Government employee Lovisa Williams shares her Twitter tips for government on her blog, Athena’s Lightning. Her post Twitter Cliff Notes outlines some need-to-know points for anyone managing a government Twitter account or managing staff who tweet for a government agency. Tips are strategic rather than technical; for example: “Twitter is a live community of humans and reacts the same way as people do when engaging with them in real life.  You should focus on developing a ‘human voice’ or persona for your community.”

Lovisa works for the U.S. State Department, and some of the tips are specific to State. Most tips can easily be modified for your own situation. And please note: “The viewpoints, opinions and ideas expressed here do not represent the official opinion or policy of the United States Government or the Department of State.”

#SocialCongress: Perceptions and Use of Social Media on Capitol Hill is “the first research into Congressional staffers’ attitudes about their offices’ use of social media” and was released this week by the Congressional Management Foundation. The report is the second in a series based on research undertaken among Congressional staff in late 2010.

In the report, the authors state that “the use of social media is transformative, changing the tone, speed, and nature of the democratic dialogue.” However, staff opinions differ as to the importance and value of newer communication tools.

On the “pro” side, fans appreciate how online media are helping reach constituents who were not being reached before. Because e-media are less expensive, they help offices deliver a better reach to a broader audience. Younger staffers are more certain than senior staff (those over age 50) of the benefits of using social media and the ability of the office to “control the message” on the social media. Staff in offices charactertized as early adopters also tend to believe the social media make members of Congress more responsive and accountable to their constituents.

In contrast, a high proportion (77%) of staff from offices characterized as late adopters said that email and the internet have caused staff to worry more about information being leaked prematurely or being taken out of context. Staff in late adopting offices were less likely to believe the office has the expertise or the time to manage social media.

Study results also showed a lack of agreement on whether social media make for more or less meaningful constituent interaction. Those most directly involved in social media communications (e.g., social media managers) were more likely to have a positive view, as compared with senior managers and staff who interact with constituents using more traditional forms of communication (email, letters, etc.).

The report also compares staff opinions of the value of specific traditional and online outreach tools such as in-person, telephone, and online community meetings, member blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. For example, 12% of senior managers and social media managers (N=138) believed Twitter was “very important” for communicating with constituents, and another 39% considered Twitter “somewhat important.” The authors note that Twitter has “further penetrated Capitol Hill” since the data were collected.

A manager remarked that a lot of time is spent worrying about the message rather than the medium, and that social media tools may not be getting the attention they deserve. Most respondents believe their offices should be spending more time on communications including social media.

Overall, do Congressional staff think social media communications are worth the time spent? Only 32% of staff in late-adopting offices say yes, in contrast with 77% of staff from the early adopters. It could be interesting to revisit these results after future election cycles to examine any correlations between outreach methods used and penetration of messages that make a difference to voters.

We linked to DGI presentations from the SLA 2011 annual conference in an earlier post, SLA2011 with DGI: Slides, Blogs. Other conference presenters have been sharing their slides online. Here’s one presentation that should be of interest to division members: Tweets from Space by Jaime Ann Scibelli of Wylie Information Systems at NASA Glenn Research Center. NASA is a heavily engaged user of social media, with over 35 Facebook Pages and over 110 twitter accounts, according to Scibelli. (For links to these and other NASA social media outlets, see the NASA.gov Connect page.) The NASA Glenn Library has its own Facebook Page (http://www.facebook.com/glennlibrary) and Twitter account (https://twitter.com/#!/glennlibrary).

The presentation slides will be useful to any library–government or not–planning to start a social media effort. If you manage a US federal, state, local, or tribal government social media project, be sure to register for the Web Council Managers Forum and its Social Media Sub-Council and take advantage of their resources and policy information specifically for governments.

Thanks to Jaime Ann Scibelli for making the slides available.

While searching for information to supplement an earlier post on U.S. government URL shorteners, I discovered the Tourism Tech Corner, a helpful blog from Indiana’s Office of Tourism Development. On the About page, the office explains:

Our hope is that the Tourism Tech Corner will shine a light on social media, technology and web marketing and how they affect the world of tourism. Our primary objective is to show how using social media can help your website become more service-oriented and more valuable to your customers.

The blog posts are of practical use to any organization trying to learn and keep up-to-date with the how-to’s of social media. The post that caught my eye was What You Need to Know About URL Shorteners, 14 December 2010. Other recent posts:

• New Facebook Features (March ’11), 8 March 2011
• How To: Track All Your Traffic From Twitter, 10 January 2011
• Explaining QR Codes, 16 December 2011

It’s a low-volume blog, but each post is timely and well-written.

In the article Volunteers with an eagle eye on the news, the Australian newspaper The Age reports today on the successful use of crowdsourcing by the National Library of Australia (NLA).

NLA’s Trove, a large digital repository of collections about Australia and Australians, has been benefiting from the work of citizens who log in to help correct the text generated from an OCR scan of the historical Australian newspapers they have digitized. As The Age reports,

The work is done by letting visitors see a scanned picture of an article alongside a computer’s best guess about what the text says. Typically, only about 60 per cent of the words are right. Where the two versions differ, humans can instantly correct the computer’s gaffes.

Since the electronic scans of newspapers were made public in August 2008 and the library took the controversial decision to let anyone – even anonymous users – help, volunteers have tweaked 26 million lines of newspaper text.

The Age quotes one of the top volunteers as saying, “It’s very addictive.” NLA recognized their top text correctors with special Australia Day awards on 28 January 2010.

A March 2009 report by the project’s director provides detail on how the text correction program works; see Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers, by Rose Holley [PDF, 28 pages].

For more, see:

• NLA’s web page Get Involved. Members of the Public. Help us by correcting text.
• Australian Newspapers Digitization Program home page.
• The program’s In the Media page. (They’ve received a fair bit of publicity.)
• The digitized newspaper collection search page.

U.S. state and local governments can take advantage of new terms of service (TOS) for their use of Facebook Pages. The new terms modify Facebook’s standard click-through TOS so that, for example, state and local governments are not subject to the requirement that legal disputes be heard in California courts and adjudicated under California law. The U.S. federal government has already negotiated modified terms with Facebook; these are online, along with other federal negotiated TOS, on the Web Content Managers Forum TOS Agreements page.

National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Social Media Legal Workgroup and the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) negotiated the revised TOS for state and local governments. Related documents and coverage:

• Facebook’s Amended Pages Terms of Service for State and Local Governments in the United States
• Press release from NASCIO and NAAG, 5 January 2011
• Facebook reaches agreement with state governments, The Hill blog post, 6 January 2011
• Facebook and States Work Out a Safe Place, techPresident, 6 January 2011

For descriptions of some of the best U.S. Gov 2.0 tools and resources, check out SocialBrite’s Gov.20 Resources list. It is a varied list, including GovLoop*, Politiwidgets, Socrata, and Open 311.

*GovLoop is a social networking site and a great source of information on Gov 2.0 and other government topics (telework, training, collaboration, …). If you join GovLoop, look for the Librarians–Local, State, Federal group or the much newer Librarians in Government group!

Did you know that, with their Womenshealth.gov account, the Department of Health and Human Services was the first U.S. federal agency on Twitter? Or that in 2009 the Food and Drug Administration created a web widget to track peanut recalls?

Read all about it on the U.S. Government Use of Social Media timeline from the General Services Administration (GSA) Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement.The timeline uses the Dipity.com free multimedia timeline website.

Are you with a federal agency? If so, take a look at the site and let GSA Center for New Media know if you have content to add.

Does your agency or library have a Twitter account? Thinking about starting one? Twitter.com announced their gradual roll out of a new Twitter in their 14 September 2010 blog post, A Better Twitter. Twitter’s FAQ and related articles describe the changes in detail. Because it is being introduced to accounts over time, not everyone on Twitter has the new Twitter — I don’t — but now is time to prepare your account for the changes.

On the GovTwit blog, Steve Lunceford gives us a look at how government and other Twitter accounts need to alter custom backgrounds if they use them. See New Twitter Kills Custom Backgrounds and the comments that follow (including helpful info from DGI’s own Sarah Bourne). Steve refers to another helpful blog post on the topic, Breaking News: Twitter’s New User Interface and What it Means to You (on Forrester.com’s blog from Augie Ray).

Already making changes? Please comment to share any tips!

Friends, Followers, and Feeds: A National Survey of Social Media Use in State Government [PDF] reports the results of a survey of forty-three states and territories. Released this week by the National Association of State CIO’s (NASCIO), the report’s findings include:

• Social media adoption rates are broad across state governments, whether controlled by CIO offices or not.
• Two-thirds of survey respondents lack enterprise policies addressing social media.
• One-third of the states responding do have enterprise policy frameworks, guidance, and standards, and a sizable number of states are in the process of developing these. (Models are available.)

The report includes a table of links to state social media policies, standards, or guidelines on the Web.