I joined Melbourne Water as their Websites Manager just under a year ago and, since then, I’ve done a lot of fun and exciting web-related work there.

We recently hit a few important milestones so I thought I’d take this opportunity to do a quick roundup of what I’ve been up to.

Web & New Media Strategy

All the exciting work I’m doing has its foundations in the Web & New Media Strategy that was kicked off in early 2009 and involved a few months of research, analysis, and decision-making. The actual “strategy” ended up being a three-phase plan for building and enhancing the organization’s online presence over the next 2-3 years.

The first phase (basically, quick wins) took less than six months to do and involved plugging the holes in our existing online presence. This included numerous web tweaks, getting a better understanding of what worked or didn’t work on our site (via Google Analytics), and, generally, making better use of the website (e.g. more cross promotion on high traffic areas). We also bought a Google Mini search engine to remove one of site’s biggest pain points which was a crappy search engine.

The second phase (6-12 months) is finishing up now. This addressed a whole bunch of other web tweaks (like content rewrites and information architecture adjustments) and launched projects in five major areas:

• A complete site overhaul (redoing the site’s content, design, and information architecture and getting a new web content management system)
• More multimedia (specifically illustrations, photos, and videos)
• More and better online maps (the more useful and usable the better)
• More information provision via mobile phones (through SMS, mobile applications, and mobile web sites)
• Getting into social media (for information provision and stakeholder engagement)

The third phase (1-3 years) involves more complex projects that can’t be started till we have everything else in place (like a new organizational GIS and a web content management system). Phase three work includes the automation of customer-facing business activities, which means things like building online forms and applications, providing custom information via SMS, and so on.

What’s Exciting Now?

Right now, though, we’re nearing the end of the second phase and we’ve made great progress in all five of the areas mentioned above:

• We’ve kicked off a project to get a new web content management system and have started the website redesign and reorganization process.
• We’ve started to place photos on Flickr (including ‘Photos from the Field’ which are from Melbourne Water employees) and videos on YouTube (almost all of which were produced in-house).
• We’ve got some really basic maps on our site but have kicked off a project that will move all our old and clunky maps to a better platform over the next year or so. Meanwhile, we’ve developed an interactive map that explains in simple terms how Melbourne’s complicated water supply network works.
• We’ve launched an iPhone app (link to iTunes store) and will be launching a new mobile version of our website in the next few weeks.
• We’re quite active on Twitter and will get further into social media when appropriate.

All in all, we’re tracking quite well and the work we’re doing is lots of fun and really quite exciting.

Culture of Innovation & Effective Communication

What I love most of all, though, is how much on-board everyone at Melbourne Water is with these enhancements. This support and appreciation of innovation and effective communication starts right at the top, too. For example, it was our Board who originally suggested that we develop a simplified water supply network map for the website. They wanted a simple way of explaining a complex system and realized that the web would be a great place to do just that.

In my opinion, the foundation for this is laid in Melbourne Water’s Strategic Framework document which explicitly lists the support of “innovation, achievement, and good ideas” and the need to “understand, manage, and meet or exceed customer expectations” as success indicators for the organization. At Melbourne Water these aren’t just phrases on a company brochure but actual, practical goals that all of us aspire to every day. In fact, to give you an example of how this is implemented practically: Every project that’s proposed at Melbourne Water has to explain and justify which of these strategic goals it’s addressing before it’s allowed to start.

So the work that I’m doing there both matches the direction the world is moving in (i.e. information provision and customer engagement is moving online) and is brilliantly supported by the organization itself. That’s yet another reason why I love working there.

If you don’t keep up with large traditional media’s continued efforts to remain both large and traditional you might have missed Rupert Murdoch’s latest thoughts on the topic. Here’s what Mashable’s Pete Cashmore had to say about them:

Microsoft and News Corp in Discussions to Remove Newspaper Content from Google

Yes, really. Rupert Murdoch’s crusade to blame Google for the failing newspaper business model continues today, as it emerges that News Corp has conducted talks with Microsoft about de-indexing the company’s sites from Google and (presumably) being paid to include them in Bing instead.

The concept makes sense only if you buy Murdoch’s claims that Google is “stealing” content rather than simply helping people find it.

A number of people have responded to Murdoch’s proposed (threatened?) business model but Arianna Huffington really hit the nail on the head in a talk she gave at a recent journalism conference in the US.

In responding to Murdoch and traditional media, she said:

In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They’d rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content.

[..]

Thinking that removing your content from Google will somehow keep it “exclusive” shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the web and how it works.

[..]

In his speech this morning, Rupert Murdoch confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation. Wholesale misappropriation is against the law — and he has legal redress against that already. Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web’s DNA. Period.

She then went on to talk about what the future of journalism will (and is starting to) look like:

We hear lots and lots of talk these days about saving newspapers — Congressional anti-trust exemptions, perhaps? — but we mustn’t forget: the state of newspapers is not the same thing as the state of journalism. As much as I love newspapers — and fully expect them to survive — the future of journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers.

Indeed, the future of journalism is to be found, at least partly, in the rapidly growing number of people who connect with the news in a whole new way.

News is no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news. It’s become something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.

In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.

It’s an excellent speech that’s well worth the read.