Social Media for Government: DoD goes social

About a year ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a lecture audience at Kansas State University the following:

"It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple years ago, 'How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world's greatest communication society?'"

Those words were symbolic marching orders for the Department of Defense and part of the reason why Charles "Jack" Holt stood before an audience of federal government employees at the Social Media for Government conference today.

Jack, the chief of new media operations for DoD, is a pleasant guy with a sharp mind. (Check out his LinkedIn profile and follow him on Twitter.) He's behind many DoD initiatives that take advantage of social media for what Jack calls "dynamic power" and "systemic power."

Dynamic power, he says, is developed when speed and agility combine to put information "into the hands of those who can use it," all the while allowing information consumers to provide feedback, which in turn helps the communicator make adjustments to improve communication. Systemic power, he says, is the ability of new media platforms to capture and archive knowledge over time. He calls it the "long tail" of information, referring to the popular business book by Chris Anderson titled The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. Fewer people get the information, Jack says, but the long-term cumulative effect is impressive.

Programs now underway at DoD include the Bloggers Roundtable, a forum for connecting influential bloggers with subject matter experts at DoD, and a YouTube-like video channel called DoDvClips, which shows news from The Pentagon Channel. Here's a little taste of what you can find there ....

Upcoming projects include a joint military service blog that combines blogs from all military branches with a blog from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a one-stop shop for military bloggers.

Coming from an organizational built on hierarchy, strict regulations, and secrecy -- you know, those things that keep soldiers alive -- it's impressive that Jack and his colleagues have embraced social media to the extent they have. The bigger test will come when DoD develops a history of content. Will they be able to walk that fine line between required military secrecy and transparency?

Time will tell. But one thing is certain: If DoD can embrace social media, there's nothing stopping the rest of us.

Comments

[Gary Thompson]

Jim - It's great that the DoD is helping lead the way in making social media a part of their "long tail" of information. (I like that phrase.) The one thing I've noticed is they do not have any way to make comments on any of the sites you mention which is always a part of the conversation. However the fact that they enabled embedding of their videos and have RSS feeds is allowing the conversation to take place on other sites which is good. Have they talked about how they are engaging and monitoring what is going on elsewhere on the internet?

I'm envious - I wish I was there with you. There's quite a few people on Twitter who seem to be attending as well.

Great work Jim!

gt

[Jim Bender]

Hopefully the upcoming DoD blog will allow comments. They're still working on it ... nothing is posted yet. Yeah, twitter is popular here.