From Federal Computer Week:

DOD today launched an updated Social Media Hub Web page to provide quick links to service-affiliated Facebook, Twitter and YouTube social media sites as well as policy documents, training manuals and other information and to provide a forum for discussion.

The military services have been active participants in social media. For example, as of today, the U.S. Marine Corps’ Facebook page counted more than 435,000 fans; the Army’s, 344,000; the Navy’s, 162,000; Air Force’s, 95,000; Defense Department’s, 38,000; Coast Guard’s, 19,000; and National Guard’s, 10,000.

via Defense Department creates online hub for social media — Federal Computer Week.

The room features 6 big monitors with 5 seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards – also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom build with partners including Radian6 and IBM. Below are a few of the visualizations that we got to check out in an interview last week:

 

 

 

This monitor is a visualization of tweets that are relevant to Gatorade; the company is tracking terms relating to its brand, including competitors, as well as its athletes and sports nutrition-related topics.

 

 

 

This monitor measures blog conversations across a variety of topics and shows how hot those conversations are across the blogosphere. The company also runs detailed sentiment analysis around key topics and product and campaign launches.

Check out the video on Mashable to see exactly what the other four monitors do. The room does look a little like mission control for a space flight – or like the dark room lined with monitors in every movie set in a casino. 

The goal: every time you type – or perhaps even utter – the word “Gatorade” near a computer, or mention one of its sponsors or taglines, that instance is captured, processed and analyzed.

As government communicators, we don’t have the budget. But shouldn’t we use our own tools, and free tools on the Web, to do what we can? Our programs, our installations, our publications, are brands. And we aren’t selling electrolyte-laced sugar water.

Read Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center.

Published in Jan 2010, a George Washington University and Cision survey of journalists reports 89% use blogs and 65% use social networks to research stories.

Lee Odden at the TopRank Online Marketing Blog analyzes results of a couple of  studies measuring reporters’ use of online resources. PAOs should be aware of these techniques; and our own journalists could pick up a few tips. Here’s one example, from a local TV news reporter:

I begin every day at search engine. It doesn’t matter what story I’m working on, it always starts with a search. I work on a segment called “Good Question,” so I often type my question directly into Google, and see what comes up. When searching for local experts, I’ll often take the subject matter, tack on the word “Minneapolis” and add the word “expert.”

For example, last week I did a story on whether cursive handwriting was vanishing because of e-mail. I typed “Minneapolis handwriting expert” into Google, and found several local handwriting analysts. Next, I searched for private schools (because public schools are often challenging to get permission to shoot at) and found the school we used for our story.

For my story on whether we get enough Vitamin D in Minnesota, I searched “Vitamin D” “Minneapolis” and “expert.” If a local company showed up very high with their own expertise in those results, I would have called that company.

Read the original for more examples: From How Journalists Use Search & Social Media – Online Marketing Blog.

In the last two competitions, however, the judges toiled over keyboards and screens, squinting and crunching numbers, silently, alone – but not really alone, at least this year.

For the 2009 competition, the entire world is looking over their shoulders. No sweaty, chapel-like boardroom, no launching cardboard-mounted entries at one another with a “Can you believe this?” and no gentlemen’s agreement to leave everything said in the room. The room is as wide as the Internet.

The coordinator at the Army level, rather than making a weak attempt a password-protected virtual boardroom (as in the IMCOM case), posted everything in public HERE. All competitors can see each other’s stuff, opening the field for endless, helpless comparison. On one hand, the judges could make themselves as popular as baseball umpires. On the other, the openness also shows how good all the entries are. Open is better, in the end. Open means more exposure for the best the Army has to offer, and the product’s generally very, very good.

As in the IMCOM competition (coordinated by this writer), a few entries stand out on either end of the bell curve, but only in a few categories. The curve skews toward excellence, as should be expected, and in the fine distinctions within this crowd of entries the judges will find their real work.

Take a look at the competition page. Should next year’s competition be as open?

Yesterday, Nielsen Business Media reported that Editor & Publisher was shutting down.Clearly, Nielsen concluded that the supplier community serving the newspaper industry can no longer sustain a media business that reports on the newspaper industry. When you get to the point where the suppliers have dwindled—or not enough of them believe in the value of using a third-party media source for the marketing—you’ve got a problem.And that tells us a lot about the state of the newspaper industry.

via A Death Knell for the Newspaper Business? – Tony Silber – Blogs B2B @ FolioMag.com.

Eve Meinhardt, writing in the Fort Bragg Paraglide, seems to go against everything we’re preaching in Army public affairs today, especially given the social media emphasis in the 2009 Worldwide Public Affairs Symposium in April and the Association of the United States Army conference last week.

The headline seems to caution against any participation. The tone continues through most of the article.

But the author never flashes the “DO NOT ENTER” light. Instead, she offers a stern warning, to the entire military community, “Don’t be stupid”:

Kellie Neuschwanger, Security and Intelligence Division, Directorate of Emergency Services, said that the safety of Soldiers, the Families and everyone working on Fort Bragg should be at the forefront of everyones mind when they write a “tweet” or update their social networking pages. “Each one of us – Soldier, Family member, civilian or contractor – has knowledge that is valuable to the enemy. Even providing mundane details like what time a PT physical training formation is taking place or where construction is on Fort Bragg can compromise OPSEC operational security,” said Neuschwanger.”It is important for all to understand that just because they can access these social networking sites, both at work and at home, does not give you permission to discuss operational and organizational information on them.”

We can’t prevent Soldiers, civilians and family members from using social media, and we can’t prevent every mistake. In fact, overall, the Army benefits from increased, authentic participation in the vast conversation of the Web.

But we can never forget the bad guys, and I don’t think, as public affairs pros, we can leave the OPSEC training to once-a-year encounter sessions with the information security officers. We’ve been trying to uncork the bottle for years. We need to share some responsibility in teaching our people how to tame the genie.

So this kind of article should stand next to the articles encouraging commanders to let their subordinates blog and tweet. The tone might be off-putting, but some readers who might ignore our more gentle reminders could be “scared straight” by this approach – if they aren’t scared completely out of the blogosphere.

Read Social networking puts operational security, Soldiers lives at risk.

JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq – The Internet has become an indispensible tool for Soldiers, allowing them to keep in contact with friends and family and share deployment stories from across the globe through social networking sites and blogs.

…

The Army respects every Soldier’s First Amendment rights to publish what they want as long as operational security is enforced, according to Army regulation 530-1.

“If a Soldier is going to start a blog or Web site, they need to make sure their chain of command is notified,” said Staff Sgt. Samuel Shoemate, the noncommissioned officer in charge of intelligence and security, with Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 13th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary).

According to the regulation, Soldiers are required to report to their immediate supervisor and OPSEC officer about their wishes to publish military-related content in any public forum.

Read the whole article at Digital Video & Imagery Distribution System.