The Blogging of the Bureaucracy: How to Use Social Media From Inside Government:

Jeanne Holm, Gwynne Kostin, Ann Aikin, Jed Sundwall, Matthew Burton (moderator)

NASA has 300 million visits a year and has a large presence in Second Life. Also NASA has the most visited Government website, and NASA allows crowdsourcing science research.

NASA is working on internal social networking, open scourced content. NASA has a new application called SPACEBOOK allowing trust and empowerment, colloberation. NASA approach is to trust people and empower them, 95% they will do the right thing and the 5% when they don’t you can speak to them easily and it’s taken care of.

CDC has gotten involved in Social Media, but it took 2.5 years to get blogging approved, and it just happened last month. A lot of materials are repurposed for social media.

H1N1 social media response, with useful information that people will read. Social Media buyin from management is needed to fully engage with SM. We also monitored tweets on H1NI and created a communication strategy around it. Peanut Butter recalls generated more social media.

One issue with Social Media and Government is getting it approved.

HOMELAND SECURITY
US Coast Guard had no presence on YouTube – response – Coast Guard developed a YouTube Channel and has had a million viewers.

TSA blog is maintained by popular bloggers that have their own following. This blog, the TSA blog, is considered the gold standard in government blogging. Success Factors – you need Top Support, Being Ready, why to do it, respecting age, Risk Taking and Cross Functional Team plus retail
and wholesale packaging of data.

Webcontent.gov
Tsagov.gov
Govloop.com
It’s critical Government Data exists on YouTube and Social Media, because, if not, then the Government doesn’t exist to the mindset of viewers and consumers of Social Media.

GSA
Wanted to start using Social Media starting a year ago. GSA is the portal to the rest of the government. Did research to find what people wanted.
We take a strategic result to everything we do. We found USA.gov seeks to serve people who want to interect with government but don’t know how.

One of the curious things about Social Media in Government is most Social Media is blocked on internal Government networks, therefore, on one side, participation in Social Media is both encouraged and then, discouraged, at the same time.