There are countless ways in which the Forest Service can use social media to better fulfill its mission. Here a some ideas. What would you add to this list?
Leadership blogs - From the Chief on down, leaders can communicate more directly with employees, partners, visitors, issues stakeholders and the public at large.
Employee social networks - increase esprit de corps with personal spaces for any employee that wants one.
Wiki knowledge bases - capture organizational expertise and institutional memory as we undergo transformational changes and face massive retirements.
Online agoras - create a market for excess property, details, and housing opportunities using a "craigslist" or "ebay" approach.
Podcast significant conferences or speeches.
Team blogs - are used to exchange ideas among a particular community of interest or community of practice (see Dave Iverson's blogs)
Wikis and/or forums - are used to supplement public meetings and comments for planning and other purposes.
Newsletters can be reinvigorated as daily blog journals with contributions from the readers.
Wikis can replace static and outmoded user guides, keeping specialists up-t0-date with best practices. Employees can post questions to a FAQ center, to which anyone with an answer can respond.
Mashups of Google Maps are a powerful tool for any kind of land-based project or delivering recreation information. Allow users to generate most of the information.
Use Tags to let users supply much of the metadata for online records such as Forest Service photographs.
5 comments:
Nice list. I like the Wiki approach for documenting/recording conferences; for example, event calendar or proceedings, presenter information/bio/notes, attendee feedback, or travel, hotel, and restaurant guides. A goggle search for 'conference wiki 2007' will return several results as more ideas for using such an approach.
Seems to me that both blogs and wikis play a useful role re: conferences. Much like library indices, we need to search by author or "presentor" as well as by title and/or subject or date. Hence the need or desire for a wiki.
Blogs are useful too, to add perspective on the conference as it is being set up and advertised, and while the conference is ongoing. Blogs are usefl as well for after-the-fact reflection.
The blog-wiki world is intertwined in many ways.
Great list! I'm particularly interested in leadership blogs. Once or twice a year I find myself in the presence of a stellar thought leader and I'm always quite impacted by his/her view of the agency. My performance and my attitude both skyrocket after such encounters. It'd be great to feel "in the loop" more often.
Maybe not everyone cares what's going on in the minds of our leaders, but that's the great thing about self-selection. We each tune in to the blogs that we feel are most relevant.
I've also been thinking about wikis/and or forums, I fantisize about the day when we tear down the fire walls (or atleast shrink them to only contain the truly sensitive info) and there is real-time open collaboration between FS and the general public. Not just at public meetings, but on an ongoing basis.
Travel tweet - I was messing around again...and incorporated twitter capability on my personal blog site (www.dwalbert.com) for the sake of exploring ideas on how we might be able to use similar functionality. It looks like I'm able to post blog entries from my cell phone (tweets) and then it can alert twitter friends when new posts are made, with the alerts being dependent on their twitter preferences of course. Not sure this is only for rock stars...we might find some creative ways to leverage twitter-like capabilities too, even though we're not U2. I'll be in Santiago in May and will try to connect to a local Chilean cell provider with my cell and will attempt to post a travel tweet from there.
Travel tweet - I was messing around again...and incorporated twitter capability on my personal blog site (www.dwalbert.com) for the sake of exploring ideas on how we might be able to use similar functionality. It looks like I'm able to post blog entries from my cell phone (tweets) and then it can alert twitter friends when new blog posts are made, with the alerts being dependent on their twitter preferences of course. Not sure this is only for rock stars...we might find some creative ways to leverage twitter-like capabilities too, even though we're not U2. I'll be in Santiago in May and will try to connect to a local Chilean cell provider with my phone and will attempt to post a travel tweet from there.
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