I’m On A Boat! 8 Lessons From The Navy Social Media Handbook

Kristin Bockius (St. Louis, MO) —

As the U.S. passes its one-year anniversary of the Open Government Directive, it’s a good time to reflect and think about how far things have come, but also to contemplate where they are going during the next year. Now that social media and government has largely moved past a phase of “surprise” about its usefulness into a phase of experimentation, most everyone wants advice on just how to experiment. There is no shortage of advice on the Web, but for your average government employee it’s very hard to know where to start. Which bloggers do you trust? How do you deal with conflicting advice? Do the best practices for corporate social media apply to government agencies?

And so, inevitably, handbooks of ideas and best practices get made and distributed. We at Microsoft are not immune from this temptation, having just published such a guidebook about social media for use in the public sector (more on that later). But great minds think alike, and around the same time that we released our bookelet, the U.S. Navy published one of their own, which we found really interesting and useful.

Tweets Meet Fleets: The Navy Social Media Handbook

The Navy’s social media handbook is public, and can be found on the social document sharing site SlideShare, where it’s already accumulated over 13,000 views. Here’s the link to the Navy Command Social Media Handbook. The sheer number of views in a relatively short time with very little formal marketing strongly suggests that despite the bleeding edge of innovation moving forward fast that there is a big desire among the middle ~60% of people interested in social media for basic information all in one place, laid out simply.

Here are eight takeaways I had from reading the Navy’s handbook:

• Senior leadership: Dennis J. Moynihan, the Navy’s Chief of Information, clearly supports organizational use of social media. This senior-level support is necessary for any corporation, agency, or institution that is going to engage in social media conversations. Employees should not be confused about whether they can or can’t use social media, or how. And because social media experimentation is now the norm, there is a need for structure and guidance around behavioral practices.
• Internal listening: The handbook points out that listening to what your own employees are saying on social media platforms is a great way to gain insight into their thoughts and concerns. This may seem obvious when stated, but I think this is incredibly insightful and haven’t seen it called out quite so explicitly before. Encouraging internal listening is great advice because it can serve as an internal sentiment monitor.
• Everyone is an ambassador: The handbook points out that all employees who use social media are brand ambassadors 24/7/365, and to act accordingly. My personal view on this goes even further: The way you behave online affects not only your reputation (or “personal brand”), but additionally the professional brand you are associated with. Thus, you must act in a way that is proper for both yourself and your employer. This is a delicate balance, but no one claimed that social media adoption would be easy.
• Single presence: The Navy’s handbook mentiones something called “single command presence” as a social media tactic, and for many cases I tend to agree with this approach. The idea is to alleviate confusion through limiting the number of online brands used in social media platforms like Twitter. With my own work within the state and local government space, I manage two primary brands (@Microsoft_Gov and Bright Side of Government), rather than siloing content by solutions (email, cloud computing, documents, etc.) or by audience (state, cities, counties…). In many cases, such division unnecessarily dilutes a brand and makes it harder to engage in consistent online conversations.
• Social media registration: The Navy mentions the idea of “registration” of an entire organization’s social media for the purpose of rolling it up to an online directory. From the Microsoft point of view, we might do a better job of this, considering the many, many (many) brands, social media accounts, personal and corporate blogs, photo sets, online events, etc. that we have. Even a passionate fan (or employee) could have trouble finding accounts to follow or people to talk to. Not unlike Microsoft, the government writ large has many, many (many) activities, and thus directories of this kind should prove most useful.
• Crisis communications: Traditional crisis communications intersecting with emerging social media is a persistent topic of conversation. For an organization like the Navy having a crisis communications plan is somewhat of a no-brainer, but being prepared for “social crisis communications” is critical for all kinds of organizations (Exhibit 1: BP). Your public relations team should have a crisis plan in place – for before, during and after conversations – so you can manage any crisis (or rumor), partly via social media. All brands are increasingly at risk for public criticism, and this must be acknowledged and planned for accordingly.
• Records keeping: Records-keeping is an important and complicated topic, particularly for governments who have specific responsibilities to the citizens they serve. The Navy’s handbook suggests that people should selectively choose what to archive or not, but now, there are cheap or even free tools (see this free SharePoint plug-in, for example) that can be a significant help in automating this process, freeing employees to be more productive elsewhere.
• Content endorsements: At the bleeding edge of social media use, most everyone realizes that people’s expressions in tweets, Facebook status updates, and so on are not the official position or policy of the government agency they work for. Nevertheless, this is still an area of active discussion with a lot of “grey” and room for error and misunderstanding, particularly when dealing with the formal media and the blogosphere. Is it okay for a soldier to complain about his instructor’s punishing training? What about if a colonel complains about the military’s presence in a certain country? This goes outside the scope of this piece, but the bottom line is that government agencies have important reputations and brands to guard, as do all large and even smaller organizations, and so a balance between personal freedom and organizational responsibility must be struck.

Overall, we think that the Navy’s social media guide, like the Air Force’s flowchart for online “rules of engagement” that came before it, will provide valuable information about social media not just for the armed services but also for agencies across the federal government, and even beyond.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Social Media

As I mentioned before, Microsoft is not only a company that serves and supports the public sector through software, but it is also an organization whose employees are adopting social media to communicate with various audiences, including government employees. Recently, we openly published a guidebook that I designed along with Mark Drapeau, Microsoft’s director of public sector engagement (and the editor of SECTOR: PUBLIC) for our employees working in the public sector, named How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Social Media [PDF document].

Our approach was very tactical, and we kept the feel of the booklet fun with cartoons and plays on words. Our goal was to bridge the gap between questions about why or if social media is relevant (“Why would I want to use social media to talk to USDA employees when we’re already talking with the CIO’s office?”), and actually tackling very specific business problems with it (“How do we use Facebook to better understand and communicate with the government and nonprofit community interested in using technology to improve U.S. education?”). Within this gap are very basic concerns: What tone of conversation do I use? How do I understand some basic metrics that track what I’m doing? How do I balance talking about my job with discussing other topics?

You can download How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Social Media for all the details, but here are five big topics we covered:

• No one is born an alpha: Hard work and patience make thought leaders.
• You reap what you say: You have to be consistent with creating great content.
• Know when not to sell: The online conversation is personal, like a cocktail party.
• Never shoot the messenger: Embrace criticism rather than recoil from it.
• Grow community organically: Gimmicks are a long-term loser.

Government 2.0: Experiments vs. Solutions

Where is Government 2.0 / Open Government going in the next year or so? As more and more people experiment with social media, they realize that while useful for communicating with citizens or other functions, a given social media platform is infrequently a solution to a government problem in isolation. Further, many companies working in the Web 2.0 space (Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr…) are still working out various issues with available features, compatibility with government rules, and even uptime (the popular blogging platform Tumblr, which is now used by some major media organizations like The Atlantic, was recently down for about 24 hours, for example).

As SECTOR: PUBLIC editor Mark Drapeau recently noted in a blog post called “The Three Phases of Government 2.0″ at O’Reilly Radar, the area of Gov 2.0 seems to be moving, at least at the bleeding edge, from a phase of experiments to one of solutions. He commented,

The landscape of Gov 2.0 is shifting once more… into one in which people are searching for stable, reliable, legal, interoperable, and complete solutions to government problems. As it turns out, these solutions are not always free, they are not always open source, they are not always created by 35 hackers meeting for a weekend, they are not always available on the web or in the cloud, and they are not always available off-the-shelf.

Sometimes they are, though, and that’s what makes Gov 2.0 ultimately so exciting. Something like Crisis Camp Haiti was incredibly significant. The use of social media to publicize the Iranian elections and other global issues is significant in a different way. There are other useful examples of simple, non-specific, commercial technologies helping government missions. Nevertheless, disappointments associated with simplistic off-the-shelf technology to crowdsource public opinion results in metrics that are irrelevant to solving problems. Other issues, like the realization that government entities in many cases don’t own the information that they upload to social media sites, nor the conversations that happen there, are leading to new discussions about what Gov 2.0 should look like.

This creates both challenges and opportunities. While fresh startup companies were the flavor of the year… what I predict is the onslaught of traditional “Beltway bandits” (Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems), software companies (Google, Microsoft, Cisco), and other major players (Bloomberg? Nielsen? Verizon?) offering a different type of solution — one that costs money, but works reliably and meets the needs and requirements of the customer.

The award-winning site America Speaking Out that Republican members of the House of Representatives built in order to listen to their consituents and provide a platform for conversation is a good example of this. While explicitly taking into account the importance of and interfacing with platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and allowing use on different phones (iPhone, Windows Phone, Android) and Web browsers, the site is not beholden to any of them. Built on a new technology called TownHall and hosted in the cloud, the site is custom-designed and controlled by the Republicans (AKA “the customer”). Security features and other customizations allow a reliable, responsible solution to am important government problem.

In the end, each person and organization must learn, experiment, and strategize about how social media applies to organizational problems. It’s easy to get excited about experiments… but they are the beginning of the process, not the end.

Kristin Bockius is the state and local government relationship and social marketing manager within Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector division. Among other activities, she manages the Bright Side of Government website, and the @Microsoft_Gov feed on Twitter. She last wrote about cloud computing in government during the recession in November.

Photos of the USS George H.W. Bush and the media bar used under Creative Commmons. Photo of Rep. Mike Pence from Life.com / Getty Images.