It’s easy to convince our social media gurus to contribute to the State Department wiki, but what about those State Department Employees that aren’t so keen on sharing their hard earned knowledge and expertise. How do we get them to understand the versatility of a wiki platform, and not just pass it off as a frivolous waste of time?
Most recently, we a great deal of success with a vodcast, advertising the State Department wiki, Diplopedia. It was an in-house production done with a flipcam, so the production quality is a bit limited. However – we posted it at 4pm on a Thursday…and by Friday morning it was the top viewed page on Diplopedia and remained that way for the following two weeks totaling 2,047 unique page views. Our in-house video service that hosted the video, contacted us the week after we posted it as well, surprised by the amount of views it received in comparison to other videos.
Here’s our video:
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How/in what creative ways have others in the Government used video to reach internal audiences?
One of the other things I love about the Diplopedia video is that it seems to have had a measurable effect on participation with the wiki. The week after the video first became available, we saw a spike of more than twice the previous increase in pageviews per week, and about a third more new contributors joined. Basically, introducing “Mr. Diplopedia” to the Department wasn’t just a one-off fun project – it really helped build on our successes and get people more involved with knowledge sharing.
So cool. Do you have a video we could embed (or is that classified?)
Awesome. This is classic.
For a great case study, see Diplopedia Imagined: Building State’s Diplomacy Wiki – How Diplopedia, the U.S. Department of State’s wiki, went from idea to reality. Tiffany Smith and Chris Bronk did a great job — http://bit.ly/cIVMPt
We do something like that in Israel. Here is one example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iumcam0Lax8
The folks here at eDiplomacy are totally cool – I LOVE this vid they put together. 🙂
There are so many things I love about this video:
– Short – 2:29 is just right
– Real people
– Concrete examples to make the case for use
– Not overly produced with just the right amount of editing for flow
– Element of surprise at the end with Mr. Diplopedia in car and promotion of mobile access
Really, really well done. Go State!
Thanks very much for this great example of video ROI!
Terrific. What everyone else said. Plus: the “thrill of victory” theme music. Great job.
That. Was. Awesome.
I enjoyed this video immensely. Good job!
How difficult was it to produce the Diplopedia. I’m trying to port the idea to my agency because of the new system. It’s…just…so…gosh-darned useful I have to have one! What were the challenges in building it? How long did it take?
The production of the video was actually pretty easy. The video was recorded by a flip cam. Of course our “actors” are staff in our office that we recruited to partcipate. We had a meeting before hand to craft the idea and write out a script. The only time consumer really is scheduling or “casting” if you will…people to participate. All in all the actual filming took one morning (maybe 3 hours).
The editing took a little bit longer. We used Premier Elements in-house, and spliced in screen shots of Diplopedia…then added in the music using final cut pro – The only real challenge is knowing how to use the editing software….and then editing itself is fairly time consuming. Our challenge was just to set aside the time (outside of our normal scope of work) to pull it all together.
Sorry, I meant the actual wiki
There’s a link to an article by Chris Bronk and Tiffany Smith in the comment on the next page from Richard Boly that provides a description of the process of getting Diplopedia up and running. Check that article for the “how.”