The main point of the speech was to highlight the city’s efforts to bring accessibility to city services using internet-based technologies, including making the city’s famously successful 311 service available through Skype and Twitter.  According to the Mayor, “the more accessible we make it [city government], the more accountable we make it.”

Of note to the Web Analytics community, the Mayor also mentioned that the city is going to be taking to look at the traffic to the site for the purpose of changing the “site architecture” to improve the online experience for city residents.

The Mayor also announced that the city is going to partner with Google to study “anonymous usage data” to “allow us to optimize the content on the web site based on what people are most often searching for.”  Could it be that NYC.gov is implementing Google Analytics?

It is great to hear that New York is committed to both using cutting-edge technology to connect to its residents (Twitter, Skype, whatever Google technology they are using) as well as optimizing user experiences so that New Yorkers have a more positive and effective experience dealing with their government online.

Given the amount of social media participation with the 2008 election, and the subsequent appointment of Vivek Kundra as our country’s first CIO, I expect that there will be increasing pressure on government agencies to not only move services online (for example, see DC’s API’s), but do so in a way that is most useful to those agencies’ constituencies.

An excellent, and timely, resource that examines the state of Web Analytics in the public sector is the recently-released Web Analytics Asoociation’s Public Sector Survey Analysis.  The study describes and analyzes survey data from web managers within government, academic, foundation, non-profit, and other public-sector focused organizations.  The report describes the web analyst roles, metrics, and optimization strategies of these organizations.

The Web Analytics Association is a great resource to organizations and people in the public sector seeking to make their sites more useful to their constituents and (perhaps more importantly) developing and fostering a culture of analytics within their organizations’ web management.

As an aside, I am currently attending the PDF conference.  If you read this post and are at the conference, I would love to have an opportunity to meet you.  Email me tom*at*tomsanalytics*dot*com or DM me on Twitter @tomsanalytics.