Social Media & Government
Since Barack Obama won the U.S. Presidential election this month, there has been article after article written about the role of technology in his campaign (here’s a very interesting overview by Mario Armstrong on NPR member station WYPR’s Midday with Dan Rodricks, this week–starts about midway through).
Many have credited Obama’s use of social media organize and communicate with supporters locally, get his message out and raise money. Indeed, MyBarackObama.com, and his use of blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, has arguably created a new precedence for how political and public interest campaigns will likely begin using the internet.
As many of you know, KickApps was approached by John McCain’s campaign about 3 months ago to host John McCain’s official social network, McCainSpace. (After abandoning their attempts to develop a site internally, they came asking for a solution that works out-of-the-box, could be easily customized and launched very quickly with all the bells & whistles.) The site’s user demographics are particularly interesting, with approximately 60% of members were 30 years or older. Additionally, many of the most active members claimed to be first time social networkers and bloggers. If anything, this election cycle showed that social media is very much firmly part of the mainstream.
What does this mean for the government and public interest organizations?
Most government and public interest organizations’ websites tend to be primarily used to provide information and educate people about a given topic. As a resource, these websites have become invaluable. That said, most are also pretty static and staid in their presentation of this information, and I’d argue, a pretty boring monologue presence in a multilogue world.
While changing government’s culture and bureaucracy is a daunting task, best left to people much brighter and more capable than those of us who work at KickApps, there are some easy opportunities for government agencies to leverage social media to better meet the needs of their constituents. Just as Obama successfully used social media to get his campaign messages out, government agencies and public interest organizations can very easily and cost effectively adopt similar tactics.
A good starting point for this are widgets. Easily shared and deployed throughout the web on social networks, blogs, etc., widgets could play a very important role in providing people with real-time information and news updates.
Here are some examples of crime bustin’ widgets that we created using the KickApps Widget Studio in a few minutes. Powered by information from the FBI’s RSS News Feeds, each are shareable with several clicks of the mouse and embeddable on any website.
Here’s one powered by an Amber Alert feed.
As you can see, the power of viral syndication could very easily be put to use to inform and even organize people very quickly. In fact, please consider taking a moment to embed any of these on your blog or website.
Like I said, this is just a start. Could there be a day when we join the IRS’ social network? Hmmmm…that thought may just be a little too exciting for a Friday afternoon.
Click here for more information about the KickApps Widget Studio and here for the latest updates from last night’s release.
