Social Media

Government Open and Structured Content Models Are Here!

Smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, not to mention your agency’s desktop website, are all clamoring for information, but sliced and diced in different ways. How can you make your content adaptive for efficient delivery to all of these mediums? Structured content and open content models can help you create content that

Structured and Open Content Models Working Group

May 05, 2014

This week the SocialGov Community took the step of recruiting a Digital Engagement Knowledge Manager, and I am excited to join the team through the innovative new Open Opportunities Program. At this point, though, you may be asking—is there really so much information out there that it needs to be

Alison Lemon

May 02, 2014

Need Help Responding to Facebook & Twitter Questions? Use Your Contact Center Customer Service Experts

Government agencies are always looking for better ways to connect with their audiences while making more effective use of existing (or shrinking) resources. To that end, many agencies—including ours, the National Cancer Institute—have begun to use social media platforms to help serve the communications mission. As these tools have become more widely used, NCI’s Contact

Candace Maynard

Apr 30, 2014

Federal Perspectives on Reaching Our Audiences with New Media Tools in 2014

AIDS.gov convenes and is guided by the Federal HIV/AIDS Web Council. The Council includes Web/new media leads, subject matter experts, and communication leads representing HIV programs across the U.S. government. Together we use new media to promote federal programs, policies and resources related to HIV.

Miguel Gomez

Apr 30, 2014

At the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) we use sharing buttons on our website to help people share content from web pages with their colleagues and friends. With one click, a user can post a page’s link to popular social networking sites or send it via email. The article To Use

Sarah Kaczmarek

Apr 23, 2014

Social Media tools, trends and algorithms come and go, but federal managers continue to see improvements in their digital engagement initiatives when they put citizens at the center of their programs. It’s common to hear that government social media lags behind

Justin Herman

Apr 22, 2014

Ten Earth Day Activities in Digital Government

On this Earth Day, federal social media managers are hard at work, sharing and promoting what government and citizens can do to protect the environment. We’ve compiled a sample of the activities that also show how different agencies are using different social media tools in support of a common goal. The United States Environmental Protection

Apr 22, 2014

Customer Satisfaction: Innovating with Lack of Resources

As government contact centers, we all face financial and technological constraints in our pursuit to improve the customer experience. One challenge faced by many contact centers is staffing limitations to handle the volume of incoming customer traffic. There are barely enough employees to operate phones, let alone work on meeting or exceeding the organizational customer

Rosetta Carrington Lue

Apr 21, 2014

How to Tell Your Agency’s Story—Plainly

You’ve got the right words, the active verbs, the carefully chosen adjectives and adverbs. You’ve got the facts. You’ve got the talking points. All you have to do is put it together, right?

Katherine Spivey

Apr 16, 2014

Tell Us Your Internet of Things Challenges

The Internet of Things, a concept approaching reality, is best described as objects (think appliance, trees, etc.) in the world equipped with identifying devices or machine-readable identifiers that make them connected to the Web. This handy infographic charts the history and development of the idea and perhaps this washing machine could be a roadmap to

Jacob Parcell

Apr 08, 2014

Earlier this month, stock photo giant Getty Images launched an embedded photo viewer, that permits sharing millions of its’ copyrighted images for free. The news generated headlines and questions about whether it’s okay for government content producers to use the tool. From Getty’s perspective, the

Judith Snyderman

Apr 03, 2014

Our digital gov neighbors in the U.K. have been working on their own digital strategy, including the consolidating into a single website. When the GOV.UK team introduced social sharing buttons, that allow users to post a link to the page on Facebook or Twitter, on their

Andrea Sigritz

Apr 02, 2014

Digital Analytics Program (DAP): Oceans of Data

In the last 15 months, the federal Digital Analytics Program (DAP) monthly Web traffic has grown to more than 1.1 billion views gov-wide, providing Web analytics to 29 U.S. federal cabinet-level agencies and nearly 3,000 public-facing government Web properties.

Marina Fox

Apr 01, 2014

For the last several years the National Weather Service has been rolling out social media accounts for all of their 122 field offices. Each office now has a Facebook page, Twitter handle and YouTube account to better communicate our life saving messages to the public. As these accounts were

Tim Brice

Mar 27, 2014

GSA Introduces News Genius to Decode Government Web

The federal government can now unlock the collaborative “genius” of citizens and communities to make public services easier to access and understand with a new free social media platform launched by GSA today at the Federal #SocialGov Summit on Entrepreneurship and

Justin Herman

Mar 27, 2014

Nine Tips to Leverage your Facebook Page

Due to recent news feed changes, Facebook engagement is down nearly 50% since October for brand pages and is predicted to go lower, according to Social@Ogilvy. As a result federal agencies are continually monitoring the performance of their pages and diversifying their strategies. We talked to members of the Social Media Community

Scott Horvath

Jessica Orquina

Mar 19, 2014

Social Media Community of Practice developed a set of baseline social media metrics to help you assess whether your efforts are achieving the results you want. How do

Sarah Kaczmarek

Mar 14, 2014

We Love it When a Plan Comes Together…

Federal agencies are currently hard at work developing revised Open Government Plans—blueprints that are published every two years, highlighting agency progress towards making their work more transparent, participatory, and collaborative, and outlining new open government commitments going forward. This iterative, biennial process grew out of the December 2009 Open Government

Nick Sinai

Corinna Zarek

Mar 10, 2014

Creating Awesome Web Analytics Reports and Presentations

Collecting visitor, engagement, and traffic data for your digital channels is nothing new. By this time, you have a lot of data about your website. How do you use and present that data to make meaningful recommendations?

Sarah Kaczmarek

Mar 04, 2014

What Do People Think of Your Content? Ask Your Contact Center!

All of us want to improve the content and information we provide to the public, but we’re intimidated by where to start: Does our website provide clear content? Is the best information hidden on pages a few layers down? What should we tweet about

Tonya Beres

Feb 28, 2014

News and Events on Social Media