Key Take-Aways from Government Web Content Managers Forum

Happily, Jeffrey Levy, Director of Communications at EPA started the call off on the right foot with mission being the necessary driver of all social media tool usage.

• Start with NEED, then figure out how social media tools can help to achieve that goal.
• Get away from destination sites — social media tools enable that

Government agencies have some unique challenges that private entities don’t have to worry about:

• Legal contract issues: can’t indemnify, can’t agree to state governance
• Gratuitous service agreement is a good solution for agencies who want to use free software
• Accessibility requirements: 508 compliance

EPA uses Twitter to auto-tweet their RSS feeds; posts GreenScenes videos on their site, but cannot yet post on YouTube

TSA’s Evolution of Security blog has been a great success because it creates of full circle of suggestions -> actions -> communication

The Collaboration Project is an independent forum of leaders committed to leveraging the interactive web and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government’s complex problems.

The Morning After

Yesterday I attended Potomac Tech Wire/Digital Media Wire’s 5th Annual Digital Media Conference. While the topics were interesting and I DID make a number of valuable connections, I have two observations, one negative, one mixed.

First, the negative: I was disappointed to find that the conference was very much of a Web 1.0 event: flat PowerPoint presentations, one-way dialogue. Despite the topic of the conference, it didn’t actively embrace many of the principles of digital/social media: collaboration, participation, conversation.

In contrast was American University’s Center for Social Media’s most recent conference, Mapping Public Media. There was a pre-conference blog, a live Twitter feed during panels, real-time data visualization maps, a panelist hooked in via Skype, a post-conference community on Facebook, and probably other social media facilitating tools that I missed due to my own only moderate social media savvy. It was a fantastic event: content, execution and interplay between the two.

Second, I was really excited for the Digital Media Conference because it’s always–I’ve attended 4 out of the 5 years–been very much of a reunion: an opportunity to see and reconnect with so many friends and former coworkers from washingtonpost.com, marchFIRST, Georgetown b-school. This year’s attendees seemed different than those of previous years. Granted, this is a completely subjective and unqualified opinion, but there seemed to be much less representation from “old guard” media companies and a lot of attendance by traditional companies looking to understand digital media tools. This is both a pro and a con. Pro: excellent that non-media companies realize that they need to “get” the social media space and are actively trying to learn about it all. Con: media and communications companies are not continuing to push the envelope in this space.

Perhaps this conference is indicative of a larger issue: the back seat that big media is finding itself sitting in as social networks gain influence….