Last Wednesday, at the Technopolis Business Breakfast, guest speakerAarne Töllinen talked about the use of social media at the Tjäreborg travel agency. The agency offers customer service via social media 76 hours a week—and the client can choose the vehicle: Twitter, Facebook or online chat. The customer service staff appear online with their own names and faces. The tone is light but businesslike, and suited to the medium: smileys are used in Facebook messages but not in e-mail. Töllinen’s key message was that social media should not be a communications afterthought, because that simply increases risks to the organization’s reputation. If you decide to provide customer service through social media, you must set measurable objectives, commit resources, and above all, you need to constantly monitor and manage the service. Tjäreborg is connecting with clients through chat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. Quite an effective use of social media in my opinion.

The Finnish Treasury has launched Public Service Info, a new service to help people manage their dealings with government agencies. Six days a week, Public Service’s advisors will help customers with e-services and guide them to the correct office. So far, most issues have dealt with the Social Insurance Institution and with tax administration. For non-urgent problems citizens should avoid calling the emergency number 112 and instead dial 0295 000; one goal of the new service is to reduce the load at emergency response centers. Those centers currently receive 350,000 non-urgent information requests per year, and half of those are related to administrative regulations and processes. You can contact Public Service Info about any administrative matter—not only by phone, but also by e-mail and through online forms. So a citizen who wants to ask a question or make a request doesn’t have to start by studying organization charts and mission statements.

Last week, Kielikello magazine reported on a language survey targeted at Finnish municipalities. According to the respondents, the most significant factors complicating the work of government writers are the lack of time (78% of respondents), standard practices (69%) and lack of skill ( 54%). 58% of respondents believe that the quality of documents will improve if they are targeted to citizens, but only 12% of the respondents rely on user feedback. I suspect that the results mainly reflect the prevailing modus operandi: feedback is not currently used as part of the usability evaluation of texts. User feedback, however, is a great development tool, one that Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland,is applying as it works to improve its forms.

Another article in the same magazine upheld The Action Plan for Plain Language. “For those who are eager to reform official language through social media and on the Internet, the action plan may be a disappointment.”Kielikello contends that while social media can be used, “we also need expert knowledge.” Unfortunately, this view reflects a superficial understanding of online communication. The whole idea is that an expert can create understandable, everyday language on difficult issues through interaction with citizens. Blogs and discussion forums are good tools for that.

Standard practice is sometimes a barrier blocking a better route.

We get information on the usefulness of municipal websites from user studies and from direct citizen feedback. In many cities, users seem to be quite satisfied; for example, Tampere gets a B-plus in the surveys. It’s challenging to structure a city’s voluminous content into an easy-to-use website. To use the site effectively, a visitor often needs prior knowledge about municipal responsibilities and organization. Although managers can monitor usability through statistics and surveys, private citizens should also give direct feedback, especially if they can’t find the information they need, or can’t understand the jargon. Detailed information about the problems that visitors encounter is essential to revising and developing a site. So how we can encourage people to give feedback? Make it easy to comment: make it clear who comments go to; include an option for discussion through social media; provide easy-to-use feedback forms and buttons.

Municipalities can take advantage of a free online guide to plain language (in Finnish). This tool highlights language issues that are important for everyone, not only for special groups. One key point is that individual writers in the public sector can’t bring jargon under control by themselves. What matters most is the approach and the methods used throughout the organization. That means changing its use of language in general. Writers within the organization can help bring about that change—for example, by organizing material in a reader-friendly format. Another task for the writers is to sharply focus on the central point of a document: what’s the one main idea that the reader needs to retain? Readers will understand more readily if the writer uses short, familiar words; well-written context helps clarify unfamiliar terms. The plain-language guide recommends repetition, an idea I usually disagree with. Relying on repetition creates unnecessary noise and can even obscure the point of the document. A couple of good examples of plain texts are Satakunta’s instructions for radiotherapy patients and Kuopio’s library guide (both in Finnish). All municipalities should start writing their instructions in plain language; it’s an obvious way to benefit every citizen.

As an enemy of officialese, I’m a friend of light language—a term Pirjo Hiidenmaa introduced in her book, Finnish language – Who Cares? I first began to believe it was actually possible to improve official language when I read Salli Kankaanpää’s dissertation on the language of government press releases. She compared releases issued by the Helsinki public works department in the 70s and the 90s. Earlier messages tended to be authoritarian and negative (everything was “prohibited”), while later ones were more persuasive, stressing benefits for citizens. An official—or officious—tone has decreased over time, while Kankaanpää saw a greater use of everyday words (saw and ax instead of “wood-cutting tools”). Press releases are now less like authorized announcements and more like news; even headlines have transformed from dull titles to informative summaries. These changes show that government is indeed adapting to the needs and interests of citizens, and this trend should become even more prevalent online. See how the public works department now engages with citizens (in Finnish) via Twitter.

The city of Tampere held a seminar on web writing for its intranet editors at the Museum Centre Vapriikki last Wednesday. As I worked on my presentation, I looked at materials I created six years ago as part of training for the start of Loora, the city’s intranet. On the basis of participant comments back then, I published a list of good practices—and also collected the most common errors found in online writing.

1. The main topic doesn’t appear at the beginning.
2. Information is not up-to-date.
3. Links don’t work.
4. The title fails to summarize the content.
5. The lead is missing.
6. There is no subtitles.
7. Text is difficult and hard to read.
8. Sentences and paragraphs are too long.
9. Too many lists with random or trivial elements.
10. Buzzwords, needless repetition, and stock phrasing.
11. Unexplained acronyms, abbreviations, and technical terms.
12. Dry content and inappropriate tone.
13. The writer underestimates the reader and overestimates himself.
14. Spelling and grammar errors.

Surprisingly—or not—that six-year-old list makes sense today. I might add to the top of the list a comment from Loora’s editor-in-chief Aila Rajamäki: “The text doesn’t take the reader into account.”

Today is my final language-criticism session for Utain, a weekly publication by students at the University of Tampere’s school of journalism, so it’s time to review the error statistics for this year’s articles. This time I checked over a hundred articles by some forty writers. The language in these articles was generally very good; the journalism students show great language awareness. The most common error? Inappropriate word choice (59 cases), as in words used incorrectly, such as specialized terminology or unnecessary loanwords instead of their Finnish equivalent. In second place were comma errors (50 cases), as in the lack of a serial comma or else one used incorrectly. Next were examples of poor wording (48), covering several types of difficult expressions. It was easy to see how the language used by sources and interviewees—good or bad—made it into the articles. While experts and officials demand the use of their preferred terminology, it’s important to vigorously defend clear language. Translating the jargon of experts or officials into plain language is a demanding task, but judging by the Utain results we don’t have to worry about the language skills of newly-minted journalists.

Last week on Twitter, I asked what kind of tweets people like to read. I compiled a list of their favorites, based on the responses (in Finnish) as a counterbalance to the Twitter fails I reported here two weeks ago. Here are the kind of tweets that the respondents say they enjoy:

1) Positive news
2) Useful summaries or comments linked to the original source
3) Discussions
4) Personal statements
5) Humor, ideas, everyday observations
6) Linguistic wit
7) Photos

I also browse through lists of favorited tweets and through tweet streams. In my opinion, no single tweet from someone is that important; what matters is his overall flow and the sense of presence it gives. In my book, I criticized the term “microblog” as applied to Twitter, but as I explore these streams, the word seems more relevant. Just as in a blog, through Twitter you can hear the author’s voice.

Reduce the number of documents, shorten and clarify frequently-used documents, ask for feedback on readability, provide graphics to clarify processes, and establish a task force to improve official language. These are the most important recommendations in the action plan that the plain-language working group delivered to the Minister of Education on Thursday. When I was reading the following lines, my mind flashed a picture of a ministry fox guarding the clear-language hen-house: “These general measures, which are concerned with every aspect of public administration, have the potential to affect how documents are created, with the result that clear and precise official language is more easily produced.” Equally thought-provoking was the follow-up survey related to the Administrative Law’s language section, which has been in effect for 10 years. Of more than 150 government respondents, two-thirds thought that the law had failed to improve documents in the public sector. But how could improvement could be achieved? Should we now try agile methods instead of bureaucratic planning? According to the action plan, customers are often satisfied with communication they receive in person or over the phone, but they’re unhappy with written documents. Agencies can reap the benefits of more conversational communication via social media as well: even discussions of difficult issues will bring out everyday language. Effective official language cannot be picked up from guidebooks; it is created together with users.