Nancy Heltman

I am not sure what product you have but as we celebrate our first anniversary using social media, I can tell you we have enjoyed a lot of success. Since I work for Virginia State Parks, my government product is a little unique since we compete with private Tourism destinations. I’m afraid I also do not have hard evidence on our success but I do…[Read more]

My parents were both Federal Civil Service and while I was always less in touch with what my father’s job was, I recall the long hours my mother worked. I can remember going to her office on weekends and learning how to use the adding machine. I remember scheduling family vacations around the Federal fiscal year (back when it was earlier) because…[Read more]

I belong to several groups and receive email notices when there are new posts. I just don’t have time to check them all out. What could be really helpful would be if the email included part of the post. That way I could see if it was something I was interested in instead of checking them all out. The Linked-In mail I get is like that and one of…[Read more]

Everyone was touting the new Twitter landing page but the truth is some simple “instructions” or how to’s on that page might help folks who look at Twitter and are clueless. In my own case, I signed up for Twitter in the fall when I heard about it from Virginia Tourism. I followed them and nothing else happened. I didn’t get it. I went away. In…[Read more]

Too much of anything is a bad thing. Parents need to emphasize other parts of life to their kids so that their whole life does not revolve around social networking. Having real friends and unplugging and going outdoors is important. But social networking in a responsible way can expose youth to a broader horizon of people. I had an international…[Read more]

I was at a forum this week where some Federal agency people said that all of the social media is barred from their computers. As a Supervisor I agree there is always risk of employees goofing off on the job. Our job as supervisors is to make sure our staff have enough work to keep them busy and hold them accountable. In my experience, you take…[Read more]

Gray – how are you handling the aggregating? We have some folks interested in tweeting for us but I envision a unified effort (although I have urged them to become users and retweet our stuff).

I use Hoot Suite.

I tweet for work as @VAStateParks and personally at @nheltman and as my dog (for fun) @yoda_the_dog. The fact that my dog has more followers than my personal account bothers me just a little. I have found that I have trouble separating my personality into these buckets and a lot of issues and friends seem to work their way into the account I use…[Read more]

I started to promote Virginia State Parks as part of our social media plan – blog, fb, ms. But found so much more. It is amazing what I have learned on Twitter, from great links on global issues I care about to finding a real butcher within driving distance. I don’t have time to web search daily to mine the gold from the net on topics I care about…[Read more]

@VAStateParks and @nheltman

Be glad to chat. We dived in without staff or planning, just absorbing. I’m having fun with it. I have talked to Tourism some and got a few ideas from them. The blog and Twitter are my favorites.