What the US Army can teach you about social media.
Some of the BuzzNumbers team are up in the Gold Coast at the AMI’s Marketing for Government conference… all work I promise!
This morning I had the chance to see Lindy Kyzer from the US Army’s social media team. She talked about how they trained army personel on how to use social media, including getting generals to Tweet and how it is a vital tool for both internal and external communication.
Obviously there were questions raised about how you do this without compromising national security but in a simple case of life mirroring the web (who would have thought it??!) the Army just adhere to their policies of how they govern any type of communication. i.e. you don’t talk about stuff which would compromise the army or the safety of your fellow service men.
I guess that rolling out social media across an organisation is nothing new but to do it on such a large scale in quite a staid organisation and get a whole load of generals (think CEO in the commercial world) actively participating is a pretty big achievement.
One of the really neat thisngs they have done is to share content created by their personel through their Facebook and Twitter pages. It allows the army to seem “real” without actually creating the content or putting it out on their main website. This one shows that there is a lighter side to life – even when you are posted in Iraq. Pretty good PR for the Army with over 5.5 million views.
And for those of you who love a good policy this is the document they created to give organisation wide rules of social media use.
Tags: Social Media, social media policy
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.