Back in late 2005 or so, I went to a Communications Community Office presentation on blogging. The CCO is a government communicators network, and the speaker was one of the leading experts on blogs as an emerging communication medium. I remember watching the presentation and thinking, man I’d love to have that gig some day.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to 2010, and I have that gig! Today, I’m doing a presentation at ALI’s Government and Social Media conference <\/a> downtown. How cool is that? I’m going to be talking about how the Army multimedia team is using YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and some of the other tools of social media. Here’s our abstract:<\/p>\n \nSocial Media Is Not One-Size-Fits-All: How To Choose The Right Tool For Your Audience, Your Message, And Your Organization’s Goals<\/em><\/p>\n The secret is out \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and now many government departments and agencies are considering launching their own YouTube channel or Facebook fan page. But how do you choose which tools are the right ones for your organization?<\/p>\n The Army News team in the Department of National Defence has posted more than 1000 videos to YouTube over the last two years and those videos have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times. Their channel is currently ranked within the top 75 YouTube channels for Canadian news and reporting. They’re also using Twitter, iTunes and Flickr to release information, and have plans to launch a Facebook fan page soon.<\/p>\n Social media is not one-size-fits-all. Not every tool is appropriate for each situation. In this session, you will learn how to choose the right tool for your audience, your message and your organization’s goals. * Tweeting in both official languages It’s funny to think back to the days when I was first evangelizing social media in the workplace, and how I got an early opportunity to ghost-write our Minister’s blog (that was eventually strangled before birth by the approvals process) largely because I was one of the few people in our organization who had even heard of blogs, let alone who was actually sustaining one. Back in the day, I was really on the cutting edge with this whole government \/ social media movement. But the year I was at home on maternity leave with Lucas was the year that the social media became mainstream in the government communications community, and I fell out of the loop entirely. <\/p>\n And now I’ve come back full circle. How could I have guessed that my obsession with blogs, tweets and sharing pictures of my boys online would have helped me in my professional career? And how convenient that I learned the ins and outs of Photoshop just a few months before I found myself using it at work. <\/p>\n Funny how life works, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in late 2005 or so, I went to a Communications Community Office presentation on blogging. The CCO is a government communicators network, and the speaker was one of the leading experts on blogs as an emerging communication medium. I remember watching the presentation and thinking, man I’d love to have that gig some day. … Continue reading “My blog and pony show”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-i-love-the-interwebs","category-it-is-all-about-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4214,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213\/revisions\/4214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nYou’ll also review some common issues to consider when using social media tools in a government environment, including:<\/p>\n
\n * Managing comments \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and responding when necessary
\n * Giving your organization an authentic “voice” and personality through social media
\n * Developing content that is relevant, interesting and timely<\/p><\/blockquote>\n