I have the following rules for my use of email with colleagues, friends, and family:
Avoid emails when I'm angry
Avoid constructive feedback by email
Avoid emails in the evening (Google has a new tool called Mail Goggles that forces people to do math problems before sending email in the evening so you don't email anyone while intoxicated)
This incredibly insightful video that should be required watching for the whole world really gets to the bottom of why email is not useful for many types of communication.
The main reason... drum roll please... email is good for facts and data, but does not carry the visual and emotional cues that are critical to human interaction and understanding.
For citizen service, email is only useful up to the point where tone becomes important
For internal collaboration and cooperation between offices and agencies, there is no substitute for in person and (as a decent substitute) phone meetings and conversations
We've talked about the Web 2.0 concepts (Social Networking, Enterprise Mashups, and Web-Oriented Architectures) in this blog.
Chris points out that Cloud Computing is a challenge in government. I think this is true, but I believe that government can find certain areas where Cloud Computing provides real benefit for minimal risk.
We have been working with a government agency on allowing them to tap into our email delivery infrastructure for messages they need to send out regarding new rulings. Rather than force them to manage all of the data on our servers, we simply accept the email address(es) of the recipients and the message content when it is ready for distribution. This information has to go out over the Internet anyway, and by using our email delivery infrastructure, our client has better assurance that the information will get to the inbox of the intended recipient in a timely manner. If the email bounces, we take care of it. If the client needs to send a lot of emails, they leverage our scale.
Cloud computing is just as powerful for government as it is for others, but we need to work hard to find the right opportunities to make it work well without risking secure data.
There is a lot of interest in this topic. Yesterday, we had 80+ people on a webinar discussing the work we are doing in cloud computing through our On-Demand Mailer which allows any government agency to use GovDelivery as its mail sender for any important email (we used to just offer our service for mass email communication. The interest and the fact that no one dropped off during the whole presentation or the case study by www.nlrb.gov was a good sign to me. You can signup to get a recording of the Webinar and our presentation here if you're interested.
One of the challenges for us with Cloud Computing is figuring out how to explain it to our clients. In our webinar, everyone kept asking us to "explain again how this is different from what we already do." I am hopeful that is people get more used to the concept the explaining will get easier.
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 11th.
This year's ASY Freedom walk and recognition of September 11th 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.
