Unfollowed: Pentagon Deletes Social Media Office | Danger Room | Wired.com<\/a>: ”
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\nUnfollowed: Pentagon Deletes Social Media Office
\nBy Spencer Ackerman January 13, 2011 \u00a0|\u00a0 5:53 pm \u00a0|\u00a0 Categories: Info War<\/p>\nAt a time when Facebook has 500 million users and Twitter is closing in on 200 million, the Pentagon no longer has a single person guiding its communications shop on how to use social media to get the military\u2019s message out.<\/p>\n
Gone are communication pro Price Floyd and technology exec Sumit Agarwal, the two men brought in during the past two years to get the Pentagon comfortable with online interaction in the 21st century. Floyd, a relentless tweeter, decamped in August to join defense giant BAE Systems. Agarwal, a former Google manager, now works on cybersecurity issues in the Pentagon policy directorate. Their old boss, assistant security of defense for public affairs Douglas Wilson, decided not to replace Agarwal, who left in November.<\/p>\n
Instead, now that the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds they set up are in place, Wilson says using social media ought to be the responsibility of the approximately 100 people he oversees. \u2018I was increasingly concerned our approach to social media was a stovepiped professional area,\u2019 he tells Danger Room. \u2018It\u2019s important for people in press operations, community and public outreach and communications and planning to be able to know how to use and access Facebook, Twitter and the other social media tools, rather than just have a single unit or single person do nothing but social media.\u2019<\/p>\n
Time will tell if Pentagon Social Media 2.0 is an actual upgrade. For one thing, it\u2019s doesn\u2019t make policy on servicemembers\u2019 access to YouTube or Facebook, \u2014 a deeply controversial topic in certain military circles.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon\u2019s shockingly open social media guidelines expire on March 1st. Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn is in charge of deciding whether a soldier in Afghanistan should be allowed to tweet freely over military networks. He\u2019s also one of the officials sounding the alarm about the Pentagon\u2019s need to secure its networks. Given the new mindfulness in the post-WikiLeaks Pentagon about the downside of online communications tools, it\u2019s worth wondering how the Pentagon will strike the new balance without an active social-media point person arguing for openness.<\/p>\n
Wilson denies that social media will be placed on the back burner. Rather, he says, it\u2019s the new normal inside his communications shop. \u2018Our people are being trained in how best to use [social media], apply it to their day-to-day work, beyond sending personal Twitter messages or being on Facebook on their own,\u2019 Wilson says. From there, they advise the military services on how to interact with their followers and Facebook fans. That is, if the services ask the Pentagon for help: they tend to have bigger online presences than the Pentagon.<\/p>\n
But some of the ways that Wilson\u2019s people adapt social media to their workaday responsibilities are more reactive than interactive themselves. Harold Hielsnis, who runs the Public Affairs Research and Analysis office, says that he now trolls Twitter, Facebook, and Google\u2019s blog search to figure out what people interested in defense are saying about. But if others working for Wilson are engaging with the defense community, Hielsnis isn\u2019t one of them: He\u2019s not on either Twitter or Facebook himself. It\u2019s up to the press shop to figure out whether and how they want to use his social media-informed research.<\/p>\n
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Unfollowed: Pentagon Deletes Social Media Office | Danger Room | Wired.com: ” PREVIOUS POST Unfollowed: Pentagon Deletes Social Media Office By Spencer Ackerman January 13, 2011 \u00a0|\u00a0 5:53 pm \u00a0|\u00a0 Categories: Info War At a time when Facebook has 500 million users and Twitter is closing in on 200 million, the Pentagon no longer has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maccconsulting","category-social-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p834Wu-c8","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":753,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions\/753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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