Social > Media *
There is no doubt that social media in government has become a major topic of discussion recently. As an advocate and active user of social media, I’m often asked to create and/or give presentations on the potential application of social media at NASA. Up until now, I’ve actively resisted the temptation to accept the invitation because social media is so often misunderstood, taken out of context, or over-hyped. Yet, I do believe that there is enormous potential for organizations who utilize social media. Do I think social media can transform government by itself? Of course not. Do I think social media can be an effective tool to help transform and add value to government? Absolutely.
I was most recently invited by the NASA legal team to explore social media from an advocates standpoint on a panel at Johnson Space Center. I was really impressed with how open and interested the NASA legal team was in truly trying to understand the role of social media within government, so I decided to accept. Terminology and context matter so when thinking about the value of social media for an organization, it’s good to have a starting point. This presentation is a starting point and short introduction to what we mean when we talk about social media, some thoughts on how we might build an effective strategy utilizing social media, and finally some examples social media in action. 99% of the content in this presentation is available elsewhere on the internet and by no means is this an authoritive source on the subject or a comprehensive list of what is being done. Rather, it’s meant simply to serve as an introduction for conversations on social media, with a hope that it’ll spark an idea or two for its application at NASA.
If you are interested in exploring social media more, here are a few suggestions:
- Government and Social Media by Bev Godwin, GSA.
- Government 2.0: How Social Media Could Transform Gov PR by Mark Drapeau
- A list of 200 social media blogs
- “What is Social Media” by Antony Mayfield
- Social Media in Plain English
* Note: I came across the title “Social > Media” somewhere online one day and thought it was a very succinct way of explaining what social media is, so I adopted it for this presentation.
12 Responses to “Social > Media *”
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tim846 on May 27th, 2009
Nice, short presentation! Always stylishly done.
Great to have so many resources shared in the notes & on the presentation. Allows for an extension of the experience beyond what you created.
I’m going to suggest the Space Media 2.0 panel at ISDC 2009 consider using this to spark some discussion. Wish you or someone from NASA could be there to discuss. We’ll work on it for next time!
Loretta on May 27th, 2009
Nick, I am still blown away by how easy it is to take in your presentations. (And now after trying to make one myself I know how hard it is!) Thank you for taking the time to make something so beautiful, so thought provoking and so visually compelling. That is a very powerful communication tool!
ad_astra2 on May 27th, 2009
Slick as ever, Nick!
Thanks for capturing this so well!
Now…to figure out how to broaden the in-bound lanes on NASA’s new 2-way streets…
InfiniteFrontier on May 27th, 2009
Nick, your presentations are always really sharp and visually interesting, what software do you use to make them look like that? Is it just powerpoint and a software program like Photoshop or something else?
Brian Shiro on May 27th, 2009
A very polished and visually appealing presentation as always. However, it lacks real substance and doesn’t really say anything. I got more out of your blog post description and the links you provided than the presentation itself.
Becca C-K on May 27th, 2009
I can’t believe how many coments are that your presentation is “pretty”!
Which it is (yours are always fabulous). But that’s not the point is it? The point is to take an advocate’s standpoint on the use of social media.
Right now the early part of the presentation says to me is “look at all these different places used for social networking”.
Then, slides 14-16 really show how many people are already using it (they are really good points)
At the end, your example slides of how to use social media speak volumes more than your earlier slides with sweeping generalizations on “improving communication”. However, the examples are almost completely limited to examples of social media being used from a public affairs perspective to communicate with the outside world. How about showing some ideas of how they can be used “inside” NASA to improve communciation between different groups and projects? There are lots of these example you can find – many MOD groups are now keeping blogs for their flight teams, for instance. Or photo sharing sites being used for imagery analysis on thermal protection for the orbiter. These social media have a lot of usefulness for people getting their job done too, and I think that’s an equally powerful message.
RyInSpace on May 27th, 2009
Hey Nick,
I’m gong to post a short blog on the new NASA Student Ambassador Virtual Community (NSAVC) about this entry and hope that the new recruits read the entry and go through the presentation.
My only suggestion would be to increase some of the font sizes in the stats. It looks beautiful!
matt on May 27th, 2009
Great survey of the social media landscape! One of the items that stood out to me was the application of social media to knowledge management. I know this has been done within intelligence organizations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia) for a couple of years now, but for NASA this could be especially valuable as a way to capture some of the knowledge of senior technical staff before they retire. Having a wiki or other system for the early career technical people to document the “tribal knowledge” stuff would not only help them as a learning tool, but will also help to preserve the information. Of course, this may already be happening, but with all the attention to the “graying of the aerospace workforce” issue, it struck me as a good test case.
Rolando Quintanilla on May 28th, 2009
This is great content Nick. I was actually going to post something on the same topic, that I just fell upon while surfing slideshare.net, when I saw your post. The links below are the three part series of presentations on Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management Part 1 of 3 — The Wikipedia Myth
http://www.slideshare.net/TSys.....th-1135966
Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management Part 2 of 3 — People at the Center
http://www.slideshare.net/TSys.....the-center
Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management Part 3 of 3 — Getting Started
http://www.slideshare.net/TSys.....ng-started
These presentations dispell many of the myths and they really get to the root of how to make social media work. They were very insightful.
Nick Skytland on May 28th, 2009
Rolando,
Those are excellent presentations. I really encourage everyone to check Rolando’s links if you have a moment. There are so many great resources on slideshare, but these three presentations do a great job of exploring Enterprise 2.0 in much more detail. Thanks for sharing!
Tim, Loretta, Matt, Ryan, Ad_Astra2, InfiniteFrontier
Thanks for the kind words. I use a combination of software like Photoshop and Illustrator to create custom graphics, then import the pictures into powerpoint. It takes a long time and is much more work, but the end result is many times better than what I can produce using powerpoint alone.
Brian, Becca,
It’d probably help if I added a voiceover to the presentations because the slides I make are purposely built to be more generic so that others can use them for their own application. I do this with all my presentations, hoping to offer others a resource to use if they would like to. This particular deck was intended to a) introduce and define social media to an audience who was largely unfamiliar with what it is, b) introduce a few ideas on how NASA could actually use social media to accomplish real work (this is the middle strategy part – the conversation prism, touch points, etc) and c) provide some examples of social media already in action within government. I decided to use more well known examples (which tended to be more PAO focused) for the slides and actually cater the talk to the audience by providing specific examples that might be of interest to them.
Celeste Merryman on May 29th, 2009
@Nick – great presentation. Thanks for sharing it.