This week, we read Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society Why I assigned this reading This is the first book we’ve read that throws some cold water on social media in government. The central thesis–to which we’ve all been exposed–is that people have pretty much made up their minds aboutRead… Read more »
Welcome to Twitter Following you: 425… Refresh 427… “Yes!” Refresh 419… “Wait what? Who unfollowed me and why?!” It happens, many times it’s just bots coming and going, but occasionally something distasteful or obnoxious was posted; other times it’s just because of consecutive uninteresting posts. So what’s driven you to click the unfollow button forRead… Read more »
A few weeks ago I became aware of a very interesting documentary project, Twittamentary, a movie that explores the intersection and interplay of peoples’ lives on Twitter. Directed by Singaporean filmmaker and Tweeter, Tan Siok Siok, the documentary takes a grass roots approach, looking at how Twitter has connected, affected and influenced individuals across America.Read… Read more »
This week we read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Why I assigned this text Every medium creates its own orthodoxy. You can tweet that. And the reason you can tweet that is because the technical strictures of Twitter push effective tweets to the limits of the sense:syllable ratio,Read… Read more »
As we’ve seen, social media is an amazing tool for any organization, but sometimes it’s difficult to know what to do with it. When thinking about social media, ask yourself these three questions: Do I know what my peers in local government are doing to streamline communications? Am I utilizing social media to reach moreRead… Read more »
Gadi Ben-Yehuda On Twitter and NPR: The State Department’s use of social media was featured in an extended piece broadcast on NPR. Is that kind of coverage a metric of social media impact? From the Cloud to Your Pocket. This week, Gov.AOL published two pieces on the federal government’s movement toward mobile. The first, aboutRead… Read more »
As Congress goes about grilling Homeland Security over the department’s monitoring of social media—as it did in a hearing last week—a more fulsome understanding of the benefits of social media monitoring and analysis is needed. The value of social media monitoring extends far beyond the important but niche domain of monitoring terrorist chatter online. RatherRead… Read more »
Web Manager University, the federal government’s training program for web, new media, and citizen engagement managed by GSA, has changed its name to DigitalGov University (DGU). We changed our name to reflect the growing demand to help agencies serve customers through digital media and citizen engagement. Our broad curriculum includes training in social media, citizenRead… Read more »
(Original Image: The Pentagon, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) David B. Gleason) Secrets and the Pentagon go hand in hand, right? So when the Pentagon decided to host an event for Social Media Week at the fabled five-walled Department of Defense headquarters called “Military & Government Use of Social Media: What Works,” we were doubtfulRead… Read more »
I have worked with graphic designer/artist Jack Hernandez for almost a decade on creative projects, both professional and personal. Jack has nearly 15 years of professional graphic design experience and for the last ten years has worked with local governments at a nonprofit DC lobby association. Recently, he and his partners established their own identityRead… Read more »