for and deployed on Hyves (Facebook equivalent in the Netherlands).  Members who received the video could send it to their friends on Hyves.  The unique thing about the video was that it utilized information from users’ Hyves profiles and incorporated this info – name, age, marital status, PERSONAL PHOTOS (!) , etc. – into the video, itself.  The idea being that personalization of the video would make it more impactful and enable the Ministry of Justice to better get their cybersecurity information communicated.  The video was widely disseminated and was, anecdotally, extremely succesful (I don’t have metrics).

I’m currently involved in the development of an integrated public affairs campaign that the U.S. Department of Defense is putting together for National Cyber Security Awareness Month (October) here in the U.S.   Seeing the Netherlands’ video got me thinking about whether this kind of dissemination and, moreover, active utilization of personal information, could ever be done in the U.S.  My initial take is that this comes way too close to a government agency capturing Personally-Identifyable Information (PII) to be even close to legal.  However, the information was captured was on Hyves, an external and commercial social network, not on a government website, per se.  This, of course, raises one of the key challenges that government agencies are grappling with regarding Web 2.0/social media policy: do all of the same rules that govern federal websites also govern federal presences on independent social networks?

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