Today marks the 6th birthday of Twitter --  the now ubiquitous collaboration platform where people share 140 characters of information. It was on On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack)…

Last year, a couple colleagues and I put together a workshop (full slides below) entitled, "How to Use Social Media and Not Jeopardize Your Job." I delivered a variation of it at the Philadelphia Federal Executive Board's EEO and Diversity Day back in November.

During the workshop,…

Initially, social media may have been thought of as just a toy for the kids. A way to keep track of what friends are up to, to share snapshots of the grand kids, to write on walls and tweet, or whatever. In the early days was some sense of a potential for business, but plenty of confusion about what that meant in reality.



Time has passed and early adopters have shown that…

My little town of Hoboken, NJ--birthplace of Frank Sinatra--already has a reality TV star--Buddy of "Cake Boss" fame.  And we might have had two more--JWoww and Snooki of "Jersey Shore"--had our mayor Dawn Zimmer not put the kibosh on it. Hoboken, already overcrowded and undersupplied with parking spaces, would have had to deal with 24-hour film crews.The mayor …

There are rules of etiquette for every social situation, from dining to business meetings – and even dining during business meetings. Most of these rules have been around for a while and they are just an accepted part of social interaction.

There is a whole other set of rules and guidelines that falls under the umbrella of communications etiquette. To that end, there’s one aspect of our communications culture which is still…

HootSuite, which gained prominence as a Twitter dashboard/management tool, launched a new App Directory last month. HootSuite had already added social media channel integration as they grew; their dashboard currently allows you to manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace, Foursquare and mixi pages/accounts (along with Twitter). And now they’ve expanded their reach…

Scott Burns, CEO and co-Founder of GovDelivery, provides insights for how government agencies can leverage the power of social media.

Watch the video to hear Scott discuss social media as part of an integrated communications strategy that incorporates email and text messaging/SMS to fight through the “noise.”

What do you think? How did your government agency or organization start using social media? Have you had success? Share your story in the…

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Hot on the heels of launching Google+ Pages on November 7, Google has released a "how-to" guide for G+ aimed at increasing use of the new social platform by those in politics and government.

The "Google+ for Politics"…

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a blog entry about StumbleUpon – what it is (social bookmarking tool), what it does (drives website traffic), and why you should probably know about it (the tool doubled its user base to 20 million in less than two years).…

The short story: GovTwit.com is dead and I'm looking for ideas on how to get it back up and running.

The slightly longer version: I recently sat on a panel hosted by Market Connections, which was releasing their third annual report around the use of social media in government (you can download the overview here), and…

11/5/2011

Chantilly, VA – Mission Essential Personnel, LLC (MEP) today announced it has hired Linda Metz as its new Vice President for Contracts and Procurement. Metz has 25 years of experience in government contracting, having supported clients from commercial, federal, and international defense firms.

"I am delighted to welcome Linda to MEP and look forward to seeing the contributions she'll make here at MEP," said CEO Chris Taylor. "I hired Linda because of…

I was reminded on a recent family visit that there is still healthy skepticism, suspicion and confusion about social media and technology. Just like explaining how to use a Droid phone to my mother — Droid is an operating system, not a style! — we need to lay…

I know some of you get questions day in and day out about how to use Twitter.  I thought these Cliff Notes might help.

I developed these "Cliff Notes" as a way to help manage expectations and provide someone who is unfamilar with the tool a foundation to start from.  We have a more in depth "How To" guide that we call the Twitter Field Guide (we have a series of these guides).  Now, these guides are great for the Community…

The profile for @DODASSMC reads: "The Army's Director of Online and Social Media Division coordinates these monthly meetings for professional development and networking of DOD social media folks."  For the past two months, I've had the pleasure of addressing that group, and I've come to realize that it's time for me to embrace (resurrect?) my inner Social Media Ninja.  More on that later.

First, it's important to understand why DODASSMC's monthly meetings are so exciting.…

This shouldn’t be considered a new idea or story by any stretch of the imagination but social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and the newly launched Google+ are becoming increasingly popular frontiers for terrorist organizations. Classic cyberterrorism has always been associated with the large-scale disruption of computer networks and certain targeted websites being affected by release of computer viruses. These types of cyber-attacks are far from new…