Government, the Public Interest and You.0

Today I was lucky enough to appear at a Washington forum on government, non-profits and social media.

The event was hosted by Clickability and Kick Apps, two companies that work mostly in the private sector but who, like so many in the tech world, are eyeing Washington as a center of social media innovation. [Or at least technology contracts.]

As one federal agency CIO said over lunch, “It’s Obama. Everybody knows he’s into this, and we’ve got to get up to speed.”

As usual, I learned more from listening to the others than the audience did by listening to me. Here are seven nuggets I picked up:

1. The government is innovating with social technologies more than I realized. I heard about internal knowledge sharing at the State Department, a CDC effort to collect on-the-ground intel from first responders and the DOD’s Pentagon Channel. And the EPA’s blogging program. Here’s a wiki that planks out what various federal agencies are up to with social media.

2. In prepping for the conference, I learned about The Twittering Diplomat. Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at U.S. State Department, is Tweeting away as she tours eastern Europe on a diplomatic mission. Yes, it opens Twitizens’ eyes to what a diplomat really does. What led her to do it? I have no clue. As I am writing this, she has Tweeted this:

flight departing for Armenia now–land 4:50AM

Of course, the Twitter profile could be a front, a persona created to head-fake the Iranians or something like that. I’d be delighted if this turned out to the first case of Twitter Espionage.

3. Michael Chin of Kick Apps, in his introduction, used a phrase I hadn’t heard on the 2.0 conference circuit: “multilogue”–as opposed to “monologue” or “dialogue.” I like that. I may steal it.

4. Fellow panelist and IBM marketing VP Sandy Carter described her company’s participation in an effort before the Beijing Olympics to get Chinese citizens to take cell phone images of broken stuff out on the street as a way to report problems to the government in time to spruce things up for the international media. She’s author of a new book titled The New Language of Marketing 2.0, full of case histories about this stuff.

5. Mario Armstrong, a digital guy who appears on his own web radio show Digital Spin Radio and occasionally on NPR as a technology expert, talked about a program he works on designed to get more U.S. students to graduate with engineering degrees. The program targets young kids.

Key insight: The adults designed a great-looking social media portal they thought was wonderful. The kids rejected it. Instead of retreating to the safety of a focus group, they just paid a bunch of the kids to plan the site. Armstrong showed a photo of the kids actually doing the card-sorting thing.

6. Alan Wolk, an advertising/PR strategist, talked about how the sort of persistent, minor contacts people have in social networks creates an effect like a “Seurat painting“–little points of color that, when taken together, suggest the full picture without providing every detail. I may steal that too.

7. The Voice of America, that hoary World-War-2-era government-funded broadcast service, launched a highly widgetized, user-generated-content-laden, make-a-profile-to-participate, join-our-discussion social network about the U.S. presidential election. They launched this in just two weeks.

Twittering diplomats. Two-week social media platform launches. Agency CIOs who know they have to get up to speed on social media. Head-spinning stuff.

Drinks were served afterward.