Millions of people use social media for fun, but these technologies are also powerful business tools that encourage communication and collaboration. Here's how you and your agency can use them to accomplish your mission.
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You Will Need
- An understanding of social media
- A clearly defined strategy
- The right tools for the job
- Resources to implement your plan
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Step 1
Understand social media tools
Before you start using social-media tools, learn how they work and what they offer, particularly for government agencies. They can enable internal collaboration, allow information-sharing with external partners, exchange information with the public, keep pace with fast-moving events in real time, and harness the collective ingenuity of the public to support your mission.
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Tip
Social networking isn't just for young people. The fastest-growing segment of Facebook users in the last half of 2008 was between the ages of 35 and 54.
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Step 2
Focus on your mission
Focus on your agency's goals. Each social media tool should serve a well-defined, mission-oriented purpose, and have the potential to improve your communications efforts.
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Step 3
Choose the right tools
Choose the right mix of tools for the job, keeping both social media and other channels, like email, in mind. To solicit the public's thoughts on an issue, you could send out an email, post a notice on your home page, record a podcast, and write a blog post inviting customers to share their ideas as comments.
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Tip
Make sure you can support multiple communications tools. Social-media sites that sit untended can lose their value
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Step 4
Allocate resources
Allocate or realign resources to implement the tools you've chosen. Like any business tool, social media requires an investment in resources to make it work. After an initial investment, you may find that these new tools allow you to work more efficiently and improve performance.
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Step 5
Identify metrics
Before implementing your social media plan, define what success looks like and how you’re going to measure it. Often social media can save money, but its strength really lies in increasing audience engagement -- which helps you accomplish your mission. Examples of measurements include subscriptions, page and blog views, and click-throughs.
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Tip
Special Terms of Service agreements have already been negotiated with vendors like YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr, to make it easier for agencies to use these tools.
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Step 6
Implement your plan
Implement your plan. Like any project, using social media requires strategic thinking. Start small and see which initiatives work and which don’t -- it’s OK to fail as you try new things. Investing in social media has the potential for delivering great rewards.
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Fact
NOAA boosted their "Ocean Explorer" video views from less than 10,000 to over 80,000 by posting clips on YouTube as well as on their own site.
