The public sector should not wait to get on social media - now is the right time, John Sheridan, Australian Government Chief Technology Officer has said. Government should also understand that engagement on social media is two-way, he added.

Speaking at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, Sheridan said: “Now is the right time to be engaged in social media to provide government services”.

Conversations on social media continuously evolve, he added, and if agencies are not already part of that conversation then citizens are “probably asking questions about your particular department and what it is that it’s doing”.

Government also has to “understand that this is a two-way conversation” on social media, he said. If agencies are only broadcasting information and not engaging with people or responding to questions, they will not get the maximum benefit out of social media - “the ability to actually get involved in discussions with people and help them in that regard”, Sheridan explained.

The Queensland Police Service has been one of the best in using social media to actively engage with people, he said. The Australian state experienced a series of natural disasters from 2010 to 2011, and the agency’s social media engagement saw an “enormous increase”, “because what people found was an active way of engaging with the police service and getting information about the sort of things in which they were interested”.

Agencies need to trust their staff to engage with citizens responsibly through social media, Sheridan said. If staff engage with citizens everyday on the phone, across the counter, in the street and in other ways, and “they do that without creating enormous difficulties for the department”, “why shouldn’t we trust them therefore, to do the same online?”, he said. The lesson here is that if “we do trust them [to do things well], they respond very well as a consequence”.