At EPA, we have a newly confirmed Administrator-designate, Lisa Jackson. I look forward to working with her team.
Our first effort on her behalf was posting her post-confirmation statement and a memo to employees in multiple places:
The challenge, of course, is to create different versions of the announcement as appropriate to each medium. Thus, the home page banner has an ellipsis in it and drops a couple of sentences. We tried it with the full statement, but it was just too crowded. And on Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters, we had to really cram it in:
EPA Administrator-designate Lisa Jackson confirmed by Senate. Statement: http://twurl.nl/rl35vi Memo to employees: http://twurl.nl/hy2g54
By the way, I also tweeted about our multi-posting on my personal Twitter account because that’s where I discuss social media & gov’t, and I wanted to point out the various methods, not just mention the announcement. It was really a stretch, but I think I communicated everything there:
EPA Admin-designate’s statement, memo to emp. on EPA home (Eng & Sp) http://twurl.nl/odc88c, Facebook http://twurl.nl/fqvwkp, and @usepagov
On a different note, the whole effort really pointed out the value of collaboration. It took quick action by three web team members working with our contractors, our Hispanic liaison to translate, and folks up the chain from us who reviewed it all. And we benefited once again from our close working relationship with the media relations shop, because we posted to the web at the same time they put out a news release with the statement.
We’re still working on a prettier presentation, but for now, I’m quite happy with the results.
Note: if you’re curious about those URLs that go to “twurl.nl,” I’ll discuss it in a later post.
Nice look inside a comprehensive new media response to breaking news. Thanks for sharing it, and godspeed with the new boss.