Communications

Preventing Agro-Terrorism with Collaboration – Plus your weekend reads

Foot-and-mouth disease is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic and wild bovids. The virus causes a high fever for two or three days, followed by blisters inside the mouth and on the feet that may rupture and cause lameness. Although the disease is not contagious to humans, itRead… Read more »

What if all government employees were trained on how to save energy at work and at home?

That would be 50 million plus who would understand how to lower greenhouse gas emissions! WOW! Once their families and friends know what they can specifically do in daily life practices and in their offices. So let’s ask ourselves, what if 50 million people in the US actually change their consumption behavior? What if lightsRead… Read more »

Social Security Administration cat videos for YouTube featuring SSA website redesign

The following cat videos were posted on the official Social Security Youtube page as well as placed Skip Ads on Youtube to encourage retiring online through our new website. The SSA website redesign is seen in the video as well. All cats and voice over talent were volunteer in an effort to save money. FromRead… Read more »

Libraries Re-Imagined – Not just books

These days libraries aren’t just repositories for thousands of books, they have adapted with the times. “Local government was the sector hit hardest by the recession, because they depend heavily on property taxes. Librarians are adapting to what is a new fiscal reality. One of the areas that libraries have been very aggressive in, isRead… Read more »

“Social Media” is SO 2009! 7 Proposed Digital Terminology Upgrades

At the risk of inspiring unresolvable semantic discussions, this post offers seven examples of digital terminology that should probably be replaced and/or removed from the lexicon and suggests both existing and new alternative terminology to use instead. It also includes some of the dialogue that followed its original publication on the former blog. What otherRead… Read more »

The Department Picnic

Ah…the department picnic. Fond memories of fried chicken, hard dry burgers, 15 varieties of potato salad, a dish with melted marshmallows on top, a mystery casserole, and some wrinkled burned hotdogs. And lots of employees with their families. Sometimes leaders are reluctant to attend this traditional summer event (also the holiday party close to theRead… Read more »

Performance Review 101 – How to get real results

We are rapidly approaching the end of the fiscal year and that means one thing for employees: performance review time. Ugh, the dreaded performance review, they are the bane of existence for employees and managers alike. But there are ways to make performance reviews less painful for everyone involved. Tom Fox is the Vice PresidentRead… Read more »

More Transparency Needed for Federal Communicators to Build Public Trust

As a federal communicator, are you able to share as much information and data with the public as needed, or is real transparency just the latest buzzword? Do you often run into antiquated bureaucratic stonewalls and other internal obstacles when trying to foster greater transparency and open government? If so, this is likely problematic notRead… Read more »

Leveraging the power of the crowd – It’s not a mob mentality

Crowdsourcing is one of those words that means different things to different people. For our purposes, Daren Brabham defines it as, “Crowdsourcing it an online distributed problem solving and production model that uses the power of online communities to meet organizational needs.” Brabham is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School of Communication and JournalismRead… Read more »