Municipalist

Who are Congress's best tweeters?

The Capitol Comment Blog at Washingtonian Magazine's site pays a lot of attention to the quality of tweets emanating from members of Congress. John McCain could save more space if he would just do away with all that silly punctuation, and John Culberson, Chuck Grassley, and Claire McCaskill are the clear stars. Check it out.

NASA's social media success

NASA has had a big year with social media. One of their blogs describes it all here.

We have followed NASA's work in this area since 2007. We have interviewed Kennedy Space Center blogger Cheryl Mansfield and Bob Jacobs, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs. And we look for excuses to write about their social media projects as often as possible.

Municipalist's full list of Q & A's with leaders of local, state, and federal government social media projects is here.

Wine and Web 2.0

My latest post is up at the Business.Gov Community expert blog called the Industry Word:

For social media success, do what the wine industry does
Producers, distributors, marketers, equipment manufacturers, and representatives from just about every area of the domestic wine industry have embraced social media strategies with plenty of enthusiasm. What have been the results of this emergence in such accessible technology that is still new but clearly powerful?

Entire post is here.

Fort Hood and Twitter

[With updates at end of this post.]

Municipalist has followed the bizarre but certainly predictable assault on Twitter in recent months from many big-time mainstream media names. Maureen Dowd at the New York Times, Dana Milbank at the Washington Post, Leonard Pitts at the Miami Herald, Alessandra Stanley, Rachel Maddow, Nancy Giles, Kathleen Parker, Matt Bai, the Financial Times, Jon Stewart, sports columnist Gregg Doyel, and on and on. But that is all over now. A new age has arrived.

Since mid-day Thursday, WashingtonPost.com has up its "Fort Hood Shooting Twitter Aggregator." Which sounds way too complicated. [That acronym would be FHSTA, to be forever referred to here as "Fasta."] The site tracks "breaking information about Thursday's Fort Hood shootings from news sources and military Twitter users." The New York Times has set up its own Twitter list covering the shootings as well.

ABC News joins the listing game too. Fastas and listas, everywhere you look, all from the mainstream media, home to plenty of Twitter bashing and eye-rolling and tut-tutting for as long as Twitter has been around. So what happened? And then on CNN this morning, I saw this under a graphic that showed a photo and the name of police officer Kimberly Munley who shot the shooter: "Source: Twitter."

Will the activity here move beyond these sort of basic engagement tactics? Will mainstream media organizations hire more Web developers to create their own aggregation and sharing and listening applications? That would seem to be the next step.

But don't look for mainstream media to suddenly refrain from slamming Twitter. Kathleen Parker has way too much space to fill every week.

On the government side, the Army is tweeting on the Fort Hood murders, but not nearly enough. Department of Homeland Security is not tweeting on this, and should be. Not that Janet Napolitano could ever figure this out.

And Twitter keeps making itself better, as TechCrunch details today here and here, as additional apps from a myriad of developers to make the Twitter experience richer and easier to manage keep popping up as well. Here is TC on recent additions such as Bettween and Brizzly.

Update 1: Essential thinking on this from Paul Carr at TechCrunch on how a soldier's tweets from inside the Fort Hood hospital as the wounded were brought in -- and even a photo of one shooting victim with a graphic description of his wounds -- are little more than "tragiporn": "For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands of people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved."

Carr interviewed about this by Brian Lehrer on WNYC here.

Update 2: Analyst Jim Geraghty shares the notion that the logical site to check out simply does not bother to make the effort, and so he wants to know: "Four days later, DHS web site has nothing on Fort Hood. One top news item is on testing smoke alarms."

Do we need all of these Web 2.0 conferences?

Municipalist had a conversation awhile ago with an operator of one of the big social media conferences. The guy admitted his lone goal: Pump the value of the thing as high as possible and then SELL IT. 

Should that shock anybody?

Every week, another social media conference seems to pop up, from Las Vegas to New York City to several right here in Washington, D.C. A few of these are worthy. But most seem not to be. Regardless, the weariness has set in. Gwynne Kostin at GoverningPeople.com agrees

Real estate bloggers get some respect

Here is my latest post to The Industry Word group blog, part of the recently created community at Business.Gov:

Real estate bloggers rock the social media world.

Non-profits and social media: Learning the basics

Very smart tutorials on social media use by non-profits, produced by the Case Foundation.

Federal Computer Week's top 10

Federal Computer Week has listed this blog in a piece on 10 top bloggers focusing on government IT. Thanks! For anyone new to Municipalist, please check out our collection of Q & A's with local, state, and federal bloggers and creators of smart Gov 2.0 projects.

Welcome to all new visitors.

The social media hype: Do you believe?

This is a video by Erik Qualman, author of "socialnomics." I have not read the book, but to be sure, the video is a stunning piece of work. But do you believe it? At least its ideology, I mean. Which is that the world has changed because of Facebook. And: If you refuse to jump on board with the cult-like fervor of the rest of us, you are missing out.

I am not there yet. For me, the evidence at this point shows it is in fact the Internet that has changed because of its users rush to social media. The leap from the Internet to the world is a big one.

Here is where Qualman stands, in his summation to a blog post that catalogs the video's laundry list of claims, italics added by me: "The above statistics and 'Social Media Revolution' video tell the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Please feel free to share with any non-believers!"

I will be following this line in the weeks ahead. What do you think? Does the extreme hype and religiosity of the social media saints match the reality?

Why NASA Tweets

The most-viewed channel on YouTube this week is NASA Television, as a shuttle launch together with events marking the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing turn out to be very good for business. For NASA, though, the Internet has been both a blessing and a pain. Online critics are ever-present. But NASA's work lately to move out among the tweeting and blogging masses has certainly found success. Among its recent online ventures: remodeling its Web site, tweeting from space, and even hosting a tweetup last night here in Washington with shuttle astronauts.

We sought to learn more about all this, and tracked down Bob Jacobs, who has worked for NASA for a little more than nine years. He began his career as news chief and is now deputy assistant administrator for Public Affairs. "It's about closing the distance between you and your audience and getting direct feedback about your organization's work," Jacobs told Municipalist. Follow him on Twitter: @bnjacobs.

How long have you been on Twitter, and is that an official part of your job? If so, how so? What has your experience been with Twitter? NASA's involvement with Twitter really began in mid 2008 with the Mars Phoenix mission and @MarsPhoenix, which attracted much more attention than many of us who had been working to with social media expected. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory took a somewhat unique approach by having the lander tweet in the first person. JPL's Veronica McGregor, who developed this approach, deserves a lot of the credit for demonstrating that Twitter could be a powerful communications tool. Today, NASA has one of the largest and most effective use of Twitter in the federal government, with nearly 50 different Twitter sites sharing a variety of information, including @NASA and the agency's first astronaut to send tweets from space, astronaut Mike Massimino, @Astro_Mike.

Can you briefly describe NASA's use of Twitter, what got NASA started, etc.? And what has been NASA's experience with Twitter, positive and negative? I can't speak on behalf of every NASA Twitter user but we use @NASA as a way to share agency news and information in ways that extend beyond traditional approaches, such as news releases. We use a dual approach to the service. First, it gives us an opportunity to point interested people to images, video, and additional information about different topics. Second, it helps us create a conversation by answering questions and engaging in a dialogue with people who are interested in what we do -- and that interest is considerable.

What are NASA's plans going forward for Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc.? The answer is really buried in the premise of your question. I don't focus on any specific service. Social sites come and go. The real value in YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites is that they force us to think about doing our jobs differently. The old communications model of simply issuing news releases and holding news conferences is dying.

With the initial iteration of the Web, organizations learned that a traditional media filter was no longer required. We could speak directly to our stakeholders. But the technology was "transmit only." With the evolution and implementation of Web 2.0, we had the opportunity to engage in two-way communication. However, we also learned that there was a significant audience that didn't want to come to us -- they expected us to come to them, and that's the real value of these sites. We want to be where they want us to be, and we want to be able to engage them in a conversation that allows us to listen and learn as well as educate and inform.

What has NASA learned by venturing into the social media space? By seeing the power of viral networking and communications. Sharing an interesting story and a link to additional information can spread very quickly. I spend a lot of time watching what happens to our information and I am constantly amazed at the speed with which news spreads.

Also, we can get a story out faster using sites like Twitter. Having only 140 characters forces you to be both creative and direct. If you want the information to resonate you have to think about what you write. Agencies who simply "feed" their news releases into these sites miss the value of being in the social universe. It's about closing the distance between you and your audience and getting direct feedback about your organization's work. I've never felt it was my job to "sell" anything. I believe my job is to "clean off the windows" and give people a better view of their space program. Social media can be a valuable tool in achieving that goal.

[Report from NASA Tweetup is from Frank Gruber. Live stream of that event is here.]

[Off topic, but interesting anyway: Good piece here on how a mission to Mars would actually work.]

Apollo 11 at 40: The countdown begins

As the 40th anniversary approaches of the launch of the first mission to land on the moon July 16, follow the countdown here at a site set up by the John F. Kennedy Library, which will re-create the Apollo 11 mission in real time.

The project has set up two Twitter feeds: Follow  @AP11_CAPCOM for all the updates from Launch and Mission Control. Follow @AP_11SPACECRAFT for tweets from Michael, Neil, and Buzz.

In the days ahead Municipalist will be taking a look at how NASA itself has gone about telling its own story using the Web.

Video: Israeli New York Consulate leverages social media to engage the world

David Saranga was kind enough to answer Municipalist's questions back in January 2009 about the world's first Twitter press conference held by a government office, in this case Israel's New York Consulate.

"Since we entered Twitter, I think the definition of public diplomacy has changed," Saranga says in this video.

Saranga told Municipalist: "Our Twitter account has been an effective tool for communicating and dialoguing directly with people all over the world. Some of these people may never have had access to Israel’s messages, which we could share with them through Twitter, and now they have the ability to speak directly with the Israeli government."