Reach the Public

GovDelivery thanks guest Blogger, Jamie Findlater, for this interesting post.

Posted by: Jamie Findlater, Department of Defense, Community Relations and New Media Team Member

Going Viral: DoD's New Media Tactics for the Troops

 

This year marked the fourth annual Department of Defense America Supports You (ASY) National Freedom Walk in Washington D.C.  The ASY Freedom Walk is an opportunity to reflect on the lives lost on September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon and remember the sacrifices of our veterans past and present.

 

Employing new media tactics to communicate to the public about DoD policy and programs is an important part of the Department of Defense's public affairs mission, and letting folks know about the ASY Freedom Walk is no exception. This year, for the first time, we incorporated viral marketing and new media tactics to increase awareness about the opportunity to walk in the DC area, which led to great walker registration and turn out. We also experimented with new media tactics the day of the event, understanding that these components are an important way to connect with our audiences.  

 

A central part of our new media campaign was the creation of an America Supports You Freedom Walk widget. The widget displayed a countdown to the day of the national walk and tallied the number of local walks being organized around the country. The widget also provided links through which participants could register and spread the word about the event. Milbloggers, military spouse bloggers and online publications could post the widget on their sites. Then, during the ASY Freedom Walk, we enabled participants to send text messages honoring our troops and the lives lost on the day of the event. The messages scrolled through the widget after the event.

 

In terms of viral outreach, we relied largely on cross-promotion from the ASY homefront groups, military support organizations and partner government agencies. GovDelivery sent our viral e-mail to its own subscription lists and partnered us with their other subscribers. Here at DoD, we placed e-mail footers at the bottom of our news articles. Other organizations, including DisabilityInfo.gov and USA.gov, were instrumental in helping us get the word out to their subscribers through similar tactics.

 

The viral outreach campaign also incorporated online video components. The DoD New Media team created a video blog, or "vlog," to share information with communities about opportunities to start local walks in their area. The video was showcased on the DoD "video on demand" Web site, DoD VClips, along with many other DoD videos centering around September 11^th. This year's ASY Freedom walk and recognition of September 11^th was particularly important due to the dedication of the Pentagon Memorial, and viral video was an important part of telling this story. 

 

Overall, thousands of participants participated in the ASY Freedom Walk. This event provided a good opportunity to experiment with viral notification and new media tactics.

We have a host of other new media ideas that we hope to develop as well. At DoD, we are constantly experimenting with new ways of delivering information, realizing that the way the public consumes information is constantly evolving.

GovDelivery invites anyone with interesting government-to-citizen communication issues to discuss to be guest bloggers on reachthepublic.  Please contact product at govdelivery dot com with your ideas.

Is Web 2.0 the end of government-to-citizen email communication?  Not likely, but effective public email communication is the foundation of taking better advantage of Web 2.0.

I have been really pleased over the past year at how much government has embraced Web 2.0 as a way of improving service to the citizen, but I sometimes wonder if my enthusiasm for Web 2.0 is cluttering up our message as a company that effective email communication remains a fundamental / foundational step for any government city/county/agency that values communication with stakeholders.

Prior to our more vocal embrace of Web 2.0, we had the opposite problem.  Our clients were asking us whether GovDelivery is going to "get into Web 2.0."  The sense was that government-to-citizen email communication, where we are the world leaders, is very Web 1.0. 

So, we're trying to strike middle ground.  I'm completely bias, but what we are trying to communicate and support is that while the potential for Web 2.0 to help government improve service and lower cost is exciting, we are 99% certain that email will continue to play an important role in government-to-citizen communication well into the future. 

Consider this evidence:

• By most measures, email is one of the most effective communication channels in history:
  -Over 85% of citizen online time in the U.S. is spent using email (Jupiter).
  -Virtually all adults that are online use email; email is the number 1 use of the Internet.
  -Even people under 25 say that they would rather get official communication via email; you don't want to get your financial aid application in your Facebook inbox.
  
  
• Email is asynchronous which is why even my gmail chat, facebook updates, and twitter feeds rely on my email account to keep me connected.  Email never sleeps.
  
  
• Email use has actually increased since RSS has become more readily available. 
  -Why?  Because we all have hundreds of different types of communication we want from government/marketers/media/friends/etc.   I don't want notices of changes to my local park hours via RSS feed, I want them by email when they occur (which is not very often)
  -RSS feeds are useful for a very limited number of news sources.  I use RSS to follow a handful of blogs and other updates, and I am a heavy RSS user by most measures.  One study recently suggested that 8% of Internet users use RSS regularly vs. 98% that use email.  RSS feeds make Web browsing more efficient and are great for creating content mashups, widgets, etc.  They are poor for proactive communication.
  

What does GovDelivery mean when we say that we embrace Web 2.0?

1. We believe in open systems.  For example, a government agency using our service can trigger an email alert by updating an RSS feed on the agency's website or on the agency's YouTube account or blog.  In this way, our clients can offer highly-specific updates from across their hosted and external Web enterprise.  RSS feeds are machine readable so we rely on the openness of others to make interfacing with our system easy (side note: any feed that validates at www.feedvalidator.org works to trigger messages in GovDelivery).
   
   
2. We have created a revolutionary level of collaboration between our clients which helps breakdown silos between government agencies.  You can read more about this in our recent announcement.
   
   
3. We have launched a new Discuss this Email blogging capability which leverages an off-the-shelf blogging capability to give our government clients a blog that is easier to manage and actually gets readers.
   
   
4. We are using the vast amounts of content flowing through our systems (80 million messages in September; on track for over 1 billion in 2009) to create new types of tag clouds that pull the most popular and interesting content forward.
   

There's more in progress and more to come, but these are a few good examples.

So, given email's prominence, I believe that it is not an interim solution for communication as much as it is one of the key building blocks to creating an audience for your content that you can further engage through a broad range of approaches made easier by Web 2.0.

Our press release today got me thinking... what we are doing for our clients is valuable, but it raises this question:  Are we continuing to make the important case for email communication while also embracing these new areas?  I welcome your feedback.

The article below includes a variety of thoughts on how Web 2.0 is being used in business-- including thoughts from me on how we use Web 2.0 at GovDelivery which is something we've been talking about a lot lately.  It's interesting to see that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the only sites mentioned more than once.  Clearly, critical mass matters in any social network.  It's hard to have a network without members.  Still, the power of Twitter is clear by the fact that it is smaller, but still gets a lot of positive feedback.  I'm sure it will continue to grow exponentially.

I took an informal survey of our government clients.  I looked up 20 clients (individuals working at government agencies that work with us).  I found that all but two of them were on LinkedIn or Facebook.  15 of them were on both. 

Obviously, our clients are Web managers and are inclined to use these tools, but I think we could all infer a lot about the increased use of Web 2.0 in government over the coming years by looking at what individual Web managers are doing and by looking at how campaigns are using Web 2.0 today which will undoubtedly translate into a new wave of elected officials and deputies that want to see Web 2.0 put to use in government.

We've been looking at different Web 2.0 sites and exploring how best clients can use them in conjunction with our system and on their own.

One site I like is Twitter.  Twitter allows an organization or an individual to post a couple of lines about what they are doing at a given moment.  This overlaps with the Facebook "status" update so I thought it wouldn't be worth the effort.  However, now that I've got Twitter working well with Facebook, I can update my status on Twitter and it gets posted everywhere.  Twitter is easier to use and something that can be updated quickly from a cell phone or blackberry.

I don't have any specific ideas yet for interconnections between GovDelivery and Twitter, but in looking around, I did see a lot of Twitter accounts being managed by government agencies and public officials.  Take a look at the GovDelivery Twitter Account and Who We are Following.  You can also take a look at my "young" Twitter account.

Here are just a few:
http://twitter.com/pueblo81009
http://twitter.com/USAgov

NASA has many offices and programs using Twitter.  As usual, they are very advanced in use of Web 2.0 tools.

and lots of public officials:
http://twitter.com/MayorMark
http://twitter.com/MayorRTRybak

Why does this matter?  Any government entity has a lot of information to offer.  Twitter is an easy way to pull forward and call attention to the information that you think might be most interesting or valuable.  I've blogged before on the difference between "give me what I want" content and "give me what you think I need" content. 

Twitter allows an agency to highlight for me the information that I might need and to do it in a simple and interesting way. 

During our Web 2.0 Webinar last Tuesday, many participants asked for examples of existing government blogs. Since we didn't have a chance to answer this question during the Webinar, we assembled this list to show that blogs are being published at all levels of government.

Federal
    http://blog.aids.gov
    http://www.tsa.gov/blog/
    http://www.cdc.gov
    http://blog.epa.gov

State/Local
    http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/trees/blog.htm
    http://www.humanrights.state.mn.us/velblog3.html#
    http://www.ci.santa-paula.ca.us/blog/
    http://secondward.blogspot.com/

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. It's only a sample of the many blogs that are being published by governments throughout the United States.

Please let us know about other government blogs you are reading.

My company, GovDelivery, just completed a Webinar on Web. 2.0 in government where we had 150 attendees.  The quality of the questions was very exciting because it shows how much government Web managers are thinking about how best to use Web 2.0 to meet the needs of the public.

For anyone who attended the webinar or is interested in this topic, I want to point out some useful links:

1. Previous post on Web 2.0  which includes a useful glossary
   
2. Follow-up on Cloud Computing
3. Post on TSA Blog

Also, we have some upcoming webinars on on-demand emailing (cloud computing) and other topics as well as a recorded version of the Government Web 2.0 webinar you can request from us by going to the registration page.

My previous entry was on Web 2.0 in government.  I want to add some fresh links and expand the conversation to cloud computing which some people, in an effort to give the entire world a headache, refer to as "Web 3.0".

Before we talk about Web 2.0+, let me share this glossary of Web 2.0 terms.  I used to go mad trying to understand all of the Web 2.0 / Web 3.0 terms.  Blogs, Wikis, Folksonomies, Mashups, Tags, Tag Clouds, Widgets, Cloud Computing, SaaS, etc.  Like Web 2.0 itself, there is no one in charge of Web 2.0 and the terminology has taken on a life of its own.

While I initially thought Web 2.0 was just for kids (hence all of the annoying terms), I'm a convert now.  Facebook really makes my life better both personally and professionally.  Mashups allow our company to deliver more value than ever to the government, and SaaS companies serve our most critical CRM and Web conferencing needs.

Most importantly, I'm convinced that cloud computing is going to make technology more powerful and cost-effective for government in so many ways that we will look back on 2008 10 years from now and see it as the infancy of e-government.

To that end, I want to add another important link which is this story on cloud computing.

We have over 250 government agencies using our Software as a Service platform here at GovDelivery.  I don't consider use of our hosted, SaaS, platform by itself as cloud computing, but now that the service is becoming more open and allowing other applications to tap into it for limited functions, it really is "service in the cloud."  For us, this means allowing agencies to connect to our "On-Demand Mailer" whenever an agency needs additional mail sending scale for certain applications or needs to send a message to a stakeholder with assured delivery to the inbox, tracking, reporting, etc.

The article referenced above lists these benefits of cloud computing:

• Reduced Cost
• Increased Storage
• Highly Automated
• Flexibility
• Allows IT to Shift Focus  "No longer having to worry about constant server updates and other computing issues"

This list of benefits is literally the Holy Grail of government IT!

The article concludes with the typical security concerns that are always raised when government talks about doing something new.  Here is the good news, it's not all or nothing. 

For example, the On-Demand Mailer service we offer is currently built to handle emails you are already sending out over the public Internet. 

We are not offering the service to the CIA for sending highly-classified emails... that is not something that belongs in the Cloud. 

Still, there are many services that fit well into the Cloud now.  Web 2.0 and cloud computing raise all kinds of security concerns.  Luckily, from the looks of all the blogs, Wikis, mashups, etc. that we see on government sites despite the security concerns raised about Web 2.0 in government, government Web and e-government managers will find the appropriate areas where they can leverage cloud computing without taking unnecessary security risks.

Everyone is talking about and writing about government 2.0 recently.

There was a great write up in FCW with a panel interview that included Bev Godwin from USA.gov and others.

There was another post on Mashable.com that provided an "Insider's Perspective" on government 2.0.

My company, GovDelivery, has made a big push into Web 2.0 in the past year.   We've found a lot of enthusiasm from our clients in a few key areas.

1. Collaboration: Using the Web 2.0 concept of "mashups" to present the citizen with "one stop shopping" for government information.  Another Web 2.0 concept, Software as a Service, SaaS, makes mashups a lot easier.
   
   Example: Use the Get Email Updates link on this DHS page and watch how you are walked through a subscription process that brings together many agencies including some outside DHS. [This is my only example that is "powered by" GovDelivery)
   
   
2. Distribution: Enabling websites, RSS feeds, and email alerts with forwarding and posting capabilities that allow citizens to repost publications and announcements to social networks, tagging sites, blogs, etc.
   
   Examples: Visit www.state.gov and look in the upper right for a simple widget that allows you to repost content or tag it using social networking sites.  Another great example is the FBI Widget Tool.
   
   
3. Aggregation: Bringing together content by using tag clouds and other tagging approaches
   
   Examples:  See right side of NASA homepage; CDC has also experimented with tag clouds.
   
   
4. Blogging: Posting content updates or more colorful blog-style entries and allowing citizens to comment. 
   
   Examples: Local government excels here with more blogs than I could possibly list for Mayor's and elected officials (take a look here).  These officials are embracing Web 2.0 in campaigns and they bring the same concepts into office.  One interesting blog is the DC Summer Intern Blog.
   
   In federal government, for all the discussion and fear around blogging, there are some truly terrific examples (and no disasters that I know of).  DoD sets the standard, but TSA, GovGab, and the Secretary of Transportation are also running exceptional blogs.

In short, for all the discussion about risks, government 2.0 (aka, government's embrace of Web 2.0) is already here.  In many cases, government is further along than private industry in embracing Web 2.0

Sure, some agencies are further along than others, but the progress and momentum is amazing.  Remember, these concepts are all relatively new. 

Additional resources:

• If you're interested in blogging, you must read "Naked Conversations"
  
• The Federal Consulting Group recently hosted a Webinar on Government 2.0 where I participated along with FEMA.  Register for a recorded version of this here
  
• Janice Nall from the CDC discusses their strategy here

If you're interested in this topic, we have another upcoming Webinar on Government 2.0.   

Our webinars are focused on how governments can use our platform to take advantage of some of these concepts, but we've received good feedback that we don't lay the sales pitch on too hard, and anyone is welcome to attend.

Back in June, I posted to this blog in response to a paper out of Princeton that proposed that content structure ought to be the number one priority for governments going online.  The premise is that if content is structured well, then private sector players can re-purpose the content.  The paper states that private parties will do a better job of organizing and distributing content than government.  I feel that the paper undervalues the role played by government Web managers.

FCW has just posted a slightly updated version of my commentary.

There are some other interesting posts related to this topic including one from a terrific anonymous blogger at ".GovWatch."

I have had a few people comment (offline) about my entry singing the praises of the TSA.  There is such a negative vibe around air travel these days, I think many people are overlooking some of the steps the TSA is taking to make travel easier and their service better.

Here is a subtle example.

My drivers license expires this August 19 on my birthday.

On a flight to Indianapolis in June, the TSA agent noticed the upcoming expiration and said, "don't forget to renew your license."  I had no idea the license was about to expire.  I recently moved and changed the address on my license, but apparently that did not reset the clock on the expiration.

When I said, "thank you," she said, "we're trained to remind people when it's a few months until expiration since it can take a while to renew."  That's good training.  Probably makes the job more interesting too.

I applied for the new license last week.  At airport security this week in Minneapolis, I showed the guard my license and said, "it's clipped so I'll need to pull out the receipt showing that my new one is in the mail."  He said that TSA rules allow him to accept my license for a year after it expires with no extra paperwork.  Cheers!

So, TSA is taking it upon itself to remind me about my license and then is showing intelligent flexibility by still accepting the license as ID after it is expired... after all, they want to know who I am not that I have valid driving privileges and qualifying eye sight like the DMV.  This really makes sense!

On a more awesome note, they are actively trying to get rid of the "remove your shoes" policy which you can read about at their unusually good blog. 

I'm not selling TSA fan club t-shirts yet, but as someone who travels far too much, I really appreciate these efforts.