by Joey deVilla on December 30, 2008
Update, January 5, 2008: Captain David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology for the U.S. Air Force, sent me an updated version of their chart, whose changes are based on your comments. The chart appears in this article, and you can click on it to download a full-sized PDF version.
You’ve probably seen many articles on companies and organizations saying that they take social media seriously. Here’s one such organization that you might not expect: the United States Air Force. Take a look at the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, reproduced below:
Click the diagram to download the PDF version (455K).
The “rules of engagement” are quite good. You might find them to be useful for your own blogs, whether personal or corporate.
WebInkNow recently covered the Air Force’s approach to social media, which is far more involved than many companies who only pay lip service to the idea. They’ve assigned someone the role of “Chief of Emerging Technology”, whose job is to develop strategy, policy and plans for the Air Force’s “communicators” and whose mission is to use or build web applications as a means of engaging Airmen and the general public in conversation. The goal is to make every single Airman a communicator.
The Air Force has quite a presence on the web, which includes:
As with the Blog Assessment chart, you might want to use the Air Force’s social media strategy as a model for your own. Check out WebInkNow’s article for more.
Tagged as:
blogging,
communicating,
military,
multimedia,
propaganda,
public relations,
social media,
Twitter
by Joey deVilla on November 27, 2008
Over at CBC’s Search Engine, Jesse Brown asks an important question: Is Canada Becoming a Digital Ghetto? I’m reproducing the article in its entirety below.
Here are three things that suck about being Canadian right now:
- Last week the CRTC sided with Bell against a group of small Internet Service Providers who want to offer their customers unthrottled connections where what they download is their own business and not subject to interference.
- In last week’s throne speech the Conservative government renewed their intention to “modernize” Canadian copyright law. Their effort to do so last session was Bill C-61, a woefully unbalanced and retrograde piece of legislation that led to the greatest citizen backlash to any proposed bill in recent memory. Yet there has been no indication from new Industry Minister Tony Clement that a much-needed public consultation will take place. The best he has offered is the possibility of a “slightly different” version of the bill.
- Twitter has just announced that they are killing outbound SMS messaging in Canada due to exorbitant and constant rate hikes from Canadian cell providers (former Industry Minister Jim Prentice vowed to get tough on SMS price gouging, then backpedalled). Cell phone rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, and the result is that mobile penetration is pathetically low and that emerging new cultural platforms like Twitter are being hobbled.
This growing list of backwards policies is already creating a sense of digital isolation: Canadians can’t stream the videos Americans stream, download the files Americans download, remix the media Americans remix, or tweet the way Americans tweet.
With the election of Barack Obama, digital culture in the U.S. hit a tipping point, where a robust online public sphere proved itself capable of changing the world. Meanwhile, here in Canada we’re approaching our own tipping point, where a series of ignorances and capitulations threaten to turn our country into a digital ghetto.
[Thanks to Mark Relph for pointing me to this article.]
Tagged as:
"The Man",
backwards-thinking,
Bell Canada,
Bill C-61,
call to action,
Canada,
copyfight,
copyright,
government,
mobile,
packet shaping,
policy,
SMS,
telcos,
telecom,
throttling,
Twitter,
wireless
by Joey deVilla on May 28, 2008
by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008