Julie Starr, in talking about News services, mentions how important it is to give your visitors the ability to engage with you:

Community, like it or not, is the future. Digital citizens are not happy just looking at your news website and using your services in a static way. They want to be able to engage. To tell you what they think of your service, to make suggestions (which are sometimes very good), to talk to each other about news stories (and your service). If you don’t give them the chance to engage, they’ll give up on you eventually and go somewhere else. These ideas are well articulated in a couple of books I’ve read recently, if you’re interested: The Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics. The Wisdom of Crowds also comes highly recommended.

[Via The Evolving Newsroom: Radio NZ gets it right, again.]

Although she’s specifically talking about News, I think what she has to say holds true for all kinds of services and organisations.

In our part of the world attitudes have shifted away from an old top-down approach where someone tells us what to do, say, think, how to behave. Now we are increasingly wanting to interact, to share our opinions, to challenge established authorities, to influence what goes on around us.

In real life we’ve been ‘talking back’ in this way for decades. Now we’re wanting to carry that approach across to the web, and to organisations we might not previously have thought to talk back to, such as news organisations.

It’s no longer sufficient for community organisations to have an isolated, informative website. Websites need to make it easy for visitors to interact, to share, to discuss with peers, to engage.

What do you think?

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