Social Media

Crowdsourcing: gathering information to support forest fire fighting

Elena Rapisardi, a new friend who contracts with, and does innovative volunteer work for, various parts of the Italian government, has reported out on an interesting meeting here. I bring this up because we don’t always notice when new ground is being broken and new fuel is being provided for our own further development andRead… Read more »

The need for social media training is larger than ever

I had the honor of chatting with the Boston SPIN group yesterday during their monthly meeting. The group, primarily engineering minded professionals, developers, QA, project managers, turned out to hear me discuss the topic of extending thought leadership positions via social media. Now, to be honest with you, I had expected to have a smallRead… Read more »

Icelandic Volcano strands people, Twitter allows them to fix it

For the last two days a volcano in Iceland has been spewing ash and rock high into the atmosphere with little indication that it is going to stop any time soon. The danger that the ash presents to aircraft (the particles are so fine and sharp they can destroy a jet engine) combined with theRead… Read more »

Project of the Week: YOUmedia (Chicago Public Library)

It’s National Library Week and in honor of that event, I posted another blog entitled “Libraries as Linchpins to #Gov20 and #OpenGov.” In addition, I wanted to highlight a sweet project in Chicago that uses libraries as connection point for kids to access the web, inspiring collaboration and creativity. Here’s a video and more infoRead… Read more »

Overcoming Liability Issues in Gov’t Social Media?

I work with a particular government agency that is quite hesitant about entering the social world due to legal and liability concerns. The problems seem to always revert back to the inability to monitor and edit the content posted on the agency’s social sites. My question is: How is every other government entity out thereRead… Read more »

Peter Corbett on Social Marketing

Peter Corbett spoke at Joe Shumard’s Internet Implementation Forum at the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce. I think Peter is one of the smartest people I’ve heard on using social media. This isn’t his whole presentation, just the parts I like best. His company, iStrategy Labs www.istrategylabs.com is a “digital experiential marketing agency.” Google istrategylabs forRead… Read more »

YouTube outreach: Early returns.

On Monday, we posted a video press release to YouTube on the subject of highway preservation and funding. It’s being described in the media as “KDOT’s first video press release,” which isn’t quite correct; we released a short video a month ago to accompany the announcement that READER’S DIGEST named Kansas roads and highways NumberRead… Read more »

Social Media in Gov is Like Riding a Bike, Seriously

When my son turned three, we got him a bike with training wheels. He did quite well, but when it came time to take off those training wheels, he violently refused. Even a three year old knew that going from four wheels down to two would increase his chances of falling from zero to incrediblyRead… Read more »