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.

• 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.
  

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.
   

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

• 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"

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.

• 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

The paper makes a strong statement that government web sites have failed to provide government data to the public, and that private industry can do a better job. I don't agree with this view, but I believe that the paper makes many insightful observations and provides useful direction to policy makers as well as government professionals involved in planning the future of the web and e-government within individual agencies.

The bottom line from my standpoint:

1)       As the authors of the paper suggest, government should put far more energy into publishing information in highly-structured formats so that the information can be repurposed for distribution by other organizations (private, public, non-profit, etc.).

2)       The authors think government should make structuring content the top priority, but they discount two areas where the government Web manager plays a critical role.  First, the government Web manager acts as an editor raising awareness of the most valuable content.  An agency may have 50 publications on its website on a certain topic, the government Web manager can feature the publication that is most current and has the most potential public valuable.  Second, government agencies are increasingly acting as citizen/customer relationship managers by learning what citizens are interested in, recommending complementary services and content, and creating ongoing ways of receiving updates direct from the government.  In my opinion, the biggest obstacle for a citizen trying to get content or services from the government is time.  Government Web managers are increasingly adept at making interaction with their agencies more efficient.

On the web, we value Amazon's ability to create an efficient and pleasant shopping experience over its ability to offer lots of different products.  Amazon features the most interesting (or maybe profitable) products, allows users to see suggestions based on what other users have purchased, and gathers information from users so it can notify them when new information and products of interest are available.  In working with federal agencies since 2003, I've seen enormous strides in how government Web managers understand their audience and play the role of trusted editor.  In addition, we've seen many government websites deploy strategies to use the website as the hub of the citizens relationship with the agency so that it serves not just as a content repository, but also as a place to signup for email updates and submit questions and comments.  In full disclosure, my company, GovDelivery, is a private sector organization that serves many governments with a digital communication platform.  This might make me bias, but it also gives me insight into how government websites have leveraged at least one platform created in the private sector to offer tens of thousands of different topics for subscription and send over 50 million digital messages out every month.  This seems to be the best of both worlds.  Government controls the content, the message, and the citizen relationship, but is able to leverage the best technology from the private sector.  Should GovDelivery fail to continue to innovate and meet government needs, another company will step in to fill the new needs of the government (this is exactly how companies move between technology providers over time). 

Highly-structured content on government websites has the benefit of making the websites easier to manage and facilitating easy deployment of new services that leverage the content in different ways.  This is a tremendous benefit, but expecting the private or non-profit sectors to manage and improve this type of service without a direct connection to the government agency is, in my opinion, like telling Amazon to outsource its homepage and its customer database.